SWNOVELS Alluring Darkness: Chapter 36
My gaze drifts across the canteen again. Even though I know that all first-years have been out on the fields doing training exercises all morning, which means they arrive later for lunch than the rest of us, I still can’t help but look for her.
Raina Smith.
I did not see this coming. At all. When she first keyed my car and inserted herself into my life, my only plan was to play with her like a doll until she broke and then throw her aside.
But she never broke.
She saw all the violent and vicious and downright fucking monstrous parts of me, and she just grinned like a goddess of death and met me on the same level. Never flinching. Never backing down. Never allowing me even a second to purge her existence from my system like the drug it is. Instead, she just kept coming and coming. Battering at my walls and breaking them down until she is all I can see, all I can hear, all I can feel.
And yet, I have never felt more calm and in control in all my life.
After telling Raina about what happened, and after sleeping through the night with her by my side every day, I’m starting to feel like I can finally breathe again.
I never thought that someone would understand me and all the dark and fucked-up things I crave. But she does. And she not only followed me into that alluring darkness, she also carved her name all over it.
“Incoming,” Rico murmurs from the chair opposite me.
His gaze glides to someone coming towards us from behind my back, but I don’t turn around to look. If it had been a threat, Rico would have made that clear. Kaden, who is sitting next to me, just keeps eating as well, but Jace tracks the person with his eyes from where he’s seated beside Rico.
A few seconds later, a girl with dark brown hair pulled up in a tight ponytail stops next to our table. She’s wearing a tight-fitting black outfit and proper boots, and she looks like someone who can hold her own in a fight. I’m pretty sure she’s a second-year, but I don’t know her name.
Leaning back in my chair, I slowly turn to face her fully while flicking my gaze up and down her body nonchalantly. “Are you lost?”
“No,” she replies in a surprisingly calm and steady voice.
My eyebrows shoot up as she casually pulls out the empty chair on my left and slides into it. I cast another assessing look over her. She’s ballsy at least, I’ll give her that.
“I don’t remember inviting you over, Shelley,” Rico says, his tone the epitome of lazy arrogance.
One exchanged look between us confirms that he said that for my benefit, so that I would know her name.
“I know,” Shelley replies. Shifting in her seat, she turns so that she is facing me directly. “But I have a proposition that I think will benefit both you and me.”
I arch an eyebrow at her. “Oh?”
“The tournament is this weekend.”
“I’m aware.”
“Which means that this is the last chance to make changes to any teams.”
“Why would I want to make any changes?”
She gives me an incredulous look. “Because you have Raina Smith on your team. Look, I’m not a first-year, but even I know that she’s the most unskilled person at this entire university. She can’t shoot. She can’t fight. She can’t climb. She can’t run. Hell, she can’t even hide properly.”
Rage roars through me, and my hand moves as if to grab her by the throat and snap her fucking neck. But before I can so much as lift it off the table, Kaden reaches across me and grabs the salt from the other side of my plate. The move makes his arm slide over mine, keeping it down on the table.
He pulls back and then shakes some salt onto an empty part of his plate. I flick a glance at him. He just watches me with eyes that see too much. That understand too much. He probably knows who this girl is, since he is also a second-year, and has decided that it would create too much trouble for our family if I killed her in front of a cafeteria full of witnesses.
I dip my chin a fraction in acknowledgement.
“You will never win if you have someone like that on your team,” Shelley says, completely oblivious to the fact that she was one second away from dying just now. She flips her ponytail back over her shoulder and levels serious eyes on me. “My team is shit. I’m not. Kaden and Rico can attest to that.”
Both of them give me a shrug as if to admit that she is indeed pretty good.
“So, here’s my proposition,” she continues when neither of them contradicted her. “Swap me into your team. Everyone knows that you’ve got sway over the instructors. Make them pull Raina from your team and put her on mine, and then put me on your team instead.”
Ballsy. Very ballsy indeed.
I arch an eyebrow. “And how would that benefit me, exactly?”
“It would secure your win.” Sitting forward, she moves her hand towards me while locking eyes with me. “And I know that winning is as important to you as it is to me.”
Right as Shelley places her hand on my arm, Raina Smith strides across the threshold and into the canteen.