Page 8 of Swallow Your Sorries

Seconds tick by and I must be turning purple because his fingers loosen a fraction. Just enough for me to breathe, but not escape as I try to pry them off.

Earlier, those fingers had felt so safe and reassuring, so warm. And now? Outside in the snow, they felt as welcoming as hot razor blades, searing my skin and threatening to end it all.

Demon,my mind decides.He’s a demon.

I shake my head frantically. Stubbornly. Ineedthat video, that’s my proof. That’s Mum and I’s out.

“You want to blackmail Madame Pelletier that badly?” he asks, his voice low and frigid.

What?

“You think you can use this little video to blackmail her into giving you individual lessons? To help you with your audition?”

“What?!” I sputter. I hadn’t even thought of that. “I don’t want anything from that bitch!”

His fingers tighten again and I choke, drool flying from my mouth onto his sleeve. If he notices, he doesn’t give a damn.

“But you need her. Now, last. Fucking. Chance. The code.” With each word, he pulses my head against the bricks, using my neck like a damn lever.

I can’t get him off and no one’s coming around back.

Despite my best attempts to stop them, angry, defiant tears run down my cheeks for a second time today and wet his fingers, but no sympathy crosses his features. He isn’t cracking, but neither am I.

“No,” I rasp.

He raises the phone again and thenCRACK!

“NO!NO!”

He releases me and I drop to the ground just as hard as my phone by his black leather boot. Before I can grab his ankle to stop him, his heel shatters the already cracked screen over and over again.

I watch helplessly as splinters of glass spring out and shimmer on the concrete steps, and I notice a second too late when he stoops to retrieve the mangled remains. By the time I blink back to this new, surreal reality, he’s already jogging down the small flight of stairs to the little pond nestled in the back left corner of the property. It hasn’t frozen over yet, but when it does, the academy will hold a private ice skating event where all my soon-to-be former classmates will skate over what’s left of my phone because he chucks it right into the middle.

I don’t care that the water’s shallow.

I don’t care that I could bend down and pick up my ruined phone in hopes of saving the SD card.

There’s no way I’d go within a foot of that pond.

Oranybody of water.

I have Jarett to thank for that.

“How hard was it for you to just listen?” he asks icily when he returns, his fingers gripping the door handle as he stares down his nose at me.

The disgust in his eyes, like I’m nothing more than gum on the bottom of his shoe, thaws my shock and ignites my anger. “Why the fuck would I listen to you?” I spit.

“You did earlier in the studio.”

“A once-off.Trust me.”

“Trust that not listening to me only sparks nightmares.”

A thought stops my incredulous snort as I take in the backdrop of the darkening, cloudy sky that casts him in shadows, turning his handsome face haunting.

“Cloud…” I mutter to myself. “It’s still on my cloud…”

“It would be,” he says coolly, “if it’d been backed up.”

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