Royal Jester

34. Mason

Mason pulled his phone out of his front pocket, eyebrows furrowing when he noticed that Ana had called him roughly twenty minutes ago. It wasn't unusual that his girlfriend would be calling him of course, but it was unusual for her to be calling him during a lecture. 

He glanced up at what the professor had written on the whiteboard, relieved to see it was mostly a review of their textbook readings from the other night. He stood from his seat and left the room, leaning against the wall just a few feet away in order to call Ana out of ear shot. 

He frowned as the call went directly to voice mail, she never had her phone off (she was royalty after all, so it was kind of fucking important to keep it on). 

So he decided to send her a quick text - asking if she was okay and if she needed anything from him - before going back to class. 

Mason tried to focus on what the instructor was saying, but he couldn't ignore the terrible feeling that something was horribly fucking wrong. 

~~~

He only lasted another twenty minutes before his concern got the better of him. 

Mason grabbed all of his belongings, stuffing his textbook and notes into his messenger bag and giving his professor a nod on the way out.

He decided to check her classroom first; that made the most sense of course, as he had left her there less than an hour ago. He leaned over to peek into the room, scanning over every head of hair he could see from the back of the room. 

A lot of people had similar curls, but they weren't Ana's. 

He sighed and stepped back to pull up his recent messages, running a hand through his hair when he saw that his text had gone unread. He called her again; nothing. 

Where the hell was she?

He slowly made his way through the building, knocking on every bathroom door and glancing inside almost every single full classroom he noticed. He periodically checked his phone as he searched, just to see if she had responded or not. 

Two hours had passed by the time he had made it back to Ana's classroom, meaning he had done a full loop around the school and still had yet to find her. 

On his way to their dorm he called her again. And again, and again, and again. 

He ended up making sixty four outgoing calls within those two hours, and none of them were picked up. 

"Fuck," Mason muttered under his breath when he didn't find her in the dorm. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

He practically sprinted back to the main building, gasping for air as he stopped outside of her classroom for the third time. 

He clenched his jaw, throat tightening as he paced up and down the hall. 

And then he heard a noise, a rhythmic thumping coming from something just beside him. He turned to look in the direction of the sound, noticing a closed door right next to one leading to Ana's classroom.

It was a janitor's closet. 

He hesitated for only a moment, taking slow steps towards the door until he was able to pick up on the sound of something else. 

Screaming. 

He immediately opened the door, recoiling back as a figure burst through the opening and fell to the ground. The person frantically scrambled up from the floor, their heart wrenching sobs echoing through the hall. 

Mason felt as though his very soul had been ripped from his body. 

"Anastasia," he called out. He was so relieved to see her, but to find her like this- his eyes burned.