As a precautionary measure, I got up and hauled a filing cabinet in front of the door. It seemed like an easier option than hauling Nurse Reller into a closet. She weighed a fuck load more than I'd have imagined, not to mention all the blood I had no hope of cleaning up.
After the door was secured, I turned to pacing the floor. Fretting. It didn't even cross my mind to just call anyone, and maybe that spoke to the level of panic running through me. Not over the violence, because that was like second nature to me. But the implications of this... This? Beating the academy nurse unconscious? Pretty sure that fell under a whole other jurisdiction than a simple academic suspension.
I didn't know how much time passed, but when the filing cabinet jerked as someone slammed into the door, I startled in fright.
"Violet!" Rafe shouted through the tiny gap he'd created in the door.
I didn't spare any time to question why it was him responding to my emergency beacon and not Jordan. It didn't matter. I just rushed over and pushed the heavy cabinet out of the way, letting him into the room.
His sharp gaze scanned everything as I slammed the door closed again and leaned my whole weight against it. The disheveled medical bed, the restraints, the tray of medical implements, the bloody, unconscious nurse, and then me—in a damn hospital gown with nothing underneath and skin probably pale as a fucking ghost.
My tongue darted out, licking my dry lips. "I need your help."
"I see that," he replied, as calm as a summer’s breeze. "Maybe you should tell me what happened here, Vi."
Vi. Huh. I couldn't even be sure which version of me he was addressing when he shortened my name like that. Was he speaking to Violet, the girl secretly dating his best friend and pushing his buttons every chance she could get? Or was he talking to Violence, the killer?
Trouble was, I'd never actually killed anyone before—not for lack of wanting to, but for lack of resources to clean up the crime. Somehow, I doubted this was the right time or place to change that track record.
"Uh," I started, licking my lips again. Why were they so fucking dry? Was it a side effect of whatever drug that crazy bitch had stuck me with? "I... she... Um..." My thoughts were so scrambled, and it was hard to grab hold of just one. To just explain the line of events as they’d happened. Logically, I knew that also had to be a lingering effect of the drug, but it didn't make things easier to deal with in the heat of the moment.
A sharp knock on the door saw me damn near jumping out of my skin, but when Jordan entered the room and wrapped me in a tight hug, well, everything seemed calm again.
"Violet," he breathed, stroking my hair while I clung to him like a life raft. "Baby, what happened here? We need to know before we can do anything."
I nodded into his chest, understanding what he was saying but not wanting to leave the warm comfort of his embrace. I allowed myself just a few more moments, then took a deep breath to reactivate my tough-girl exterior and stepped away from him.
"Okay," I said softly. "This is... this is all I know."
I told the two of them everything I could remember, from getting jabbed in the neck with a needle, to waking up strapped to the medical bed, to Alex walking away and washing his hands of whatever Nurse Reller wanted to do to me... and finally, to how I'd freed myself.
"It's okay," Jordan assured me, closing me into another warm hug and melting my hardened walls once more. "Sweetheart, it's okay. We'll take care of this, I promise you."
While Jordan whispered sweet nothings in my ear, my eyelids flicked open just in time to see Rafe pull an eight-inch dagger from his belt and slice it across Nurse Reller's throat.
I didn't react. I didn't even flinch. Blood sprayed out in an arc, coating the sterile whiteness of the infirmary. Just like that, the resident rape-y nurse died with barely a gurgle and I just relaxed further into Jordan's embrace.
What the fuck did that say about me now?
Chapter 26
Blood mixed with water and stained the tiles of my shower red. It pooled and swirled, disappearing down the drain. It seemed so easy to wash away the blood. Just a bit of water and it was gone. Like tonight had never happened.
"I should have finished her myself," I finally said, tearing my eyes away from the blood running down my drain. It wasn't my blood—for once—but that simple fact seemed to be tripping me up more than normal. Nurse Reller wouldn't have stood a fucking chance against me in a fair fight, but then, it hadn’t been a fair fight, had it? She’d drugged me, strapped me to a table, planned to violate me against my will...
"Too bad," Rafe replied, his tone holding no sympathy. "If you wanted to kill her, you should have done it before you called me."
Anger crackled through me, and I pumped soap a bit too aggressively into my hand, almost knocking the bottle off the shelf. "I didn't call you," I snarled. "And I didn't want to kill her."
Rafe snorted a laugh, meeting my gaze over the frosted shower glass. "Sure you didn't, Vi."
I swallowed a growl of anger as I spread the soap all over me and scrubbed with a rough loofah. Like scrubbing four layers of my skin off would help to remove the feeling of being violated.
"Look," Jordan said, ever the peacemaker. "The fact remains that she couldn't be left alive. It was too risky. Not only could she have reported Violet for physical violence, she could have tried the same bullshit again. Who knows what might have happened if that sedative had lasted longer."
I huffed, dousing my hair in water. The fact that they were both lurking in the bathroom hadn't escaped my notice, no matter how shaken up I was about what had happened with the creepy nurse. The glass door of my shower was frosted enough from knee to neck that they couldn't actually see anything... but still.
"What happens now?" I asked, when my hair was wet enough to shampoo. I wasn't taking any chances on finding a stray droplet of blood later. Every freaking inch of me needed to be spotless. "It wasn't exactly the cleanest of deaths."
Yeah, I was throwing stones inside my glass house. I'd already splattered the infirmary with blood before the guys had even shown up. But Rafe slitting her throat like that sure as fuck hadn't helped matters.
"I've called some of my people in," Rafe said, drumming his fingertips on the marble vanity top beside him. He was sitting beside my en-suite sink, his dark head against the mirror but his gaze locked on me. No matter how much he tried to pretend it wasn’t.
I bit my lip, not replying as I carefully massaged shampoo through my hair, rinsed it out, then squirted conditioner into my palm.
"You guys don't have to babysit me," I finally said, smearing the cream between my palms, then rubbing it through my hair, starting at the ends, then working my way to the midsections. "I'm fine."
"No one said you weren't," Jordan replied. He was sitting on my closed toilet seat, flipping through screens on his palm reader at an impressive speed. Every now and then, though, I could feel his eyes on me. Worried. Caring. Hungry.
"Can we speed things up on the virus?" Rafe asked his friend. "I'd feel better if he was in a holding cell before the Spring Ball." By "he" he clearly meant Alex. When I'd told them about his part in Nurse Reller's plans, they'd both looked worse than murderous.
"Agreed," Jordan murmured, still typing and scrolling at a rapid pace. "I'll see what I can do. In the meantime... Zach is going to be a bigger problem than we had prepared for."
Rafe let out a long sigh, closing his eyes. I paused in rinsing my conditioner out because I was pretty sure that was the first time I'd ever seen him show any sign of weakness. For the briefest of moments, he looked exhausted.
Sometimes I forgot who I was friends with. Jordan was the crown prince of New America, destined to rule the second most influential kingdom in the world. Rafe? Rafe quite seriously held the weight of the universe on his shoulders. When his father either abdicated or died, he would be our planet's most powerful monarch. It was no fucking wonder he was such a prickly bitch at the best of times. I wouldn't trade places with him for all the money on Earth.
"He’s not going to easily convince me to be a Society member," I said into the dead air, addressing Jordan's earlier comment. “And why would they even want that, me being an orphan and all…?” I was assuming that’s what he meant by Zach being an issue. Or maybe I was way off.
Jordan gave a small laugh, looking over at me from his palm reader display. "Babe, you were practically fucking born to be in the Society, no matter how much we'd rather you stay out of it."
Rafe scoffed a laugh of his own. "He's right. You even have an ancient royal surname, like a big old fuck you to the monarchies. The upper level members of the Society are probably frothing harder than they did the day Jordy and I joined."
That reminded me. "I was wondering how that worked," I admitted. I'd officially finished washing every damn inch of myself and hesitated a moment before tossing my modesty and insecurity out the metaphorical window. "Pass me a towel?" I shut the water off and cracked the shower door just enough to poke my hand out.
Jordan was engrossed in whatever he was doing on his palm reader, so Rafe slid off my vanity and approached with a towel in his hands. The look on his face, though? Pure evil.