I paused. “Why not?”

“Because a note followed you there, too,” he reminded me. “I think the only way to stop this is to figure out what it means and confront whoever is doing it. I just wish I knew where to start.”

And that made two of us.

The next morning we decided that we would all stay close, all four of us. Rob would move into the apartment with us now too, it was just too dangerous for us to all be separated and we stood a better chance at figuring this out together.

Adam’s cuts, although still quite painful, were shallow so they healed quickly. We were nowhere close to figuring out what was going on, and we had exhausted every resource at Lineage and every resource that Rob had at the precinct. Michael thought of going to Goldshire to see if there had been any strange occurrences on their campus as well. It was a long shot, especially since we all thought that it was pretty clear the attacks were being directed as a message to me. But then again, I was once a Goldshire student and it wasn’t that long ago that our rival colleges did quite a bit of intermingling of both friends and enemies.

We walked the pathway along the edge of the campus, the one that would head over toward that big tree that Julian and I used to sit in. The one where Michael and I had fought each other and given each other both black eyes.

And also, the one that the stone room had once been near along the edge of the path.

Layla had the stone room removed while she had been Headmistress here for that short amount of time. I don’t even think she knew what it was, or what sorts of things had happened in that room. I think she just realized that it was old and decrepit and didn’t serve a purpose anymore, so she had it taken off the campus. I wondered as we walked along this path toward where it had once stood, what had happened to it and if it had simply been destroyed or repurposed for something else entirely.

But, when we came around a bend in the path and saw the structure standing there once more, I nearly screamed.

“What the fuck…” Adam said as we slowed our walk along the path.

We had all seen that the stone room had been removed. We had all walked this path several times since we had come back to Lineage after Layla had presided over the campus. And we had all seen that it was gone.

How in the world was it back here now?

“Okay guys,” Rob said, looking visibly shaken for the first time in a while. “I walk this path on the grounds almost every day. This thing was not here yesterday. It’s not as if it was a small birdhouse, either. It’s a stone building for fuck’s sake. How did this get back here?”

We kept walking until we reached the structure and Michael stepped up to the door to open it. The daylight shined into the room and illuminated what was inside. What previously had been four bare, solid stone walls, were now four walls completely covered with notes taped up in every available inch of space. Every single little piece of paper had the word “sorry” scribbled onto it.

I felt like I was losing my mind.

I ran into the stone room and started to rip the notes from the wall, screaming and breaking my nails against the stone as I pulled every tiny piece of paper off and threw it into the middle of the floor. Michael came in behind me and tried to grab my arms to try to stop me and calm me down, but this time it wouldn’t work.

“I want them off!” I screamed. “I want them all off!”

So instead of trying to calm me, the three of them came into the room with me and helped to pull all the notes off until the walls of the stone room were bare once more. After we were done, we closed the room back up and left the pile of tattered notes inside on the floor.

We decided to wait until another day to go to Goldshire because I looked as if I had just had an emotional breakdown.

“I think that we should maybe try a different strategy,” Michael said as we walked back to the apartment. “This is obviously wearing all of our nerves really thin. Maybe that’s the point of what they’re trying to do. Maybe the whole goal of whoever is doing this, is to try to wear us down and make us ultra-paranoid. Maybe this isn’t even the end goal?”

“Well that sure is refreshing to hear,” Adam said sarcastically.

“You might be right,” Rob said. “So, what’s your idea then?”

“Pretend like none of it matters,” Michael answered.

Everyone kind of stared at him in disbelief.

“Seriously?” Adam asked.

“Yes, think about it. That stunt back at the stone room; there was no way that wasn’t just a mind game. What other purpose could that have served except to get Lisette really upset and worked up? If someone is doing this in order to get a reaction out of us, then the best way to get them to stop is to stop reacting.”

“What if that just makes them do bigger, worse things?” I asked.

“Possible,” Michael answered. “But at some point, they’ll grow tired of not getting what they want, of not getting a reaction.”

“It might work,” Rob said.

“Might as well try it,” Adam said. “It’s not like we have any other good ideas right at the moment.”

The timing for pretending to ignore how upsetting this all is was perfect. Tomorrow was the Diplomatic Dinner party at Goldshire. I had almost forgotten about it with everything else going on, but the reminder alert on my phone buzzed and then we all suddenly remembered about the event. The four of us could all go together, stay close, maybe even talk to some of the people at Goldshire in a casual way to see if anything strange had been going on there, just as Michael had suggested before. Aside from that, we would try our best to just look like we were enjoying ourselves and that we weren’t bothered by any of it.

Tonight, we would rest.

But tomorrow, we would pretend that everything was fine.

The Diplomatic Dinner was a long-standing annual event between the two colleges which was abandoned during the time that David was in charge but reinitiated this season with the change in Lineage leadership. Goldshire had apparently had a change in leadership too, although no one from Lineage knew quite who it was that was in charge. We were hoping to find that out tonight at the dinner.

Dressing the part helped to get my mind off things a little bit. I had put on a sleek black cocktail dress that reached all the way down to the floor but had a slit in the front that reached all the way up to the top of my thighs. The dress was sleeveless and had a deep plunging neckline that pushed everything together in the front and made it look like I had way more cleavage than I actually did. All three of the guys wore black suits with white dress shirts and left the top couple of buttons undone. Apparently, none of them were a fan of ties.

“You guys all match,” I teased as we got ready to leave.

“Well it’s not as if we have quite as many fashion options as you girls do,” Adam teased back.

“I don’t know, you had a lot of options at the masquerade. I could hardly tell who was who.”

I caught Rob’s eye contact after I mentioned the masquerade and an instant flash of being together that night filled both of our eyes.

“You guys ready?” Michael asked as he broke up our frozen stare.

“Yeah,” Rob said as he started to walk out the door ahead of us. “Let’s do this.”

We walked along the same path toward the Goldshire campus, and we passed the stone room. It was still there, and the door was still closed. I guessed that the pile of notes was still inside on the floor. Then we reached the tree at the edge of the campus and I stopped to look at it for a minute. A flood of memories came into my mind of all the times that Julian and I had sat in that tree and then of all the times that Adam had sat in those branches with us too. My favorite memory in that tree was the one when Julian tried to keep me from falling and he laid on top of me on the branch. I remembered feeling his excitement push against me and how hard both of us tried to pretend like it wasn’t there. That had been before we had told each other how we felt. I wished that we had told each other our feelings years before that, then we would have more time together not just as friends, but as lovers too.

Adam gently threaded his fingers into my hand. He looked up at the tree and he knew what I was remembering too.

We crossed the cobblestone street and stepped onto the Goldshire campus. When we got into the main hall there were already tons of people there. One of the apparent new board members came over to introduce herself and shake all of our hands. I hated shaking hands; I just truly didn’t see the point in wanting to touch people you didn’t even know. We were ushered to the long table at the head of the room and seated by other people who were in one role of leadership or another. I looked around at the mingling and conversing of Lineage and Goldshire students and faculty and then looked down the table at all of the administration and wondered which one was the Headmistress or Headmaster. This was the entire point of the dinner, just to join the two schools over a meal with no other agenda other than to eat and drink and talk.

“I think that man toward the end there is the new Headmaster,” Michael whispered in my ear. “I heard someone addressing him earlier.”

I nodded and then kind of glazed over as I stared into the crowd and people-watched as everyone talked and ate. If the point of this was to look as unaffected as possible, then I was pretty sure I could do a good job of that now. I stuck a piece of sweet meat in my mouth and washed it down with a swig of red wine. The food was good at least. The guys seemed to be doing the same as I was. They were enjoying the food and drink, having casual, surface level chit-chat with the people around us at the table, and smiling as if they were having a good time. My eyes wandered from person to person around the room, trying not to really focus on any one thing for too long since I didn’t want to appear rude like I was staring. People moved around the tables as they got up to go sit by friends and meet new people.

When I glanced over to see what a different crowd of people were doing, I saw a face that looked so eerily similar to my mother’s that it made me feel as though I’d seen a ghost. It wasn’t her, though. Obviously. Unlike my father and his faked-death theatrics, I was with my mother after she had been murdered and she was horribly, terribly dead.

But still, the face in the crowd made me feel especially uneasy.

I tried to find it again and noticed the same face look back at me from different places in the crowd. Not only did the woman look a lot like my mother, but she stared back at me as if she knew me.