Page 15 of Kings of Sherwood

“You look...familiar,” adds the brunette—Taylor. The one who looked like she wanted to spread Will on toast and have him for breakfast.Sorry, girlfriend. He’s taken.She chews her thumbnail, sizes me up. “Are you at CCS Nottingham?”

It takes me a second to realize what she’s talking about. The community college. And where she mightactuallyrecognize me from—being that girl who was briefly missing before her alleged fiancé...died? Was murdered? I realize I still have no idea what the party line is about Guy Gisbourne’s death. The whole supposed reason we even went out tonight.

“No,” I say. “I’m, um...not in school.”

Meanwhile, McKayla/Mackenzie still has me by the shoulders. “You’re seriously okay?”

“I’m good,” I say. “I promise.”

One of the stalls flushes and an older woman, decked out in rhinestone denim, swings out and leaves without so much as glancing at the sink, drawing a softewfrom McKayla/Mackenzie before she swivels back to me.

“Okay, good.” She lets me go and bends towards the cracked mirror to reapply lipstick, staring at me in the glass. “You have to besocareful out there these days.”

“For real.” Taylor nods sagely.

“What do you mean?” I ask as I slip into the stall. It’s not...unclean, and the tequila-whatever cocktails are not going to let me wait for a less sticky option, so I shuck down my jeans and hope for the best.

A snort, presumably from Taylor. “You haven’t heard?”

“About?”

“The freaking cult murders at that guy’s mansion?”

I’m so startled I almost fall off the toilet. Or maybe that’s the tequila. I right myself, flush, and exit.

“Thewhat?”

“Okay, we don’tknowit was a cult,” McKayla/Mackenzie butts in. “You listen to too much true crime, Tay.”

I halfheartedly spritz my hands under the weak faucet and reach for a paper towel. There are none, of course. I wipe my hands on my jeans, pulse hammering as I wait for the answer.

“If it walks like a duck and shits like a duck,Mackenzie.” Taylor swipes at the air dismissively with one hand. “This rich guy, a lawyer or something?” She sucks on the vape pen she’d successfully found in her purse. “Had this huge party at his mansion outside of town—like, tuxedoes and shit—and justkilledeveryone. Total bloodbath.”

For a second, my heart forgets to beat.

Maybe it’s the tequila, maybe it’s the nauseating smell of the bathroom, maybe it’s just an emotional flashback I can’t control.

“No kidding,” I manage to say at last. Neither of them seems to have noticed my distress.

“Yeah, it was pretty crazy,” adds Mackenzie. “They gave us a whole safety presentation on campus and everything. Just to, like, go out in pairs, keep tabs on each other, cover our drinks.”

I nod, as if this all makes sense—and itdoesmake sense, just not in the way they think it does.

“Do they have any idea why he did it?” I probe, trying to sound like an ordinary, interested, tipsy girl in a bathroom and not someone who witnessed the total bloodbath and dragon claws and...matricide for herself.

“Seems like he was just crazy,” Taylor says, sucking her vape again. “Like one of those weird, polished control freak types who then just loses his shit and goes postal.”

“I think he had a girlfriend or something that left.” The third one—right, there were three...Grace, or something?—chimes in as she comes out of the other stall. “Right? Like a broken heart thing.”

“Ugh, that’s so tragic,” says Mackenzie.

Taylor grunts. “I love how men always claim thatwe’rethe emotional ones, and then one little breakup happens to a man and suddenly it’s mass murder.”

I lick my lips, wishing I had mascara or powder or something else on me to occupy me in here a little longer.

“Crazy,” I say. “I can’t believe I didn’t see anything in the news about it, or anything.”

“Yeah, well, you know,” Taylor says, as if we’re all aware that there’s some vast conspiracy going on in the media. “They don’t want us to know these kinds of things.”

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