Nightshade: An Enemies to Lovers, Dark Academic Romance (Sorrowsong University Book 1)
Nightshade: Chapter 17

Ninety-one percent. Best in the class.

Vincenzo jumps into the air to celebrate his forty-eight—a pass—like he’s just won the lottery.

Alex shuts off his phone screen, closing the results email as we all grab our bags to leave Andersson’s lecture hall. “I guess we make a good team, Twist.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“You don’t like the nickname?”

It’s kind of ironic. I was orphaned, but he doesn’t know that. “It’s marginally better than fish food. But a Dickensian orphan, it doesn’t really make me feel…like a woman.”

“So what should I call you?”

“Oh, I don’t know, how about Ophelia Winters?”

“What should Shawn call you?”

I blush. Shawn is pretty relentless, but I’ve managed to use swimming as an excuse not to see him so far. “I don’t know…What do men call their girlfriends? Sugar?”

I regret it the second I say it, but Alex raises an eyebrow before I can retract my statement. “Sugar. You want to be called sugar.”

“No, not sugar. Something else, like…” I scratch my head. I have no idea.

He presses his lips together. “Sugar.”

I shove him out of the way, feeling my cheeks flame. “Not sugar. Honey? No. Not honey. Muffin? No.”

He looks exasperated with me. “Jesus Christ. What’s next? Eggs? Preheat oven to two fifty? Baking soda, I’m home!”

I smother my laugh in my mittens. He’s right. I have no idea how a relationship works. “Shut up.”

“I guess we have no reason to see each other anymore,” he says as pulls his phone back out of his pocket and frowns. I wonder if everything is okay at home.

Then I wonder why I care.

“I guess we don’t.”

“At last.”

“At last,” I repeat firmly. I’ve been counting down to this date for weeks.

So why am I not ecstatic?

Alex’s phone lights up with an incoming call, and I catch the name Evie before he looks back up to me. “See you around, sugar.”

I hate the nickname, but my pulse flutters. The way he says it, it sounds sinful and not sweet. Dark and twisted.

He says it like a promise. Like he’ll be looking for me.

I turn away, grinning into my scarf as his phone’s ringing stops and starts back up again. “Later, muffin.”

I trudge out of the psychology wing and into the mid-November air. An early winter chill rolled in over the valley last week, and it doesn’t seem to be keen to leave. Autumn seemed to give up on her mission.

Like me.

Last week, paparazzi photographed Alex’s mother running in Central Park in her dressing gown.

He left his rugby match halfway through and flew to New York the same day.

His father didn’t leave the climate conference in Washington.

Alex is quieter and quieter. The storm in his eyes is more and more violent each day. Usually so cold and calculated, I watched him in an extremely heated fight with Carmichael in the car park while on a run this week.

I said when I met him that he seemed like an elastic band waiting to snap. Somehow, it feels like he’s been stretched even further.

My lack of evidence and my nightly internet searches about his mother and his oldest sister, Fleur, do nothing to stoke the fire of revenge in me.

All the times I’ve considered just ending it all, the need to see Cain Green in shackles has been the hand that stops me.

It was easier when the Greens were just words on an internet article. When I hadn’t seen photos of them on Alex’s Instagram, or watched a stupid video of him twirling his eight-year-old sister around the kitchen on Fleur’s Instagram story.

I always knew I’d be ruining a family.

This was always part of the deal.

Carmichael hasn’t sent me any more strange emails since our altercation in his office a few weeks ago. Maybe I’ve panicked him. Maybe he knows I already know too much, that his gargantuan retirement fund is at risk. Either way, it’s been twenty-three days of swimming competitions, drinking with Colette, walks back to the mansion with Alex, and hiding from the sound of the helicopter.

Life feels almost normal.

An email pings through as I amble down a busy corridor in the castle’s central structure. It doesn’t worry me anymore. I open up the message from the mailing room and frown. I have a parcel waiting for me. Odd. I haven’t had so much as a letter, postcard, or parcel since my elderly neighbor got dementia three years ago.

I excuse myself from the group of chattering psychology students and follow the chaotic map on my phone down endless winding tunnels and into the shortest turret on the outer perimeter of the castle. Given the trajectory my life is on, I know the package is almost definitely a severed hand.

But I never get mail, so whether it’s a severed hand or a threat in a box, I will get my fun unboxing. Maybe I’ll even film it and post it to my private Instagram account with zero followers.

Maybe it’ll go viral.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I clear my throat as I round the doorway. “Hello?”

The woman at the desk simultaneously sighs and chews her gum. “Name.”

“Ophelia Winters.”

She yanks a battered box off the rows of shelving and shoves it toward me. I don’t know what’s stronger, the coffee on her breath or her Glaswegian accent. “Sign for it.”

I pick up the pen and write my name. “Do you know who sent it? Was there any indication?”

She cracks the chewing gum in her mouth. “I’m paid by the parcel, love. Not by the hour.”

“Right.” I tuck the small box beneath my arm and hurry my way back to the Nightshade mansion.

I toss the package onto my bed and examine the writing on it. It was shipped to my parents’ cottage an hour and a half from here, and then redirected to the university.

Intriguing.

I split what’s left of the duct tape with my room key, tearing open the box. A messily scrawled note sits on top, written on the back of half an envelope.

It’s what he would’ve wanted. —L.

Underneath it is an object wrapped in a dirty T-shirt and a tea towel. Wondering if I need a hazmat suit, I pinch the T-shirt between my fingers and pull it out of the box.

A tape clatters to the floor of my room.

I pick it up shakily, the writing on the label fading away. Laura, my darling, I’m sorry.

I drop it again like it gave me an electric shock, lowering myself to the floor beside it.

The final bullet in the barrel.

The grenade in Cain Green’s home.

Only, he’s not home alone.

I stare at the tape, wracked with indecision.

The two girls inside me—the girl before, and the girl after—want different things. One wants war, to make others suffer the same as she has, to not be alone in her misery. The other one just wants a quiet life of crosswords and peace.

One wants to mail the tape back to where it came from.

One wants to pull the trigger.

I opt to do what my father would. Sleep on it, decide tomorrow. But I do order myself a tape to MP3 converter.

Just in case.

There’s only been one foolproof way to clear my mind since I got to Sorrowsong, so I put my swimsuit on beneath my joggers and knitted cardigan, pack my towel and swimming float into a tote bag, and head down to the tarn.

The world feels silent as I take the winding path down to the lake. The temperature has dipped well into the single digits, too cold for groups of students to sit around and smoke on the trail.

A bitter wind chases me down to the water’s edge, biting at my heels. My trainers don’t even attempt to hide the cold around my feet as I dump my bag on the soft bank.

A rustle sounds in the hedgerow behind me. My eyes scan the length of it, suddenly aware of how alone I am here. All is silent and still, so I slip off my shoes and socks, letting my feet sink into the mud.

I’m just clipping my small orange float around my waist when leaves crunch louder behind me. I reach for the penknife in my bag, gripping it in my fist as the branches in the hedge bounce.

My attempt at steadying my breath fails. I’m as useless as the horror movie heroines I’ve spent my evenings yelling at.

Oh god. I’m going to die. Why did I provoke Carmichael? The man probably has hitmen working for him.

I’m going to die, and I haven’t even done today’s Wordle.

A fox darts out from the bushes, scampering away into the inky green mass of the Solemn Woods.

I breathe out a shaky laugh. This university is making me overly paranoid.

I do Wordle at the water’s edge, though, just to be sure.

The water is cold enough to freeze my mind. Freeze my worries—freeze the racing thoughts that treat my body like a racetrack. By the time my shoulders sink below the waterline, I can’t feel my legs.

I tread water for a split second, trying to work the stupid fitness watch Belladonna gave me to track my swim speed.

My mother would know. She’d always fix the TV right before Dad was at the stage of punching it. She was clever.

She’d have caught my stalker by now.

My body falls still in the water.

Alan Sine.

It’s an anagram of my mother’s name.

All of those puzzles. All of those crosswords, and it’s taken me almost two months to realize that Alan Sine is an anagram of Annalise.

It doesn’t change anything; not really. It doesn’t change what they’ve said or done. But it makes it all feel twice as sinister. Twice as personal.

A twig snaps in the trees to my right, and somehow it feels different. Different to the fox, different to the peace I’ve known for the last few weeks.

Something deep inside me tells me to return to the castle. Something is wrong.

My limbs too cold to be of much use, I make my way to the bank and stumble out of the water. Another twig crunches in the trees.

“Just a fox,” I repeat, over and over, even though the snap is too loud to be a fox. Frantically, I rummage around in my bag for my knife. My legs are shaky, fingers devoid of feeling.

The wind howls over the valley. Achlys screams for help. My breaths are hyperventilating.

I don’t know why I’m so scared, don’t know why I reach for my phone to unblock Alex’s number. It takes me too long to replace his texts to me, too long to click on them. I don’t hit Unblock in time.

I’m too slow to react when a heavy footstep lands behind me.

Two hands slam down on the back of my neck, sending me flying onto the bank in front of me. My face lands in the shallows of the water.

I try to roll over, try to fight, but a large hand pins my face into the water, the other pressing on the back of my neck. I scream, but it’s a garbled cry that tastes like dirt and earth and dread.

I fight. God, I fight. I fight like I never thought I would. I fight like a girl who has something to come home to at Christmas.

I slam my head back. It collides with something, someone. I hear a furious grunt through the water that blocks my ears.

But it’s not enough. The hands don’t move. Before my head is slammed back onto the bank, the sickening stench of cloves and anise fills my lungs.

My legs kick in the mud. My lungs burn for air. My hands grapple behind me. They brush a forearm—a male forearm—and they claw at a ringed finger at the back of my neck.

I need to inhale.

I feel the girl before die inside me. I watch her hopes and dreams of noisy Christmases and sinks full of dishes slither into the water.

The girl after fights for longer. She screams again, bubbles spilling into the dark brown water. She kicks and thrashes even after the energy has left her limbs, fueled by hatred.

But like everything she’s ever done, it’s just not enough.

Water invades places only delicate enough for air.

My hatred and my malice join my compassion and my kindness at the bottom of the tarn.

The world fades to black around me.

Just black. No orange room. No music. No crosswords. No Mum, no Dad.

Just black.

I’m sorry.