Nightshade: An Enemies to Lovers, Dark Academic Romance (Sorrowsong University Book 1)
Nightshade: Chapter 26

I don’t think Vincenzo has ever beaten me at poker in the almost twelve years I’ve known him, and he’s obliterating me. That’s what Ophelia has done to me. I’m a husk of my former self. I’d lose it all if it meant I could keep her, though. Half the time I can’t believe she’s mine.

She’s beautiful in a way that makes me grateful nothing before her has ever worked out. In a way that makes me want to almost run her over on that rainy track outside the castle gates one more time, because I just know I didn’t appreciate her enough the first time.

I can’t remember the last time the world felt so colorful.

I make another sloppy mistake; another five hundred dollars down the drain. I’m tired. I spent half of last night buried inside Ophelia and the other half counting her freckles.

“Fold,” huffs Jack, stroking his chin. A mustache has joined his messy mullet at some point over Christmas. A deep tan kisses his muscles from a December in the Maldives with his rich neurosurgeon parents. He’s the perfect pornstar.

Vincenzo and Bella are fighting over the card game, as usual. And I’m just re-reading my texts to my girlfriend like an idiot.

She left me on Read a while ago. I hate being left on Read. I’m not ashamed to admit I can be a little overbearing sometimes, and unfortunately Ophelia texts like your average sixty-year-old man. I passed my exam? Thumbs-up emoji. I wanna rail her into next week? Thumbs-up emoji. I narrowly avoided death at rugby? Thumbs-up emoji.

But she’s new to it all, so I’ll forgive her.

As Vincenzo deals out another hand, she finally replies.

Banned orifice? The fuck does that mean? Anal? Jesus, my blood pressure is fighting for its life this evening. Give a man a chance, Ophelia.

Vincenzo catches me staring at my phone and smiles. He got a face tattoo over Christmas. Some Roman numerals extend from the bottom of his shaved sideburn to the corner of his jaw. He’s going to run out of space soon, at the ripe old age of twenty-one. “How come she isn’t here?”

“In some study session. She wouldn’t let me go with her. Says I’m a control freak.”

“You are. Who is she with?”

“One of the psych lecturers. Bancroft, or something.”

Belladonna makes a face. “He’s creepy.”

I tense, dropping my cards onto the table. “Why?”

“Just weird. He took one of our third-year modules. He’s just odd. He talks for hours on end and doesn’t even hit the content he’s supposed to.” She sips her wine, tossing her dark ponytail over her shoulder. “He hates me.”

“How come?”

“Caught him fucking one of the gardeners in my first year. I wasn’t even gonna tell anyone anyway, but he threatened me. Said he’d hurt me if I told someone. I told him if he even dared, he’d have a hundred hot-blooded Italian men after him.”

“Fuck yeah, he would,” mutters Vincenzo. “What did you say his name was? Might pop over for a friendly chat.”

Their conversation gets drowned out by ringing in my ears. I’m already out of my seat. “What did the gardener look like?”

“Female. Ginger. I can’t remember much more than that.”

A sickening dread sinks into my blood. “Fuck.”

They all stand in unison. “What?”

“He’s her stalker.” I bolt out of the library and through the front door of the mansion, flying toward the castle. I call her number with the others on my heels. “Pick up, Ophelia, come on.”

“Should we split?” asks Jack.

“Go to the car park. Don’t let any cars leave.”

“Got it.”

My feet pound the castle courtyard, taking the stairs into the eastern quadrant three at a time. I dial her again with no success. Vincenzo and Bella are trying to reassure me, but it’s not going in.

She’s not fine. I have a feeling she’s not fine.

Banned orifice. Bancroft’s office. I’ve never felt a panic like it. Never felt so hopeless or so full of hatred.

“Up the turret,” breathes Bella as we run into a stairwell. Vincenzo spears off to search the eastern halls.

The door to Bancroft’s office is wide open when we reach it. The scene in front of me makes me want to vomit. There’s blood on the carpet, a lot of blood. Her phone is shattered on the floor, her bag abandoned by the desk.

Belladonna curses in Italian. “It might not be her blood.”

I tap her phone screen for a clue, but it’s broken. “What was I thinking, letting her go anywhere alone?”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“It’s all my fucking fault.” I pull open every door on the top of the turret. It’s deserted. My sense of despair is all-consuming. “Stay up here, they might come back. Call me if you see anything.”

She nods, pulling a Glock from her waistband and holding it out for me. I almost take it, but I can’t bring myself to. I’m not leaving Belladonna unarmed alone. “Keep it.”

“Alex.”

I’m already descending the stairs. “Keep it!”

I knew better and I let her down. I should’ve been following her everywhere until Alan was caught. I let myself get complacent in his silence. I pull out my phone, bringing up the Find My app.

A wave of gratitude slams into me. Ophelia’s AirPods are moving on the map. Clever girl. They jump around due to poor signal, converging on the forested edge of the tarn. Fuck. A strangling voice in my ear says he’s dumped her body there. I push it out and grit my teeth.

She’s not allowed to die until I say so.

I sprint out of the castle, traversing the path down to the water’s edge, heart pulsing in my mouth. The place is deserted, covered with a foot of snow. There’s no sign of footprints at the edge of the tarn when I skid onto it. “Ophelia, baby, where are you?” I whisper as I head into the woods.

The forest is silent and eerie as I jog through it, a low fog hugging the trees. I don’t use a flashlight. I don’t know how dangerous this guy is, or if he has people working with him. I can’t attract attention to myself.

There’s no sign of them. No footprints, no rustles in the bushes.

He could’ve abandoned her body, but I know Ophelia. I have some otherworldly connection to her that transcends what makes sense. In my heart I know she’s alive, because if she wasn’t, it would be aching.

I try to keep the anger aside, to focus on Ophelia’s safety, but the monster inside me has crawled out of its cage. The colors bleed out of my brain, nothing left but malice.

I follow the blue dot until I’m so close it looks like I could reach out and touch her.

I stop, scanning the inky black abyss around me. My breaths are the loudest thing in the valley, each one a white cloud in the moonlight. There’s no sign of Ophelia, no sign of Bancroft. A disconcerting silence falls around me. It’s too quiet.

The dot moves to my left, and I head through a dense thicket of trees.

I slam into something—someone—as I round a thin tree trunk. Or rather, someone slams into me. Ophelia was sprinting through the trees toward the forest’s edge. The large knife in her hand glistens with blood.

A terrified scream rips through her throat and I clamp a hand over her mouth to silence her, catching her wrist an inch before the knife sinks into my chest. “It’s me,” I whisper. “It’s me, baby. I’ve got you.”

She sobs into my hand, deep breaths heaving through her nose. Moonlight catches in the flecks of gold in her irises, wide and glassy. She looks terrified. I rake a desperate gaze up and down the soft contours of her body, searching for any sign that she’s badly hurt. “I’m going to need you to be quieter, love.”

When her ragged cries die down, I remove the hand from her mouth. “I love you,” she breathes, like it’s been on the tip of her tongue for hours.

I shake my head, clutching her to me. “No. You’re saying that because you think we’re going to die. Say it when you know we won’t.”

“He has a gun,” she whispers, teeth chattering violently.

“Where is he?”

“I stabbed him.”

That’s my girl. “Take me there and then I’ll get Vin to come and take you back.”

“No. I’m not leaving you. Not now, not ever.” She leads me through the night, my hand sticky with blood. Her blood. The monster rears its ugly head inside me.

“Are you hurt?”

She nods but keeps walking, dragging me through the trees. A rope dangles from her right wrist like her hands were bound before. A nauseating thirst for death, a lust for blood, courses through me.

Is this how my father feels all the time?

She hands me the knife in the dark, eyes wide with worry. It’s such an act of trust, such a display of her belief that I’d protect her. Any other situation and I’d probably get down on one knee right here.

She freezes in a small gap in the trees, moonlight spilling like liquid silver over the forest floor. Her legs tremble beneath her ripped tights, eyes frantically darting between the shadows around us. A shovel glints in the cold lighting, discarded against a rock. He was going to bury her.

I have a feeling this’ll take a long time for her to overcome.

Wet, sticky blood glistens on the leaves at our feet. A crow calls out in warning somewhere far away. Her breaths pick up, chest rising and falling faster. Unease prickles my spine. “I left him here. He was bleeding out right here.”

I have to get her back to the castle. Revenge can go on hold as long as I know she’s safe. We spin around to leave, but a twig snaps somewhere in the bushes. I wrap myself around her, hoping and praying that the muscle and bone of my body would be enough to save her if it came to it.

“Come out, man. Don’t be boring.”

Bancroft stumbles out into the trees, a gun aimed at me. He’s vaguely familiar; a tall, gray-haired man whose existence is as miserable as his sweater. Ophelia has done a real number on him. A giant bloodstain sits over his abdomen, one of his eyes swollen shut. From the muddy footprints over his crotch, I’d say he’s been through it.

I love her.

Even in the dark, it takes me all of ten seconds to see the gun is fake. Convincing, but faker than a three-dollar bill. It took Vincenzo a hell of a lot of effort to get his guns into the UK. There’s no way this buffoon has got one. I tell Ophelia so, so quietly that I’m not sure she heard me. But her shoulders relax slightly in my arms, breaths steadying a little.

“Ophelia, love, would you go and stand over there?” I ask softly, slipping the rope from her wrist. “Might get messy.”

“I love your mess, Alex.”

I wonder what my shrink would make of the fact that, despite the situation, all I can think about is bending her over right here on the forest floor. My fingers sink into the curve of her ass, having to bite down my amusement as Bancroft points the gun at us with renewed determination.

A tiny, almost inaudible moan hangs in the dense air around us.

Oh, Ophelia.

I knew she had a fucked-up little monster of her own. I knew a tiny thread of depravity stained her gentle heart. Cute.

I calmly walk to Bancroft. He must clock that I know the gun is fake, because he drops it and turns to run. But he’s slow, and I’m fast. He’s old, I’m young. He’s got nothing to run for, but I have everything.

It takes me all of three seconds to catch him by the back of the neck, dragging him into the middle of the glade and pushing his limp form onto its knees in front of Ophelia. She stares down at him, eyes alight with fury.

I twirl the knife between my fingers and let it land beneath his ear. “You and I are going to have a quick chat about Sofia Ivanov, and then we’ll talk about what you’ve done to my girlfriend.”

His squeal is nectar for the darkness inside me. For a man who likes to torture others, it doesn’t take much force from the knife to get him to talk. By the time I’ve recorded his confession to Sofia’s murder and the helicopter crash, he’s clinging onto his life by the fingernails, begging for mercy.

I slide my phone into my back pocket, staring down at the withering mess on the floor. Evidence that I killed Sofia’s murderer will be useful if I’m ever to cool my father’s volatile relationship with the Ivanovs.

I move to finish the miserable bastard off, but Ophelia steps out of the shadows and shakes her head. “Let him die slowly.”

She stands between his legs where he lies, sprawled out on the bloodied earth beneath us. Her body may be shaking, but her voice is not. She looks down at him as he lives his final minutes, reciting lines from Ode to a Nightingale, the John Keats poem that started this whole mess. She looks like a priest reading the last rites, and I don’t intervene, can’t intervene, too awestruck by her.

“‘That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim.’”

Angry tears roll down her cheeks, joining his rotting blood on the black earth.

Bancroft’s chest heaves with a final breath, blood gurgling from his lips. The moonlight bathes Ophelia like a goddess, a silver statue painted in blood.

“‘Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies.’”

She leans over and spits on his corpse, turning away in disgust. It’s a forensic analyst’s wet dream, but I decide to keep my mouth shut.

She sinks to her knees on the wet earth. Her next exhale is a desperate, shuddering apology to her father. The one after that is a bitter insult to her mother.

I kneel opposite her and she buries her head in my chest. “This doesn’t feel like a win at all.”

“It doesn’t have to. You don’t owe anyone gratitude.”

“I love you.”

I grin against her damp hair. “I love you, too.”

Footsteps sound to our left, Vincenzo emerging between two trees with one of his men. They look ready for a clean-up job. Vincenzo chucks me a shovel, silently taking in the scene around us, gaze landing on Bancroft. “Ten points to Ophelia. You were a wreck the last time someone died.”

I nod my agreement. “Character development.”