Henry grinned, leaning against the arch that led from the living room to the entryway. “Though I thank you for your unwavering warmth and hospitality, I prefer to keep watch.”
With that, he turned to face the window near the front door, his shoulder blades dropping as he clasped his hands behind his back in a stance that was vaguely militaristic. My eyelids drooped, the events of the day finally overwhelming me. I slipped off into a haze of dreams, where the image of Henry standing at attention lingered.
Meanwhile, in an underground clubhouse hidden beneath the Waverly library, Lauren Lockwood paced back and forth from one end of her makeshift cell to the other, contemplating the blocked door. Once, Lauren considered this room cozy. It was similar to her own dorm room, with a set of bunk beds against one wall and a soft, downy rug to cushion the click of her heeled boots across the stone floor. She had stayed in this room when the noise and stress of student life during midterms or finals got to be too loud. It had been comforting to get away from the rest of the campus and to spend some time with her own thoughts, but now her solitude highlighted her betrayal of the society. A sturdy, wood chair—no doubt purloined from the library above—was wedged beneath the doorknob outside, ensuring Lauren’s captivity.
How had it all gone wrong so quickly? She had always been so cautious, paranoid even, to avoid discovery, but it was difficult sometimes to lie to the people who, for the past two years, had been her closest friends and family. The Black Raptor Society wasn’t just a club. It was a community. In order to join, you had to be deemed worthy of the club’s exclusivity by the current members. Lauren had already had an in. She was Black Raptor royalty; she carried the surname of one of the original Raptor members. She was the princess of the society. Even on her first campus tour of Waverly University, she felt the weight of the society’s expectations on her shoulders, passed on to her from her father and her older siblings. It had been her turn to accept the torch and lead her peers into their next stages of success. Instead, she’d dunked the torch in a barrel of gasoline, tossed it behind her, and sprinted off, leaving the other members of the society with a raging conflagration and no fire extinguisher.
The Black Raptor Society was collapsing from the inside. A rift had been cleaved between the members. There were those whose only desires were to uphold and epitomize the society’s once noble pillars—loyalty, integrity, passion, wisdom, and strength—and there were those who had compromised the pillars in favor of Catherine Flynn’s crude style of leadership. Lauren’s hands trembled at the thought. From the time she was little, Lauren had feared her aunt. The woman had never exuded an ounce of warmth, and since Lauren was old enough to understand what mental illness was, she strongly suspected that Catherine’s cold, indifferent demeanor was the result of an undiagnosed condition. Catherine’s go-to method for problem solving was murder, which felt excessive to say the least.
Lauren went over the details of her detainment in her head. With her father’s help, Lauren had managed to lure Catherine’s followers away from Nicole’s trail, feeding the Raptors false information on Nicole’s whereabouts and leading them on a fabricated raid of an abandoned supermarket west of the Waverly campus. The Raptors came up short, of course, and though Lauren faked her disappointment well enough, she did not expect her aunt’s ardent guard dogs to react quite so aggressively. Ashton Brooks, who had become Catherine’s right-hand man ever since she’d ordered the death of the previous one, had made his aggravation clear:
“Damn it, Lockwood!” he’d growled. He kicked aside a toppled shopping cart to direct his rage at Lauren. Four other Raptors stood closely by, watching their superiors confront one another. “Where is this bitch?”
“Get out of my face,” spat Lauren, standing her ground as Brooks loomed over her. “All of my information led to this spot. She must have set us up.”
“Or you missed something,” he challenged. “Admit it, Lauren. You haven’t been at the top of your game lately. You getting cold feet or something? Not living up to your family’s expectations?”
Lauren glared up into Brook’s face. “Back off, Ashton.”
He sneered and stepped closer. “What’s your aunt going to say when I tell her that you wasted our time tonight and that Nicole Costello has once against vanished into thin air? You know, Lauren, I’m started to wonder if you’ve gone soft on us. Has the Raptor’s pretty little princess decided she doesn’t want to be royalty anymore?”
Behind her, Lauren heard one of the accompanying Raptors snigger. “Shut up, Wickes,” she ordered without looking at the culprit. Though Lauren was younger than the others, her last name ensured that she outranked them, and she sure as hell wouldn’t let them think that they could get the better of her simply because she was a woman. “Ashton,” she said. “I highly suggest that you get off my back. Costello’s not here, and the more time we waste bitching at each other, the farther away she gets from us. Let’s get back to campus.”
She turned on her heel and gestured for the remaining Raptors to return to the black SUV parked outside the supermarket, but as she made to follow them, Brooks took hold of her arm.
“I swear, Lockwood,” he said, his face so close to hers that she could smell the tang of his breath. “I will not go down so easily as Donovan Davenport. If Flynn’s on the warpath, I won’t hesitate to throw you under the bus. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how fucking sketchy your behavior has been as of late.”
It took all of Lauren’s willpower not to spit in Brooks’s face, but she forced herself
