Crossroads → Nicholas Scratch [CAOS]

viii. behind closed doors

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
CHAPTER EIGHT

It was uncomfortably sunny for a day in Greendale, the heat burning into Daniella's brown hair and dark jeans with a vengeance. Any other day, she would have complained and overexaggerated about the tiny bit of stickiness in her clothes. Her favourite season was fall, where beauty could be found in even the deadest of things, not summer or spring where her nose constantly felt like a volcano that was about to erupt. Fall in Greendale and Riverdale seemed to be a combination of all four seasons.

Dani was too excited for the evening to be frustrated by the weather or her slightly itchy eyes; she was going on her first real date with Nick. There was something about Nicholas Scratch that made him special and different but Dani couldn't quite put her finger on it. Was it his charm? The fact that no one could make her smile the way he did? Was it that he was the only person who seemed to understand her sense of humour and rival her level of wit? How when something was bothering him, which in most cases was Harvey, Dani was the only person who could occupy him enough to let it go? Could it be how mysterious he was sometimes; disappearing and showing up out of nowhere, acting awkward and unsure when talking about himself? Or maybe it was everything combined. She didn't know what it was that she liked so much about the boy, but maybe tonight at the carnival, on their first real date, she'd finally figure it out.

She smiled at the thought of how close their first date was as she stuck her house key into her front door. The pair had gone out together enough times for it to already seem like they were in a relationship, so had they not labelled this hang out as a date, it would have been like any other day they were outside together. Dani was still beyond excited, a hurricane of thoughts in her head and a swirl of emotions stampeding throughout her chest and the pit of her stomach. She didn't even care that she was going out against her dad's orders; she had already gotten used to leaving her house, despite house arrest, to meet with Nick or her other friends. Calum was going to be home but that was no obstacle, considering he'd been covering for her all this time anyway. Tonight was going to be perfect.

"I'm home!" she announced, dropping her bag on the floor beside the wooden coat rack and walking deeper into the house. She placed a foot on the first step of the staircase and held onto the railing. "Dad?" she called out for assurance that he wasn't home and she'd be able to leave in an hour in peace to meet Nick.

Waiting for a moment to hear if there were any footsteps, Daniella's wide, ecstatic eyes wandered around the room, just like thoughts running rampant in her mind. She glanced at the one door left ajar, which she had only ever known to be locked. Why was her dad's office left open? She had never pondered why it was always off-limits, knowing that her dad was just protective of losing his paperwork and 'businessy things like that' as Dani would refer to it, but just the fact that it was left opened so wide was questionable enough to make a girl as innately curious and nosy as Dani to walk toward it.

She didn't even hesitate to walk into the one room in the house that she had never been inside before. Her dad's study was nothing like she imagined. He always seemed like a man who thought too much and didn't have the time to organize things, but Dani didn't see papers messily stacked up on the wooden desk or on the floor. The room was extremely tidy, save for a few sheets of paper on the polished desk, all with strange symbols scrawled across the front that Dani had never seen before. Drawn across all four sides of the room were different symbols. Many of them were of the same thing: a star encased in a circle.

Dani's eyes lingered on the largest of all the symbols. An enormous painted star, covering almost the entirety of the hardwood floor. A thick black circle surrounded it just like the others, but this one had more, smaller sigils, between each point of the star. The ceiling mirrored the same shape. Dani felt intimidated by the hulking shape she found herself trapped between. The dark lines were menacing in an indescribable way, sending chills down her spine and forcing the hair on the back of her neck upright.