Nightshade: An Enemies to Lovers, Dark Academic Romance (Sorrowsong University Book 1)
Nightshade: Chapter 9

Honestly, I hardly noticed that the ginger girl left the library until I got this odd feeling like something was missing. Then I realized it was her unrelenting complaining and her weird lines of interrogation.

And maybe the soft sound of her blowing a piece of unruly red hair out of her face only for it to land exactly where it started.

When I watched her tattered tote bag swing around the double doors, I did feel a little bad, but my sympathy dwindled by the time I took my next breath. Sure, she’s a loner, but she brings it on herself. She’s rude, and where’s her sense of fun? I get the impression the highlight of her day every day is doing Wordle, or replaceing a misshapen cornflake in the box, or something.

In a way, I’m envious of her constant foul mood. There was a time once when I had the energy to care. When my mind was capable of any emotion that wasn’t lukewarm apathy. Nothing matters to me these days. Rugby games, essay grades, girls, my career, they all sit in a dusty box in the attic of my mind with a peeling label that says for when the world has color again.

It’s not that I’m sad, either. I’m just…blank. I can’t remember the last time I had a label to slap onto my mood. Can’t remember the last time something drummed up enough excitement in me to make me look forward to waking up in the morning. So though Ophelia’s constant anger irks me, I think it’d be worse to see it go.

There’s a gray cloud inside me, a shapeless, faceless monster created by my father. He rolled me in his palm, flattening all my edges and peculiarities; my creativity, my empathy, my passion, until I was a perfect sphere of his creation. Until the monster inside me matched the monster inside him.

But his monster, it walks outside his body, threaded through each of his actions and his words. It’s in the way he tears down others, and the way he can spin anyone’s enthusiasm into self-doubt.

But mine, mine is trapped between the boundaries of my flesh. It won’t creep past my lips or bleed into my deeds, no matter how hard I try. It tears me down, churns my optimism into self-doubt.

Cain Green planted the seed of evil inside me, nurtured it, watered it, fed it every day, and then made my skin so thick it couldn’t get out.

If it wasn’t for my sisters, for my desperation that they don’t get a gray cloud of their own, for my plan to win over Carmichael, I’d have succumbed to it already.

But I can’t and I won’t. Not until they’re all safe.

Shutting the lid of my laptop in the darkest corner of the Nightshade library, I turn my attention back to my texts with my eldest sister.

Vincenzo appears behind me, two tequila shots in his bruised fist. He scans my phone screen, his expression sobering. He sets the shots down and watches the three dots on the bottom left of the screen until a message pops up.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I mutter. I imagine the scene in my parents’ ostentatious home and try to gauge each of my sister’s reactions.

Fleur, at the ripe old age of sixteen, has more emotional maturity than any adult I know. At fourteen, Mia and Evie pretend they have no emotions, like watching their mother lose her sanity is a regular phase of adolescence for everyone. Éléanor isn’t really interested in anything that isn’t Taylor Swift, but it’s Charlotte and Josie, not yet out of elementary school, who I worry about most.

My mood sinks faster than Vin sinks the tequila, and for what might be the hundredth time today, a wave of guilt slams into me and reinforces what I already know to be true.

I’m awful for leaving them. Noble quest or not, if anything happens to any of them, I’ll never be able to forgive myself.

Somewhere along the line, our childhood morphed from idyllic to troubled, turning my relationship with my little sisters from brotherly to fatherly. Then, as we all ate cereal on the floor of our ridiculous pantry on a day when my mother’s mind was particularly fractured and my father’s fuse was particularly short, I promised them that no matter what happens in life, they’d always have me.

And they still do, but I’m three thousand miles away. Fleur understands why I’m here. She understands that my silence is not truly apathy. It’s molten rage churning beneath the surface, and one day, that rage will melt the flesh off Cain Green’s wretched body.

Fleur is the only one who really knows. I can’t trust the others. They’re young and loquacious. They’d spill all my secrets for a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and a new lip balm if given the chance.

I gather my things and return to my room, flicking the gold switch on the wall. No power, great. Half my evenings here I’ve spent studying by candlelight in a dungeon—like Gondor, or Gandalf, whatever his name is.

In the eerie dark, I swap my black shirt out for a hoodie of the same color, tugging some sweatpants over my legs. Outside, the rain picks up, trickling over inky ivy and down the Tudor mansion windows. The dark silhouette of Sorrowsong looms through the fog, dotted with warm, orange lights from windows.

If spending three miserable years kissing ass in this shitty, dark castle is what I have to do for the seven women in my life, I’ll do it. I just hope they don’t hate me in the meantime.

And God, I hope I don’t mess this up.

Tugging the hood of my rugby sweater over my head with the omnipresent weight of expectation on my shoulders, I run my hand along the back of my desk drawer until my fingers replace what I’m after. A master key. I took it from a cleaner’s trolley this morning in the business wing.

My phone buzzes with a text from my second youngest sister. It’s a picture of her arm, decorated with a friendship bracelet with my name on it.

I fire back a picture of the matching one hanging from my room key and wait a depressing amount of time for it to send.

A warm glow settles around my cold heart, and I make my way out into the rainy night.