Page 13 of The Good Girl

My head feels wet where my fingers touch the tender spot, and I know it’s blood before I see it. Grabbing a beer from the fridge, I sit at the breakfast bar and pop off the cap. Looking out into the garden, where the darkness blankets everything, I take a long swig.

I wonder what he’s done with the body this time.

Chapter Eleven

Elena

“Another woman has gone missing from Newtown. Sasha Carter vanished eight days ago, police were alerted to her disappearance when she failed to return home from a night out…”

“How many is that now?” Tabitha says with a small frown as she throws herself down onto the sofa next to where I’m reading over some notes, ready for my government and politics class. She runs a hand through her golden curls and sighs dramatically as she stretches out her long limbs.

The common room is one of the nicest parts of the Academy, courtesy of the Black family and their money, with a series of sofas, laid out in u-shapes with coffee tables at the center of each one-on-one side of the L-shaped space. In the far corner there are two pool tables, several vending machines and less regulated seating, with arm chairs, bean bags and floor cushions. The walls have large flatscreen televisions mounted, and it’s usually blasting a music channel or, like today, the news.

I don’t realize Tabi is actually talking to me until I look up and see her big blue eyes, clouded with concern. We tended not to socialize at school, it wasn’t a rule, we just didn’t have friends in the same circles. She’s my cousin on my father’s side. Her mother is my aunt, although our parents are nothing alike. Cassia Black was an actress who preferred to indulge in the extravagant lifestyle her husband and her celebrity status afforded her, while my father considered her ‘unmotivated’ and a ‘waste of oxygen and good genes’, not that he’d say that in front of her since the Black family was higher up the hierarchy than the Montgomerys.

“Urm, three?” My eyes flash up to the screen briefly behind me as the image of a pretty young woman is shown, along with hotline numbers. She looks familiar, like the other missing women, which means they’ll never find her. There’s probably not much left of her to find anyway.

“But it’s five from Greenville.” Athena (Attie) Hawthorne says as she slides onto the sofa opposite me, followed closely by her twin, Atlas. “Making it eight in the last six months.”

They’re also Legacies, again cousins, this time on my mother’s side. Rowan, their father, was my mother’s twin. They were both beautiful, like my mother and uncle, but they had inherited their mother’s dark coloring and almost lavender eyes.

“Someone’s going to get sloppy and slip up…” There’s an edge to Atlas’ voice as he perches on the back on the sofa and pats his twin’s head. My chest feels tight as I feel eyes on me, and I know Tristan is somewhere nearby. I hear Blip laugh, and I assume he’s over on the floor cushions with his stoner friends. I refuse to look, I don’t want to see his smug grin when our eyes meet.

“You okay? Want me to come to the library with you?” Serena’s voice is soft in my ear as she leans back. She’d given me space, sitting just behind me, with some of the girls from the cheerleading squad. I like that she gives me space to be myself, especially when I’m under pressure, like I am this week. She doesn’t demand my time or attention, and she’s always checking to make sure I’m okay – and that’s not something many people do. It helps that she doesn’t realize that these people, Atlas, Attie and Tabi are bound to me forever, and not just because we’re cousins. It’s deeper than that. We will always be ingrained in each other’s lives because of The Society. And while we might not trust one another, we would die for each other – there’s a certain madness in that.

I shake my head, and she returns back to the conversation the others are having about whether some celebrity meant to leak his dick pics online. I don’t understand why we’re suddenly having some sort of public Legacy hang-out, but I can handle it.

“You don’t think…” Attie muses quietly, glancing over to the floor cushions, confirming what I already know. Tristan is staring at me so hard, he might just burn a hole in my cheek.

Sucking in a breath, Tabitha’s words come out tight, like she is afraid of them. “Don’t know.”

Shrugging, Atlas claps a hand on Attie’s shoulder, making her jump and punch her brother in the arm. “The Society will intervene if it gets out of hand.”

Snorting, Tabitha pulls a small compact mirror out of her bag and begins reapplying her red lipstick. Like my mother, she always looks perfectly put together. She should have been cheer captain, not me. But unlike me, she never liked to do what her parents expected, instead following her own rules. That in itself made them proud of her, she embraced the power The Society gave us. “If it’s on the news, then it’s already spiraling out of hand.”

Attie pulls a pack of gum out of her bag and offers it around. “We don’t know that it’s him.”

Atlas says nothing, but I can see his jaw tighten. With a small sigh, I shove my papers back into my bag. I clearly wasn’t going to get any work done while the others clearly wanted to discuss the missing women. Fighting the mild annoyance that I’m trying to suppress, I look at them and calmly say, “Let’s not jump to conclusions. You know nothing has ever been confirmed, only rumors.”

Rumors were the bread and butter of The Society, they could bring men to their knees and ruin families that had been standing for generations. Malcom Radcliffe was no different. He’d always seemed perfectly polite if a little cold towards his son, but you never could tell what was lurking beneath the surface. The whispers that swirled around him often involved beautiful women, who vanished as if they had never existed. The woman had looked familiar, but it couldn’t possibly be…could it?

With a tilt of my head, I realize another member of our usual little ‘gang’ is missing. “Where’s Hunter?”

He was usually the joker of the group, he would have pulled us out of this strange contemplation that seemed to have settled over us before the news gradually moved on to discuss the weather for the weekend.

Attie laughs with a gleam in her eye, earning her a shove from her brother. “Avoiding Atlas,” she manages to squeak out, breathlessly.

Tabitha leans forward, her interest clearly piqued. “Ohhhh, why?”

Atlas shrugs again, eyes dark with a clear warning that this subject was not up for discussion. Atlas and Athena, along with Hunter, were the oldest out of the children of The Council. As a result, they’d started to become more involved with The Society and the roles their parents played. Attie was still babied, as the only daughter, but Atlas had been assisting his father alongside their older brother, Ares, since last summer. I wouldn’t say it changed him, because that would be overly dramatic and we were all aware of the reach The Society had, even if we feigned ignorance most days. However it had made him rougher, more closed off. Hunter was the same, and it was clear they had seen and done things that both brought them together and made them wary of one another.

“Leave it alone, Tabi, he clearly doesn’t want to discuss it.”

“El, ever the diplomat,” she says with a bored voice as Atlas flashes me a grateful look before standing and stretching his long limbs.

The back of my neck begins to prickle and a shiver runs down my spine as a voice I know so well cuts through the quiet. “Nah, she’s not a diplomat. She’s just avoiding having to make choices and pick sides.”

Chapter Twelve

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