“What are you doing?” he whispered to me as I walked behind the registrar’s desk to open the file cabinet.

“Looking,” I answered. I knew that one-word answers drove him crazy, but it served him right for tracking me down. If he hadn’t come, I likely wouldn’t have gotten caught. He was the one that started all the fucking noise, after all!

I opened the drawer and started flipping through the files when Julian hissed at me again. “Looking for what?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I’ll know it when I see it.” I lifted my sunglasses up to the top of my head so that I could get a better look.

Julian jumped off his seat and ran over to me and pushed my glasses back down onto the bridge of my nose.

“Ouch!” I said. “What the hell?”

“There are cameras in here,” he said as he pointed to the corners of the ceiling. “Don’t be stupid. If they catch you on camera, you’ll get expelled from Goldshire for trespassing.”

He was right, I was being careless. I had to get better at sneaking around if I wanted to figure any of this out.

“Hey!” the Dean shouted at us as his office door opened, and he caught us standing in front of the open drawer of private files.

“Run!” Julian said. He grabbed my hand and shoved us right out the door, nearly knocking down the Dean in the process.

Once we hit the outside grounds, I was already breathless. I tried to keep up with him as we saw the cobblestone street come into sight, but then I remembered my backpack.

“Julian, I left my bag in the tree!”

“We can’t go back for it,” he said. “They’ll catch us. We need to get off the campus and back to Goldshire.”

“My I.D. is in my backpack.”

Julian came to an abrupt stop. Losing my I.D. wasn’t a problem, but Lineage getting a hold of it was. If they found my bag, they could prove I had trespassed on their property. We ran back to the tree, and Julian pulled my bag down and swung it over his shoulder. But just as we were about to make a run for it again, we heard the security guards coming near.

I looked at him in a panic, and without hesitation, he grabbed me around the waist and hoisted us both up into the tree. We climbed just above the bottom limbs of the branches to get higher and above the Spanish moss, which hid most of the canopy above. Balance was also not my forte as I struggled to hold onto the branch without falling. Julian saw me start to teeter dangerously close to falling off and climbed from his branch over to mine. He wrapped an arm around my waist as he laid on top of me and held us both steady against the wide branch of the tree.

“When did you become this nimble?” I teased him in a whisper.

Our bodies were pressed together, and our faces were so close that our noses were touching.

“I guess when I needed to start saving your ass.” He grinned. He stared at me silently as we heard the security guards pass by underneath us. I felt something press against my pelvis, and for a moment, I got that heated feeling again. Julian turned his head and diverted his eyes from me and acted like he didn’t feel it. But when the guards had passed, he turned his face back to me and our lips were so close that they brushed against each other.

It wasn’t a kiss. That would have been weird. But it was something. The kind of something that had been happening a lot between us and wasn’t simply going to go away.

“Come on,” he said as he rolled off of me and dangled by one arm from the branch. He dropped to the ground and then called for me to jump down too.

“Uh, it’s a bit high, Julian,” I yelled down to him.

“Trust me,” he said.

I heard him but couldn’t see where he was through all the moss. So, I closed my eyes and slid off the branch, hoping that if I fractured or broke something, it wouldn’t be my writing hand. But Julian caught me and set me down onto my feet without a scratch.

We were careful not to be seen again as we made our way back across to Goldshire, and it seemed like we had narrowly managed to escape detection that time. Julian came back to my dorm with me, and I fully expected a lecture about not being so careless and reckless or about dropping the wild obsession about finding my mother’s killer.

But instead of reprimanding me, he headed straight for the door.

I assumed he was too tired—or too furious—to tell me how stupid I was. But just before he left, he froze beneath the frame, his back still to me.

“The next time you plan on doing something stupid, you damn well better tell me. Because whether you like it or not, I’m coming with you.”

And as his words struck my gut, he passed through the doorframe. Leaving me with my thoughts, my suspicions, my questions, and my shock.

3

The next day I only had one class, and then I had to go to work. Even though I didn’t get paid to work at the halfway house, it was my mom’s pet project, and I kept her commitment to it alive in order to honor her memory.

I didn’t need to get paid, either. I mean, no one at Goldshire was short on money. Besides, Bricks had done a lot of good for a lot of the local teenage runaways. It wasn’t just a building for them to spend the night in; it was a place of sanctuary where they could sit with other kids, eat a hot meal, and sleep knowing that no harm would come to them. At least that’s what my mother had always said.

If only the same had held true for her.

It didn’t even seem possible that she could have been killed while volunteering at Bricks that night. I was there working with her, and there was at least a half-dozen kids there that night for a meal and a warm bed. The doors were always kept locked unless someone had a visitor, and even then it was by keyed-entry only. Everyone that was there that night was questioned by the police, and when no evidence that any sort of foul play had been found my mother’s death was ruled a suicide.

But I had known from the moment I found her lying on the cold floor of that storage closet that she hadn’t killed herself. Both of her wrists had been slit, and the suicide note was tucked loosely between her fingers.

And while I’m not a medical expert, a couple of things didn’t add up.

I’m not sure how long it takes someone to bleed out, but the fact that my mother’s apparent suicide note had no blood on it whatsoever despite it being all around her body stuck me as odd. I’d done a great deal of research into what happened when someone slit their wrists. And from the documents I read through, that note shouldn’t been tainted in it. But, it was completely clean.

Odd, right?

There was another odd thing, though. Something that the police still couldn’t explain, despite ruling her death as a suicide: and that was the utensil used to slit her wrists. The coroner ruled that it had be some sort of sharp, smooth-edged knife. But, there was none to be found on her body. Nowhere around her. Nowhere beside her. Nowhere in her pockets. Nada.

If Mom had slit her wrists, shouldn’t the knife have simply… been there?

Either way, I have blamed myself every single day since her death for not going back there to check on her sooner. For not knocking on the door when I thought for the first time that she had been gone for a while. And after I found her body, most of those kids didn’t return to the halfway house again after that night. I can’t say that I blamed them. Who would want to go back to a place that someone had died in?

Only one of those kids ended up crossing paths with me again A kid by the name of Adam.

And he was somewhat of an enigma.

At the time, Adam had been homeless, and even though he was technically an adult since he had just turned 21, my mother let him in any way. She said he was still “young enough” to deserve our help. I wasn’t sure of Adam’s backstory, other that he didn’t have any parents or family and that he had been on the streets since graduating high school.

But, the look in his eye every time he looked at me told of grizzly tales and secrets his lips would never speak of.

I remembered him because he stood out from anyone else that I had seen around there. He had medium-length spiky black hair and dark eyes, and a nose piercing that had a silver ring dangling from his nostril. And those eyes. Those brooding, shadowed, almost blackish kind of eyes. They stuck with me just as much as my mother’s dead stare.

And it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I saw him again at Goldshire.

He was there on some diplomatic council meeting with Michael, a complete asshole and the son of the Headmistress of Lineage. Adam had been wearing a Lineage jacket, but aside from that, he still looked like the punk indie-guy that I remembered him as. I had no idea what he was doing at my school or how he had managed to get into Lineage. Going from being homeless to attending Lineage would have simply been impossible. And I was planning on asking him after the meeting. But as soon as their meeting was over, he and Michael were quickly ushered off campus. Adam had seen me, too, though. Just as he was walking out, he had turned and looked right at me.

And that same dark stare found my gaze once more.