Nightshade: An Enemies to Lovers, Dark Academic Romance (Sorrowsong University Book 1)
Nightshade: Chapter 5

How I’ve been roped into a two-mile trip to watch cold people splash around in a loch is beyond me.

My running shoes sink into the soft forest floor beside Vincenzo’s, his shirt slung over his shoulder despite the bitter chill. Our night began in the Nightshade library, ended at the Snakeroot initiation party in the castle, and neither of us can remember what happened in the middle. All I know is we were awoken in the Snakeroot dormitories by Bella phoning Vincenzo to ask why he was late to help her run the swimming trials.

I woke up alone, clothed, and on a couch, and Vincenzo woke up naked, in company, and in a bed, so we were both pleased with how the night turned out.

“Che cazzo.” Vin stops and puts his hands on his knees, cursing his sister in breathless Italian.

“Ciò fa ben sperare ai provini per della squadra di rugby.” This bodes well for the rugby squad tryouts.

He holds up a middle finger but doesn’t straighten up. “Fuck you, rich boy. Your Italian sucks. And so does your hair.”

I start running again, pulling my black hoodie off. It’s sticky in this forest, the air thick with fog. “So do your manners. You’re the one who dragged us here.”

He catches up beside me, a bead of sweat running down the skull tattoo on his neck. “You’ve seen how scary Bella can be, she’ll have my balls. She should be the next fucking capo, not me.”

The forest thins, allowing us a distant view of the loch through the trees. It’s nine in the morning and the sun looks like it’s had enough for the day. Still, in my first seven days here, I think this is the first day it hasn’t rained. “Perhaps she should be.”

“Fuck no. There’d be a war in the first month. She’s happy playing doctors and nurses.”

I’m not sure Vin is any more calm-tempered than his sister, but I don’t let that thought pass my lips. I met him in New York when he was nine and I was eleven, and somehow, I haven’t managed to shake him off in the twelve years since. We sat and stared at each other in silence for three hours that day while my father made a shady deal to provide helicopters to the Morello Syndicate. When Vin’s father, Rocco, asked my father how much it would cost to make one of his Russian enemies vanish in an accident, they asked me to stand outside.

The man in question died in a helicopter crash the next week. The official report was swept out of media coverage just as quickly, but the press said the Russian pilot was on Class A drugs at the time.

Every life has a price to my father.

As we trudge down the bank of the loch, I half wonder what mine is. Low, probably, but higher than my sisters’. And that annoys me.

Belladonna is yelling at Vin in rapid Italian before we’re even in earshot, her hands darting around in front of her. I’m genuinely afraid for my balls.

My friend sheepishly rubs his chest as we approach, choosing not to respond to the string of curses that float our way. He’s right; if Belladonna took over the Morello syndicate, New York would be a war zone. “Sorry, Bella, we got buried in pre-reading for the financial module.”

She shoves his head aside like she doesn’t buy his bullshit. “Buried in a Snakeroot student, more like. You two can be lifeguards.”

Vin rubs a hand over his brown, recently buzzed hair. “You said we’d be timing people. I’m not getting in that water.”

“And then you were half an hour late.” She kisses my cheek. “Alex, amore, you really must replace a new best friend. Why won’t you try out? We could use you.”

“I was just thinking that,” I mutter, dodging Vin’s battered knuckles that swing at my jaw—wasn’t he just talking about his sister’s temper? “And I’m stretched thin enough already, I can’t add swimming to my schedule.” I pick a bottle of water from the ice bucket on the jetty and tug my hoodie back on.

Sorrowsong has a reputation for success in sports. It’s not the reason I came here, but it helps. Rugby practice and the occasional rowing regatta have been shoehorned into the few gaps in my schedule. I’m sure I’ll resent selling my sanity to impress Carmichael, but it’s all part of my plan. It’ll all pay off in the end.

I hope.

“Alex!”

I look up to see Sara Hamilton and Mura Sayari jogging over to me. Supermodels. They’re also not the reason I came here, but they help, too, even if they are both wearing ridiculous heels on muddy terrain in the north of Scotland. I’ve met them both before at a social club in New York, but that seems a far cry from where we’ve all ended up now.

Truthfully, I don’t really know why everyone comes here. Maybe we’re all just trying to be as far away from home as possible.

“It’s good to see you both. Terrific footwear choice,” I say as Sara hugs me.

“Thank you!” she exclaims, looking down at her brown Manolo Blahniks that were probably peach-pink about an hour ago. “They’re not even for sale yet; I just wore them for a shoot, and they let me keep them, and I said they really didn’t have to do that, and then they said it’s totally fine, and then I said⁠—”

“He’s being sarcastic, Sara,” Mura interrupts, giving me a knowing smile.

Mura is one of my closest friends here, even if she did force me into a luxury fashion photoshoot with her last year. I did it for my mother, really, who proudly kept the magazine in a display cabinet.

Until she shattered it with a tennis racket, but that’s a story for another day.

Mura has a sensible head on her shoulders, and she’s always been kind to my sister, Fleur, supporting her through her first few modeling campaigns. “You look good, Alex. Family okay?”

There’s an undercurrent to the question, a private look just for me. Mura and I, we understand each other. God knows how much of her soul she sold to be allowed to study here. I give her a tight smile, because it’s easier than trying to articulate the black cloud that lives in my chest lately. “Yeah. Yours?”

Her smile doesn’t touch her eyes, and I know she doesn’t believe me. “Yeah. Anyway, you’re here to swim?”

“To lifeguard.”

“Oh, I love Baywatch,” interjects Sara, beckoning over an attractive blonde who, judging by the towel robe she ties around her waist, is here to compete. “Have you met Colette DuPont?”

I cock my head at the newcomer. She looks vaguely familiar, like everyone else here. “I recognize you from somewhere.”

She flashes me a shy smile, all platinum hair and tanned skin. “Well, I’ve been on the front page of every news blog for my very public estrangement from my family.” A flush heats her face, like this is not information she wanted to discuss on her first time meeting someone.

I have seen her very public, very messy estrangement from the Luxembourgish royal family all over the French news, now that she mentions it. “I was in a Swedish yogurt commercial, too, but I doubt it’s that.”

I click my fingers as she says the second sentence. “That’s it. I’m a huge Swedish yogurt guy. Watch all the commercials on the day they come out.”

A grateful laugh leaves her lips, her hand landing over one of the ravens on my arm. “Maybe we can get a drink sometime?”

“Sure,” I say, but it trails off as a flash of copper hair and dark clothing rushes behind her. Ophelia fucking Winters. She’s everywhere. When I eat, she’s sat in the dining hall. When I study, she’s doing those stupid crosswords in the library. When I go out running, she’s floating in the tarn like an orange dish sponge.

She was intriguing in the car, out of line in the chapel, and downright infuriating in the library. I don’t know what happened between those events that made her hate me, but I suppose it could be any number of things. My father angers a lot of people these days.

I nod a quick goodbye to Mura, Sara, and Colette, and join Vin where he sits on the end of the jetty. Ophelia glances in our vague direction. Was Vincenzo serious when he said my hair looked shit? I run both hands through it, tensing my jawline and my thighs beneath my rugby shorts.

What the hell am I doing? Why do I care? I can’t stand the girl.

“Look who it is.”

My teeth clamp together as I watch her wave to Colette and drop her bag at her feet. “I’ve seen. If she starts drowning, I’m not going in.”

“I will,” he says through a bite of an apple. “She’s hot, and girls love that shit.”

I shove my hood back up over my hair. “What, drowning?”

“No, shirtless men carrying them out of bodies of water.”

The heat from Vin’s lighter brushes my nose as I light a cigarette. I quit last year, but something about that ginger girl makes me want one. She looks like she’ll get scared off before the first semester is up, which is good for me and my blood pressure. The sooner the better. “Hell will freeze over before I take dating advice from you, Vincenzo.”

“Come on, you really think she’s up to something? She looks like her idea of bad is parking without a ticket.”

“She clearly doesn’t want to be here, and she looks like she gets her clothes from Goodwill. She’s up to something.”

Vincenzo takes off his shoes and dips his gross feet in the water. I offer a silent prayer for the aquatic population of Sorrowsong Loch. Death by Mafia bonehead feet. Gotta be in the worst five ways to go.

“First of all, Goodwill is expensive nowadays. That’s what Zia Patrizia says. Second of all, they don’t even have that store here. Third of all, you don’t wanna be here either. Third of all⁠—”

“You’ve already done a third.” I love the guy, but I’d bet each of my cars that he’ll fail all his exams this semester.

“Whatever. She’s not gonna last the month, anyway. Looked terrified at dinner yesterday.”

The only thing I thought she looked at dinner yesterday was hot, but I keep that confession quiet. With her nose buried in a clothbound classic, a packet of tissues up her sleeve and a miserable expression on her face, she’s almost charming, in a depressing sort of way.

We both stand as the first men’s heat begins, but my attention struggles to pull away from Ophelia on the third jetty along. She steps out of her tired, black sweatpants and pulls her shapeless sweater over her head, left in just a black swimsuit. I’d drawn some conclusions from her rain-soaked shirt and miniskirt from last week, but this confirms what I already know.

She’s a fucking smokeshow.

Shame it’s all wasted on that nasty attitude. I turn back to watch the race, because Vin can’t keep his eyes off Colette and one of us has to at least vaguely pay attention. “Don’t even dream of it, man. She’s asked me for a drink.”

His face falls. “Are you gonna go?”

“No.” I have my reasons for being here, and none of them include getting involved with disgraced royals.

“Good.” He rubs his knuckles over the short beard on his jaw. “Just imagine. Let me live my fantasy in my head.”

As long as it stays in his head. Vin has a habit of bumping into a woman in a coffee shop for the first time and then planning all their future children’s names the same day. He once matched with a girl on Tinder on a Monday and gave her the code to his Amex on the Wednesday.

Pretty sure she used it to book a flight to go and visit her boyfriend.

The men’s heats come and go, boring and uneventful. Belladonna scribbles down the names and houses of the few that qualify, ushering everyone around with her usual ruthless organization.

“Odds on the one that wanted to be in Hemlock drowning?” Shawn Miller appears behind me and Vin, blond hair still wet from his swim. Even in the mudslide that is the Scottish Highlands in autumn, he’s wearing loafers and no socks.

Horrendous.

I tend to socialize with people for one of two reasons. Because I like them, or because it’s smart business. Shawn falls so far into the latter category. I’d rather put pins in my eyes than chat with him, but his father owns an investment firm and sits on the board of my father’s company, so I can’t toss him in the loch.

Yet.

“High,” I mutter, watching her take her place at the edge of the jetty. Beside her, Colette dips a toe in the water and lets out a quiet yelp. No one here is handling the transition from expensive, climate-controlled, indoor swimming pools to a late-autumn Scottish lake very well. Sorrowsong does have a pool inside the conservatory, but Belladonna likes to watch people suffer.

I watch another swimmer from Nightshade mutter something in Ophelia’s ear, and judging by the way her jaw tenses, it’s not an offer of good luck.

One day in, and she seems to have made a lot of enemies.

She doesn’t grace the other girl with a response, focusing on her stretches as the final stragglers take their places. Belladonna fires an empty rifle into the air and they all dive in. They all surface immediately, stunned motionless by the cold.

Not Ophelia, though. I can’t see her. Shawn steps forward between me and Vincenzo. “Where’s Hemlock girl?”

“Her name is Ophelia,” I mutter, scanning the black surface of the water. Shit, I didn’t actually want her to drown. Not that badly, anyway. Just a little bit. Silent seconds tick by, Belladonna’s pen freezing on her clipboard.

Vin is already tossing his shirt aside and grabbing the life buoy when she surfaces about twenty yards ahead of the others, gliding across the loch like she hasn’t noticed that it’s cold.

To my left, Vincenzo tucks the buoy under his arm and claps as though she can actually hear him. “Girl can swim.”

And she can. She glides through the water as if propelled by some external force, some desperate need to win. Whatever her motive for impressing Carmichael is, I doubt it burns hotter than mine.

She wins her heat by a mile, Colette coming in second, and then she wins the final by a few inches, pushing her athletic frame out of the water and stepping into a towel—wait, is that Shawn holding the towel? He’s vanished from between us, holding Ophelia’s towel for her and gushing over her performance. A small smile appears on her lips as he holds out her clothes, and when he laces up her sneakers for her, she fucking giggles.

“Fuck Shawn Miller, man.” Two-faced imbecile.

Vincenzo snorts and jingles his keys in his pockets. “Would be a shame if someone scratched his Bentley later.”

“A tragedy for the ages.”

My phone buzzes in my pocket and I tug it out. The screen lights up with an incoming call. Cain Green. My mood sours. I’ve been in the UK for weeks, and this is the first time my father has contacted me outside of forwarding me financial statements he thinks I’ll be interested in.

I press the phone to my ear. “Cain.”

The rhythmic thud of footsteps punctuates his smooth voice, and I imagine him pacing the halls of Green Aviation’s head office in Manhattan, barking at his secretary. “Alexander. You didn’t reply to my email.”

I stroll off the jetty and away from Vincenzo. “I’ve been busy. What was it about?”

“Looks like TechEon has pulled their stake in the Intrepid Air narrowbody deal.”

I pause for a minute, trying to summon a single fuck to give. Just when I think I’ve got one, it fizzles away into the frigid air. “Wow, that’s crazy.”

“Certainly poses an opportunity for us. Deacon is putting together the proposal already. I expect you to be more active on your work email in future.”

I toe a rock in the mud with my running shoe, keeping my sigh contained. “I’m kind of busy here.”

His tone deteriorates from polite to bitter in a moment. “You don’t know what busy is, boy. If you want to break your poor mother and sisters’ hearts and go to Scotland, that’s on you, but I won’t have it interfere with your training. Do you know how many men your age would kill for a position as CEO in twenty years?”

Twenty years. I’d sooner die than let it be that long. His second sentence makes the darkness inside me expand in my chest to the point that it hurts. My fingers itch to text each of them the two words that bounce around my brain for every waking moment of my days here.

I’m sorry.

“Harris told me you got a seventy-six on your pre-course assessment,” he says, and I hear a door shut in the background. He must be in his office.

Jesus Christ. “Why are you getting so cozy with the chancellor?”

“Seventy-six, Alex?”

I’m surprised the phone doesn’t crack in my hand. “It’s the pre-course assessment. I’ve not taken the course yet.”

“You’ve been joining me in the office since you were ten. Have I taught you to give seventy-six percent effort at work?”

“Is there a point to this phone call?”

He’s seething, talking through gritted teeth. “The point is not letting my deadbeat son waste another several years of his life. The media are watching you closely. God knows our publicity people are busy enough as it is.”

Deadbeat. I don’t say anything, unable to think of a reply that won’t split our family into two and make my mother worse.

A ragged sigh crackles through the speaker. “I push you for your own benefit, Alex, to make you stronger. One day I won’t be around anymore. A son should not need his father.”

I needed him a long time ago. I needed him when I broke my first bone at seven. When I had my first breakup at fourteen. When I first dialed for help for my mother at sixteen. When I first checked all my sisters into a hotel at seventeen. When I left Yale at nineteen. My life is a complex web of moments that could’ve been made easier by a present father.

I needed him then.

I need him now.

My tone is as flat as my mood. “Sure. Got to go to rugby.”

“Sports are a waste of time.”

“Always great to catch up, Cain.” I punch the red button at the bottom of the screen with far more force than necessary and gesture to Vin that I’m leaving.

Having seen enough, I say my goodbyes to Belladonna and the others, and jog toward the forest’s edge. A low fog hugs the base of the trees, and somewhere a raven lets out a shrill cry into the bitter air. We’re on the cusp of October, but it feels like a New York winter out here.

As I veer left into the thicket, a small hand shoots out from the shadows and grabs my hoodie.

Warm cinnamon. The same smell that lingers on the passenger seat of my car. Christ, I wish we could go back to that car journey some days. Where for five minutes, a glimmer of intrigue sparked in my chest. When the pretty, down-on-life redhead was still a mystery and not a thorn in my side. “Fucking hell, Twist, you’re obsessed with me.”

She drags me deeper into the trees, caramel-brown eyes burning up at me in the dark. “Were you at the tarn last night?”

My smile is venomous. “I don’t remember a lot of last night, Ophelia. Want me to wear an ankle tag just for you?”

Her grip on the front of my sweater tightens. “I swear to God, Corbeau, if you were fucking with me at the tarn yesterday, I’ll kill you. It wasn’t funny.”

“Not if I kill you first,” I bite back as a droplet from her wet hair runs over the freckles beside her nose.

“Just answer the question.” The water trickles over the soft, pink curve of her bottom lip. She’s shivering. I don’t know why I notice. I don’t know why I care.

I take a step back, freeing my hoodie from her grip. Cold air replaces the warmth of her chest and I replace myself frustrated that I’m losing my cool, unable to pinpoint why she stirs such an intense reaction from me. My usual comfort blanket of apathy doesn’t feel like an option around her.

Somewhere between the car and the chapel, she made her mind up about me, and that’s fine. It’s happened a hundred times before.

So why am I so bothered?

“No, Ophelia, I wasn’t at the tarn. Can I run back to the castle now, or do I need to submit a map of my expected route? Wanna meet up at a checkpoint halfway?”

“Go to hell, Alex.”

I jog backward away from her, my gaze fixed on hers. “See you there.”