The door from the stairwell opened, and I darted into the greenhouse since it was the only place to really hide. I ducked down onto the ground to hide behind the plants. As soon as I did, I started to think about the last time I was in here, with Michael. I thought about what he said when he was waning in and out of consciousness…that he wanted to make love to me every day. If there was any chance that I actually survived this, I’d like for that to happen too.

I wished I would have told him that before I left.

I wrapped my arms around myself and silently replayed the blissful moment in my head as the service worker outside swept off the rooftop. Since it was winter now, they probably rarely had people coming up to look in the greenhouse, so it was actually the perfect place to hide. If only being in here didn’t make me feel like there was a hollow pit in my stomach.

How was it possible that the feelings I was having toward three guys were causing me so much angst?

18

“Calm down, Michael,” Julian said to me as I flew into a rampage.

“Where is she?!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, ignoring the pain in my ribcage.

Adam had already left the apartment to search around the campus, thinking that maybe Lisette had foolishly taken a walk on her own to clear her head.

“This is my fault,” Julian said as he shook his head. “I shouldn’t have gotten so upset with her. It’s you I should have gotten mad at. None of this was worth her losing her life over.”

“No, you’re wrong, this is entirely HER fault,” I roared. “She knows exactly what she’s doing, and she’s trying to leave all three of us out of it.” I held up the napkin that Lisette had written on and waved it in Julian’s face. “There is no excuse for this! Not after all that we’ve done to try and protect her, not after everything we’ve walked away from in order to save her.”

Julian’s face fell flat. “That sounds an awful lot like you’re speaking for yourself, Michael.”

I picked up the empty whiskey bottle on the counter and launched it at Julian’s head. I was furious at Lisette for doing this, for leaving us behind. For leaving me behind.

But then, the door opened, and Adam walked back into the apartment.

“I can’t find her,” he said with a panic in his voice. “I’ve scoured the whole campus and even snuck onto the Lineage grounds to look for her there. She’s gone.”

I grabbed my leather jacket and shoved my arms through the sleeves; catching the makeshift stitches that she had sewn into my hand on the cuffs and yowling in an angry pain that made me pull a stitch out on purpose, simply because it felt good to be able to hurt something.

“Where are you going?” Julian asked me.

“To try and save Lisette’s ass again,” I growled.

I stormed across the Goldshire campus, straight onto the Lineage grounds, and straight into my mother’s office. A crowd of onlookers started following me before I had even reached the building. One of the security guards tried to approach me and say something about how he “needed to escort me to administration,” but when I bared my teeth at him, he shriveled away like the puny minion that he was.

I found my mother sitting at her claw-footed desk with a look of immediate disappointment on her face as I walked through the door.

“You have to call this hunt off!” I demanded as I walked up to her desk and slammed my hand down in front of her.

The coffee in her mug spun in a dizzying circle at the impact.

“Sit down, Michael,” she said calmly.

“I’m not going to sit down until you call it off,” I said.

“Well, I’m not going to do anything until you sit… down.”

She spaced her last two words out slowly, which is what she always did when she was about to lose her temper. I sat down in the chair at her desk. I knew my mother well enough to know that she wouldn’t budge until she felt like she had some sort of illusion of control over the situation.

“None of this had to be this way, you know,” she said, calmly picking up her coffee mug and taking a sip. “You’ve forced my hand.”

I balked. “Me? You’re blaming me for this?”

“Yes, you. How do you think it looks as Headmistress to have my own son aiding a girl that is plotting against Lineage? Do you really think we could have just let her go? Now? We can’t do that right before the big exchange of power. Even you aren’t that silly.”

I shook my head and dug my heels in. “Just call it off, and I’ll find her and take her out of here. No one will even have to know. It’ll be like she disappeared, you can say she was killed or something. I’ll make sure she’s so far away that no one will ever find her.”

She tisked. “You know I can’t do that, sweetheart.”

I grimaced at the nickname. “Mother, please. I’ve never asked you for anything. Just this once, please help me.”

My mother looked at me with those cold, stone eyes that I had gotten so accustomed to seeing during my childhood. Even when my father was murdered, she never showed any emotion.

In fact, I’d never seen her show any emotion.

“You may not have asked for me to do all of the things I’ve done for you over the years, but I’ve done more for you Michael, than you will ever know. That’s what mothers do. Do you think it was a coincidence that you were the one to kill Lisette’s mother?”

I blinked. “What?”

I didn’t understand what this possibly had to do with the hunt for Lisette currently taking place. “Pauline reached out to me,” I said. “I killed her because she asked me to be the one to do it, and she asked me to do it to keep Lisette safe from him.”

My mother laughed, as if I were making some sort of joke.

“You’re foolish,” she said condescendingly, her laughter stopping as quickly as it appeared. “There were always so many more things in play than you ever had the ability to see.” She reached across the desk and ruffled her fingers in my hair. “Cute, but foolish.”

I swatted her hand away as she continued.

“It wasn’t just Pauline’s choice that you would be the one to kill her. That whole thing was orchestrated to perfection by faces you didn’t even know were there. You were the one chosen to do it so that you and Lisette would hate each other. How could she ever have feelings for someone that killed her own mother? And how could you ever fall for a girl that would be a constant reminder of the murder you committed?”

I felt all the blood rush to my face, and my heartbeat started to echo painfully loud in my eardrums. “What?”

She sighed. “You see, son? I did it to protect you; to keep you away from that girl once I started to see that you were attracted to her. But in all my endeavors, this was the one time I failed. I’m not sure how it happened, but you ended up falling for her anyway. Ridiculous! Underestimating your foolishness is not a mistake I will make again. The kill-order on Lisette will stand, and hopefully, they’ll find her and extinguish this loose end before the day is up.”

I sat across the desk, staring at my mother and feeling as if everything I had ever known about my life, about her, about myself, had all just melted meaninglessly away.

“Now,” she continued as I sat there speechless. “I’m going to give you one more chance to set this all straight and fall into line. At the charity event, he will be there, leadership will exchange hands, and then you will have one last opportunity to fulfill the role you were meant to have.”

“What role?” I asked.

I felt as if I were still in a delusional state from the solid beating that I had taken back at the apartment. My mother’s thin lips pulled into the hideous grin that I had unfortunately inherited from her as a bad trait that appeared when I got mad. But, the words that fell forth from her lips stunned me so greatly that I almost puked on my shoes.

“You’re going to be the new Dean of Goldshire,” she said.

19