Nightshade: An Enemies to Lovers, Dark Academic Romance (Sorrowsong University Book 1)
Nightshade: Chapter 10

I wake up with a racing heart and a sheen of sweat cooling my skin.

For once, my nightmares were not of a helicopter plunging into a thick forest, but of Achlys wailing at the end of my bed. Downstairs, the thundering bass has been replaced with low chatter, quiet enough to let me hear the howl of the wind through the rafters. The party must’ve wound down.

In the dark, I tug on the cord of my nightlight, but the power is out.

My heartbeat hasn’t slowed. The sense of dread looming over me hasn’t lessened, and all of a sudden, it hits me why that is.

There’s a smell in the air. That same smell. The scent of licorice and nutmeg followed me in the tarn, it clung to my freshly made bed the other night, and now it lingers in the frigid air of the bedroom. I roll onto my side and make out Sofia’s sleeping form in the other bed and realization sinks into me.

It’s her.

She’s my strange stalker. I don’t know why I’m surprised. She is the only other person with a key to access this room, and God knows she’s not my biggest fan. She must’ve spiked my drink last night too. I bolt upright in bed, trying to decide what to do with this new knowledge. I turn on my phone and squint at the time.

4:23 a.m.

Then a notification distracts me. An email to my personal account, sent an hour ago. I don’t recognize the name, but I open it all the same.

_____________________________

From: Alan Sine

Subject: Ode to a Nightingale

Date: Wednesday 2nd October 03:04 BST

To: Ophelia Winters

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.

—John Keats.

_____________________________

I frown down at the email. Alan Sine. It isn’t remotely familiar. My gaze lingers on the word hemlock for an extra second, a sinking feeling in my stomach. It’s too apt to be a coincidence.

Perhaps the name is an alias. My gaze lands once again on the other person in the room, and I stomp out of bed and yank her onto her back.

My voice is far louder than I intend, but I am so sick of her. “What the fuck is⁠—”

Sofia is cold beneath my fingers. Colder than any human should be. Her skin doesn’t dimple beneath my touch like it should do. She’s missing the hum of life that I never realized people have until now.

No.

A scream is lodged in my throat, fighting my heart for space. A bead of sweat runs down my spine. My lungs beg me to breathe, but it’s fruitless.

Time grinds to a halt, and for a few sickening seconds, I’m paralyzed with shock.

Then a flash of lightning illuminates every corner of the room, and the scream finally escapes. Sofia stares up at me, unblinking and emotionless, and placed ever so delicately in her mouth is a small bunch of white hemlock flowers, tied neatly with a ribbon.

My trembling hands cover my eyes for the next lightning flash, because I can’t bear to see. I can’t breathe. I need to get out of here. It takes five tries for my fingers to hit three consecutive nines on my phone screen, and one try for the woman in the speaker to tell me my call cannot be connected because I have no signal. I hit the Dial button again and again and again until a dense ball of dread is lodged in my throat and I finally replace the strength in my legs to stumble out into the hallway.

A low voice pierces the quiet. “Twist?”

No. No, no, no. What is he doing here? Will he kill me next? Alex has a key in the door at the end of the hallway, his hair so wet beneath his hood that it drips onto his muddy shoes.

My back hits the wall with a thud, needing somewhere to hide. I’m trapped. Trapped in the hallway with the son of a killer. Trapped in the hallway with Sofia’s killer. I don’t feel anything as my back scrapes down the rough stone, sinking to the floor with my hand over my mouth.

He takes in my appearance, and in that moment, I’m everything I prayed I’d never be. Scared of a man. Scared of a Corbeau-Green. Weak. “What’s the matter? Done a Sudoku wrong?”

I can’t talk through my hyperventilating breaths, can’t think, can’t move, can’t escape, can’t do anything but sit and stare at the lifeless shadow in the bed beside mine. Alex’s gaze follows my own, his brow creasing. He tugs his phone out of his joggers and turns on the flashlight as he stops beside Sofia’s bed.

He’s emotionless, silent for a moment. And then another. Eventually, he swipes up on his phone, switches off the flashlight, and slowly turns to face me. “Fucking hell, Ophelia. You didn’t have to kill her.”

I—what? “I didn’t,” I whisper, looking up at him as he fills the doorway. “You don’t get to pin this on me. You did this.”

“I heard her scream. You’re the only one who’s been in there.”

I rise to my feet, knees trembling. “That was my scream, genius.”

“Sure.” His focus returns to his phone, opening his contacts. His finger hovers over the green Dial button.

“What the hell are you doing?” I whisper-shout, lunging for the device. I catch a glimpse of the name Carmichael on the screen and intensify my efforts.

He holds the phone above his head. “Getting you out of here before you kill the next person that annoys you.”

“Yeah? And when I say it wasn’t me, but Alex came running in with his face hidden at four-thirty in the morning, maybe you should check the CCTV? You look just as suspicious as me.”

His nostrils flare, thumb shutting off his phone “I have no reason to kill Sofia, you do.”

“Such as?” I hiss, feeling woozy. I’m all too aware of the dead body just a few yards away.

His eyes are almost glowing in the dark, alight with frustration. “She was making your life hell.”

I scrub my face in my hands, pacing into the hallway. I’m surfing a colossal wave of adrenaline, but I know I’ll be broken when I fall off it. “I don’t know what parallel universe you live in, but that’s a reason for me to steal her body lotion, or something, not fucking murder her!”

He stands opposite me and remains silent, mouth set in a firm line. I think he’s a killer. He thinks I’m a killer. I look suspicious. He looks suspicious. We’re at an impasse, two suspects beside a dead body, unsure if we’re on the same team or not.

One large hand tugs back the hood of his rugby sweatshirt, his damp hair tousled beneath. “So what are we now? Study buddies who bury bodies together?”

“What? The day I bury a body with you is the day I lose my mind. We are not covering this up. That’s not fair on her family.”

“Her father is a shithead.”

I hate his complete lack of empathy. “A shithead who lost his daughter.”

“You got a better idea, Twist?”

I open my mouth in the hope that something clever will fall out of it, but the silence is shattered by the sound of voices outside. Distant shadows obscure the translucent stained glass in the hallway door, laughter creeping through the gap beneath. Panic slices through my stomach, the dwindling wave of adrenaline replaceing a second wind. “What now?” I whisper, frantic.

A figure moves on the other side of the door, snapping Alex into action. He points to the key in the lock of the room at the end of the hall. “My bedroom, Ophelia.”

His bedroom? Alex shares my hallway? I said I’d never set foot in his room, but a manslaughter charge in my first month here feels worse. As Alex makes my bed with a speed I can only admire, my shaky fingers turn the key and I dive inside.

I hardly have time to notice that Alex’s bedroom is actually a whole apartment, because as soon as the door closes behind him, he yanks his wet hoodie and T-shirt over his head. My heartbeat roaring in my ears, I stand awkwardly by the king-sized bed, wrapping my arms around myself.

I don’t mean to look, but I do.

A birdcage curves around the side of his ribs, and out of the open door flies a raven that spreads its wings over his abs. Another raven soars over his left shoulder, and another over his broad chest. They dance down rippling arms, over his muscular back as he chucks his muddy running shoes into the bathroom and shuts the door.

Alex Corbeau-Green is an evil, depraved work of art.

“There is a universe outside of my arms, you know.”

I feel my cheeks warm. “You’re a gold-plated turd, Alex.”

He rounds the bed in nothing but dark gray joggers. The sound of voices in the hallway gets louder, the thud of my heart in my ears deepens. “Get in the bed.”

“What?”

He’s so close I can feel the heat of his bare chest through my pajama shirt. “Get. Into. My. Bed.”

My next breath is heavy, riddled with loathing and something unfamiliar. “And why would I do that?”

His hands replace my shoulders and gently but firmly push me to the mattress, his face hovering above mine. I focus on the scar through his eyebrow. The five o’clock shadow that kisses his jaw. The way the rain clings to his lashes. Anywhere that isn’t the pools of green beneath them. His voice comes out a hoarse whisper. “Because for some reason, I’m willing to be your alibi.”

He steps back from between my legs, tossing the duvet over my shivering form before peering through the peephole in the door. His voice is muffled by the door, but I hear his gravely command. “Wear your hair down.”

“Why?”

“The last letter is Z.”

Am I in a different universe to everyone else at this school? I never know what is going on. “Huh?”

“Sounds like you’re always stuck on the penultimate letter of the alphabet. It’s all you ever say.” He turns back to the bed. “Wear your hair down, Twist, because that’s how I would’ve wanted it.”

What? Butterflies do odd things in my stomach. Not for him, though. They’d do it for anyone.

I don’t know why my fingers tug my red waves loose, but they do. Eyes still glued to the hole in the door, he holds up three fingers, then two fingers, then one. A visceral scream for help from the hallway makes my blood run cold, and Alex flicks off his phone torch, plunging us into darkness.

With my eyes unadjusted, I can’t see a thing, but I feel the bed dip beside me under the heavy weight of him, sense his head on the pillow beside mine. I don’t dare breathe, don’t dare tell him this is my first time in bed with a man, don’t dare tell him that this is all bringing back awful flashbacks of the worst day of my life.

Ancient grief has wriggled its way out of the cracks of my heart and tied my tongue in a knot.

I forget the man beside me is my worst enemy and anchor myself to the steady, calm rhythm of his breaths and the warmth that emanates from his skin. I ignore the shouting outside, ignore the yawning hole of panic trying to drag me under, ignore the tears that sting my eyes.

After a few minutes of waiting with bated breath, I feel Alex’s body stiffen as a gruff voice grumbles outside. “It’s Carmichael.”

My heart skips a beat. “In the hallway?”

“Yeah,” he whispers, holding his breath.

His leg brushes mine, the contact enough to make us both take a sharp inhale. I jolt back, reminding myself once more of why I hate him. “Are you giving me an alibi, Alex, or using me as one?”

He sits up beside me, lighting a candle on the side table with a Zippo. “Now is really not the time, Ophelia.” He looks down at me in the dim light, and with careful, steady fingers, he undoes the top two buttons of my sleep shirt without ever grazing my skin. I’m paralyzed, forced to watch his hands as they drop the fabric and gently tousle the lengths of my hair.

Copper strands wind between his index finger and thumb, neither one of us willing to shatter the silence. I’m so starved of connection, so hungry for intimacy that I don’t stop him. Even a fabricated moment with the wrong person feels better than loneliness.

His focused expression relaxes and he stills a moment, breaking eye contact to look at my mouth. The pad of his thumb skates along my lower lip ever so slightly. “If you weren’t so unbearable, I’d make you look freshly kissed,” he whispers.

His words snatch my retort away. If he was anyone else, anywhere else, perhaps I’d agree. I roll my head away from his hand in time for a sharp knock to rap on the door. The dread that was just beginning to dissolve from my body seeps back in at the edges.

What if he thinks it was me? What if it was me?

Alex rolls out of the now-messy bed and pads over to the door, his voice almost inaudible. “Look…flustered, okay? And cry.”

Look flustered and cry? What kind of instruction is that? Fortunately, flustered and crying is my default mode.

Alex lazily swings open the door and rubs his chest sleepily. “Good morning, Harris.”

Harris? Are they buddies? The chancellor looms in the doorway, and I swear the temperature drops ten degrees. Could he be Alan Sine? He doesn’t seem to like me, and he does give me the creeps. He’d have a key to my room, surely. And what is he doing fully dressed in a waistcoat and blazer at this hour? Even his mustache is perfectly shaped into a handlebar.

“Alex. I don’t suppose you saw Ms. Ivanov or Ms. Winters this evening?”

He muffles a yawn with a tattooed forearm. “I saw Sofia at the party at ten or eleven. Ophelia is in here.”

Carmichael’s eyes drop to me, filled with ill-hidden surprise. “Oh?”

I don’t have to fabricate my embarrassment because I know what Carmichael must think of me. Seduced by the son of Cain Green, the reason behind all of my problems. “Hello, Chancellor Carmichael.”

“Are you all right, sir?” asks Alex, turning his attention back to Carmichael. “Seems an odd hour for a chat?”

“Ms. Ivanov was found dead a short while ago.”

I can’t fake cry, but I can think about how far off track my life has gone.

It doesn’t take long for the tears to fall, but I wish they didn’t splinter my soul on the way down. I wish they were fake, and not tears of grief for the life Sofia won’t live, for the goodnight text I didn’t get from my dad, for all the hopes and dreams I had that now sit in a dusty bedroom back home.

I’m a mess.

Alex and Carmichael share a hushed conversation at the door, and it’s obvious they know each other well already. The chancellor listens to what Alex says with a strange sort of respect, and when he swears neither of us killed Sofia, he accepts it without doubt.

Thank God.

Carmichael tears his attention from my new fake lover and stares at me. The longer he does, the colder I feel. He glances from me to Alex, back to me. I get the strange sensation that he sees inside my head.

Now that Alex is my alibi, I can’t accuse him. Smart. And if it was Carmichael, I don’t want to poke the bear. Not now I know that the bear has a creepy penchant for literature and access to a fucking poison cabinet.

I blurt out the obvious question, mostly to end the silence. “Can’t the police investigate it? Like every other murder?”

Carmichael’s eyes flash with something strange. “This is being handled…internally.”

Of course it is. The police can be bought, it seems. He checks his pocket watch, which is unnecessary because there’s a clock in each hallway. “Well, do come back to me if any information…” he almost snarls, “…resurfaces.”

Carmichael leaves and I hop out of the bed like it’s on fire while Alex tugs on a black, long-sleeved training top.

My legs threaten to give way beneath me, my whole body trembling with residual shock. “I don’t believe you didn’t do this.”

His nostrils flare, fingers tightening around his phone. It’s the first glimmer of anger, or of any emotion, really, I’ve seen from him since I got here. “No, Ophelia, I didn’t do this, because any rational student here would know that this makes Vincenzo look guilty.”

I feel blood start to pool back in my limbs, the ringing in my ears relenting. “Then maybe he did do this. Aren’t they at war?”

Alex pinches his nose and exhales a slow breath. “Because Vincenzo would say—and has always said⁠—”

“We keep the women out of it,” finishes a gruff voice. Vincenzo’s broad frame fills the doorway. “You think I’m a murderer, darlin’?”

I shake my head and lean it back against the cold wall behind me. I spent so long trying to escape the silence of my lonely life back home, and now it’s all I want. I’m leaving tomorrow.

She didn’t deserve this.

And though I didn’t do it, I wished her gone on so many occasions. Now Kirill has lost his best friend and her parents have lost a child. The thought turns my anger into sadness, sitting like a lead weight on my left shoulder while guilt weighs down the other.

Alex and Vincenzo fall into serious conversation, and then the Italian rings one of his men to ask for protection for him and his sister. It’s another world I never knew existed.

Tears still trickling over my cheeks, I fill my mind with menial thoughts about a small mark on the wood flooring, like how it got there and how long ago, because if I think about anything else, I’ll crumble.

And if I think about how my stalker isn’t Sofia but someone else entirely, I might not last the night.

A sock covers the mark, and beside it, a glass of water lands on the bedside table. I feel the weight of two striking green eyes on me.

“Is this a joke?” I whisper, looking up at him.

Alex looks down at me, and for the first time, I see the hatred I feel for him reflecting back at me with the same intensity. He thinks I’ve put his friend’s life at risk. I think his father caused my parents’ death. “I don’t know, Ophelia. Are we laughing?”

“You spiked my drink and now you’re giving me this?” The glass scrapes against the wood as I push it back toward him.

“I spiked your drink,” he repeats, as though he didn’t hear correctly. He breathes out a soft laugh and leans forward so we’re eye to eye, and I’m cloaked in his shadow. “You vastly, vastly, overestimate my interest in you. You’re just a sad girl with a made-up backstory. I don’t know what your obsession with me is, Winters, but it is not reciprocated. I swear, if even a whisper of an accusation of Vincenzo leaves your lips, I’ll make you disappear.”

The second sentence is salt in my already broken heart, and the last sends my blood temperature plummeting.

He is his father. The apple hasn’t even fallen from the tree. He’s a rotting core behind a beautiful facade.

“Surely, Ophelia is the only one that could’ve done this,’ says Vincenzo, coming out of the bathroom. I don’t understand how they’re both fine. A girl is dead, and they’re just…fine.

Vincenzo is supposed to like me. I feel the first strings of madness thread their way through my conscience. Could it have been me? I wasn’t in my right mind last night. I don’t know what happened after the world went black.

I shake my head. I know myself. Even at my lowest, I wouldn’t take a life. “It wasn’t me; it was Alex. He spiked my drink, he sent me the email, he killed Sofia.”

Alex snaps his focus back to me. “What email?”

Something stops me from explaining. ‘Alan’ is either Alex or Carmichael, and I don’t think he’d take kindly to either accusation. “Nothing.”

The two of them head toward the door, my eyes tracking Alex. He moves like a panther, gracefully threatening. “Don’t go anywhere. We’re just checking that Belladonna is fine.”

The door clicks shut, and I’m alone in his bedroom.

I can’t face the questions from other students, nor can I even think about going back to my bedroom, so I remain in place as instructed.

Alex’s phone is on the small side table, his laptop on the desk, illuminated by two candles that bathe the room in a low light. It feels like a trap, all too convenient. I wipe my damp cheeks with the back of my wrist, pacing the perimeter of the room for any snippets of Alex I can replace. The floorboards creak beneath my feet, punctuated by the occasional rumble of thunder and the trickle of rain through the gutters.

It’s obvious he has two main hobbies outside of sports: sketching and reading. Intricate drawings of gothic and baroque buildings are pinned to a board above his desk, and if he wasn’t so unpleasant, I’d say they were very good. Beside his MacBook is the leather sketchbook I saw in his car on the first day, open on a half-completed drawing of a female form sketched in orange pencil.

Almost all of the remaining wall space is occupied by bookshelves. I run my finger over delicate clothbound titles until it pauses on one particular set of books. The Complete Works of John Keats. My saliva turns to sawdust. In a day full of strange coincidences, it feels like one too many.

Even in the dark, I spot a scrap of paper sticking out the top of one of the books. Glancing over my shoulder to check I’m definitely alone, I tug it off the shelf and creak open the spine to the bookmarked page. For the second time tonight, a knot constricts in my throat.

Ode to a Nightingale.

The book lands on my toes, but I barely feel it. Dread has its hand wrapped firmly around my throat.

A shadow caresses my shoulder, and for some reason, even in a room full of people, I would know it was him. “That was expensive.”

My whole body goes rigid. “Get away from me.”

He does as I ask, and I hear the bed rustle as he flops down on it. “Not a fan of John Keats?”

“You sent me the email,” I whisper, staring at the book on the floor as if it might reach up and smite me down. “You killed Sofia, you took my shoelaces.” My rage builds up with each accusation that slips through my lips, until he’s lying back on the bed and my hands are around his neck. All I see is red, and all I feel is defeat. Like I’ve watched the last threads of my sanity unravel over the last few weeks and not been able to stop it.

Somewhere in the distance, somewhere far away, I hear him tell me he didn’t do those things. I hear him tell me to stop. He doesn’t fight me, though. Doesn’t touch me.

But it doesn’t matter. I’m too far gone. Too angry, too desperate to pin the blame on someone. It is him. It has to be him. For my own soundness of mind, I need it to be him. By the time I manage my next sentence, my voice is hoarse with unshed tears. “You spiked my drink, you made me think I was insane.”

I’m yanked back by two firm hands, rapid Italian dragging me back to Earth. Vincenzo grasps me by the shoulders, eyes wide with alarm. “She’s fucking crazy, man. I know you hate that word, but she is.”

“He’s torturing me,” I choke out, tears scorching a path down my cheeks.

Alex sits up, the imprint of my palms on his neck as he sucks in a heavy breath. “She just woke up next to a body, Vincenzo, what do you think she’s gonna do? Start making a cup of tea?”

“It’s preferable to accentuation!”

Despite the tension of the moment, the faintest hint of a smile crosses Alex’s expression. “You mean asphyxiation?”

Vincenzo breaks into a laugh. “Fuck you, man. I’m trying.”

His giant hands come up to shield his face as Alex clubs him around the head with a thesaurus, but I just stand there. An outsider looking in.

Sofia is dead, and something deep in my gut tells me it’s my fault. That she was killed for merely being my roommate.

On shaky legs, feeling like I’m living somewhere outside of my body, I stagger into Alex’s oversized bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror.

Blotchy cheeks, puffy eyes, and a nose the color of my ugly pink pajamas. I look awful, and I’m suddenly desperate to be gone. Out of this bathroom, out of this mansion, out of this university.

And God above, I’m sick of feeling sad, sick of not knowing how not to feel sad. I’m worried my worst fears are coming true. That I’m so damaged that I’ll end up incapable of loving or being loved. As I stare down at my trembling hands over the sink, I’m so weighed down by grief, so overwhelmingly alone, it’s hard to imagine how I’ll get through my next breath.

Alex appears behind me. “You know, you can stop crying now.”

It’s the final straw. A throwaway comment, not laced with any animosity, but at the end of such a vile night, it’s the thing that tips the scales. An ugly sob strangles my throat, self-loathing burning me from the inside out. I barge past him, past his friend, and out of that awful mansion.