Nightshade: An Enemies to Lovers, Dark Academic Romance (Sorrowsong University Book 1)
Nightshade: Chapter 6

The first night in the Nightshade Halls, I fell asleep at midnight and woke up to Sofia standing over my bed, grinning at me, two hours later.

I didn’t manage to fall back asleep. I went swimming instead.

In the week since, she’s managed to make my existence hell most nights. A rat in my bed, a knife to the throat, and, worst of all, missing biscuits from my biscuit tin. And all because she thinks I’m joining Vincenzo’s side. Like having an opinion on a New York-based mafia conflict is something that normal people have.

I’d retaliate if it wouldn’t be the last thing I’d ever do.

She’s in Jaden’s room this evening, but I’ve been lying awake staring at the ceiling for hours. My body is exhausted, but my mind and my heart are racing. Coming to Sorrowsong was a mistake. Kicked out of school for non-attendance, denied university places for lack of exam results; my dreams burned to ash in that helicopter wreckage.

With bills piling up on my doorstep and loneliness gnawing at my bones, I begged the universe for a reason to get up. Then a white envelope with a red wax seal landed on the growing pile of mail beside my door; an opportunity to have a career, an opportunity to understand more of my parents’ death. It felt like a glimmer of hope.

Now, though, I don’t think I can do it. The sound of the staff shuttle helicopter taking off earlier this evening sent me into a crippling panic attack so bad that I couldn’t get down to dinner.

Every time I close my eyes, I wonder how scared my parents were at the end. I see a ball of fire crashing into a dark forest, and I swear I can feel smoke burning the back of my throat. I thought I was coping well, doing better, but there are too many reminders here, too many ghosts trapped inside the castle walls. Maybe I’m not ready to confront my parents’ death, after all. Maybe I’m content with the oddly vague incident report citing “weather-related causes” as the reason I was orphaned a few weeks after turning seventeen.

The Nightshade mansion sighs and groans at night, battered by the howling wind. I don’t bother turning the lights on because darkness is preferable to eerie flickering.

I’m beginning to wonder if Lord MacArtain wasn’t so insane after all, because it does sound like a woman is wailing, condemned to an eternity in this bleak valley. In the rafters above me, creaking and other strange noises persist through the night.

I don’t know whether being awake or asleep is worse. The unexplainable sense of dread that started the second I saw the Sorrowsong gates sits heavier in my gut each morning.

In the dark, I turn on my phone and wait five minutes for one search on the internet to load—Wi-Fi doesn’t really stretch to the first-year rooms and I have patchy signal in the mansion.

One by one, paparazzi photos of Alex landing at a London airport earlier this month look back at me. He looks immaculate in black suit trousers and a tailored black shirt, that one fucking strand of his hair perfectly out of place over his eye. I swipe left over my greasy phone screen, faced with a snap of him in bed with a model as part of a cologne advert.

No one our age should be built like…that. Tattoos decorate his rippling forearms, biceps, and chest as he gazes lazily at the camera, one hand behind his head.

It’s probably Photoshop. I imagine an underpaid intern working overtime to make Alex’s biceps look bigger. It makes me feel better.

I’m losing my mind here.

I click on the link I’m looking for. His biography loads line by line at a painful pace. I’ve read his father’s biography so many times it’s burned into the fabric of my soul. I’ve even pinned his face to a dart board, but I’ve ignored Alex’s until now. I doubt the apple falls far from the tree.

I learn he has recently turned twenty-three, and that he completed two years of a architecture degree at Yale before abruptly dropping out four years ago, refusing to disclose the reason to the press. There are reports of his potential appearance in the Olympic rowing team, of a career as a pilot, but it all came to a sudden end. Strange.

I learn that he grew up with an American father and an English-French mother, his childhood split between London, Paris, and New York. There’s a photo of him on the red carpet with a younger girl who must be his sister. There’s a photo of him running a marathon for charity, and one of him sweaty and grinning with a medal hanging over his navy Yale Rowing top. Another of him unveiling a new model of private jet for Green Aviation.

Like his father’s, his image is squeaky clean. The devil works hard, but it appears that the Green publicist works harder.

I’m going to have my work cut out for me.

For the millionth time, I type the same four words into the search bar.

Sorrowsong University helicopter crash.

No matches found.

It’s this feeling. This unfathomable rage I feel when those three words get spat out at me is what keeps my heart beating on my lowest days. I’ve dreamed, fantasized, yearned for the moment that my screen is flooded with photos of Alex’s father being depicted as the killer that he is—the man who cuts corners, accepts bribes, kills innocent people, and pays the press to remove all trace.

One day, the Corbeau-Green name will only ever be muttered like a curse word. Only then can I start to live again.

My finger trembles a little as I tap on the Contacts app. The list has expanded by three names this week alone. Belladonna—who only asked for my number because she captains the university swim team—Divya, who is very friendly, but spends all her hours studying—and Colette—who seems to genuinely like me.

Some guy called Shawn Miller asked for my number, too. He’s a little bit cliché: a blond, all-American, rich boy whose father works in finance, but he did seem genuinely sweet earlier. I didn’t give it to him, but it might be nice to have a male friend here. God knows I could use the experience.

I click on Divya’s name, opening up a text she sent me earlier.

I sit upright in bed, the glow of my phone illuminating the arched stone ceiling of the room. I shift uncomfortably, holding my breath as though someone might creep out from a dark corner.

Divya is at one of the desks in the middle of the library, surrounded by dusty textbooks and leather journals. I sink into the chair beside her, looking at the annotated diagram of cardiomyocytes on her screen.

“Jesus.”

“I know,” she says, rubbing her forehead. “What’s up?”

“Do you know the Corbeau-Greens?”

“Everyone knows them. Their name is plastered on the side of half the private jets in America. I’m not friendly with them, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I unlock my phone while she finishes talking and Alex’s face is still on the screen. Whoops. “That is not what it looks like.”

She beams. “You want me to hack his photo album?”

“No.” My face warms with embarrassment. “Absolutely not.”

“Wouldn’t blame you, that man is…” She reaches over and zooms into a photo of him in his trademark black shirt, top two buttons undone. “Slutty.”

“What does that even mean? Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. I’m asking about his father.”

Divya wrinkles her nose. “My mother says he’s sleazy. I don’t know what he did to make her say that, but it’s enough to make me dislike him.”

I lower my voice, eyes darting around to the dark corners of the mostly empty library. “My parents died in a helicopter crash a few years ago.”

“What? You said they’re political aides,” she hisses back, and I hold up two hands to beg her to quieten down.

“I lied. They died here in Sorrowsong Valley in a Green helicopter crash.”

A familiar look flits across her face, a gleam to her eyes I’ve seen a hundred times before. “Ophelia, I’m so sorry. That must’ve⁠—”

“I don’t want sympathy, Divya, I want revenge.”

“What were they doing in Sorrowsong anyway? Even the locals keep away from here.”

“My father was a chef here, and my mother a gardener. They died in the staff helicopter shuttle. With a healthy pilot. In a new helicopter that had no issues reported.”

Her eyes widen. “You think someone sabotaged it?”

“Something like that.”

“Shit. Ophelia…sometimes these things just happen. Pockets of air, or sudden storms, an unexpected mechanical fault.”

Frustration bubbles in my throat, dangerous and volatile. “There’s more to this, Divya. I know it.”

“So take it to the papers.”

“None of them will discuss it. He must have something over them, an NDA or something. Look at this.” I open my final messages with my father and put my phone on the desk in front of us, hoping I can trust her.

The letters wobble through my tears as I stare back at them. I screamed when I saw the crash site. I yelled when they dragged me away. But the grief didn’t come until I stepped back into the still, empty cottage the next day. When my eyes landed on the three stale burger buns laid out on the chopping board, I sank to my knees on the kitchen floor and didn’t plan to ever get up.

Then the anger came. Not the unpredictable, fleeting kind that I felt at the crash site. This one came on slowly. It seeped into my blood like a disease, and every day I woke up sicker than the last. Every hour in the silent house rotted the calm inside me away. Every extra million on Cain Corbeau-Green’s net worth made the fire in my chest burn hotter. Every whistleblower paid into silence made me more determined to lift the curtain on that heinous man.

The pink flush drains from Divya’s brown cheeks. “Holy shit. Why would he tell you to stay away? Did he catch wind of something?”

I shrug, locking my phone. “Something worried him the day he died. It has to mean something. Cain must somehow be to blame. Police aren’t interested without concrete proof. He’s too rich to be touched by the law.”

“How are you not…god, I’d be furious.”

“I am fury itself, Divya. It’s like a curse I’ve had for years, stopping me from sleeping well, eating right. Help me, please.”

“What do you need?”

“I just want to know the name of one engineer on shift that week who touched that helicopter. It’ll be on a maintenance log. The school orders a check of the helicopter every twenty-five flying hours, as well as a preflight check on Monday and Friday. There has to be documentation of that somewhere.”

Her brown eyes are sincere as she nods. “I’ll see what I can do, see how good the security on the drives is. I’m so sorry, Ophelia. That’s…I can’t believe it. Not a word to anyone, I swear.”

I leave Divya in her world of arteries and ventricles, but I don’t turn left out of the library. I head right, out of the mansion and into the starless night.

A few students smoke in a huddle outside, but the path to the castle is quiet. The occasional runner jogs by, the hoot of an owl punctuating the crunch of my feet over the pebbles.

The castle looks magical at night. Moonlight kisses the slate rooftops with a silver shine. The six turrets seem to stand taller, prouder than they do in the day. The cracks and crumbles aren’t so visible, overshadowed by pools of warm, orange light that spills from pointed arch windows. The silhouette of a girl drying her hair obscures one, a couple dance in another. Dying houseplants and half-empty vodka bottles sit on the ledges of others.

It makes the castle feel more normal.

It makes me feel less lonely.

Creeping through the darkness of the chapel and back to Achlys’s Hall, I can’t even bring myself to look at her. I step up to the painting, running my fingers over the varnished canvas until I spot the rectangular dip in the paint. Holding my breath, I push on the door. It rattles, but it doesn’t open.

Damn it. Obviously it would be locked.

A bird coos in the rafters, making me jump out of my skin. I take a step back away from the door, a sudden sense of unease washing over me.

“There’s a keyhole just below her left foot.”

A scream bursts out of my throat, my back against the painting as I whirl around. Carmichael steps out of the shadows of the hall and paces toward me.

Fuck. The man is a phantom.

“Sorry, sir. I was just exploring.”

“Exploring my office?”

Well, obviously not, because it’s locked. “Oh, is that what this is?”

He unlocks the door and pushes it open so that Achlys’s leg bends at a sickening angle. I peer inside the warmly lit office, a slave to my own curiosity. There’s a desk just in front of the door, which must belong to his assistant, and behind that, a set of wooden stairs lead up to a mezzanine. The stain on the wooden banister is turning orange, the steps bowing in the center. I can’t see much of the mezzanine, but I can see the walls are covered in shelves of boxes and books that extend to the intricate cornice on the ceiling.

There has to be something useful in there.

The glint in Carmichael’s eye makes me nervous. “Come in.”

“Um…no. It’s okay. I should really get to bed.”

“Oh, but you were so keen to see inside?”

The bird coos again, as if telling me to leave. A gust of wind howls through the hall. Achlys lets out a mournful cry.

“I had better go. Thank you, sir.”

I back away from him for the first few steps, before turning away and jogging all the way back to the Nightshade mansion. Trudging back up to the fourth floor, I fish my key out of the front pocket of my Sorrowsong Swimming hoodie. My clumsy fingers fumble around in the dark, eventually putting my room key into the lock and twisting it right.

It doesn’t move.

The door is already unlocked. Christ. If all my belongings get stolen one day, it’ll be my own fault for being forgetful.

I step inside the empty room, and the tiny grain of fear at the back of my mind is realized. A distinctive scent tickles my nostrils: nutmeg or cloves mixed with something unfamiliar. It’s the same odd combination that followed me as I ran from the tarn last week.

My fingers tremble at my sides as I scan my side of the room.

I may have forgotten to lock the door, but I sure as hell didn’t make my bed.