Freya Arsov sits on top of a world of diamonds and sports cars. Her father is a billionaire, head of a world-renown company, her mother, an esteemed lawyer. She attends the most prestigious boarding school in England. She has four amazing best frien...
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TOGETHER, THEY HAD COAXED MAYE up the stairs after dragging her through the woods, passing panicked, fleeing throngs of teens as they did. Without Freya guiding them, walking through the woods was a far more dangerous task. But they'd left Freya in Cyan Hall where she'd been guarding Matthew al Nassar.
Mayella was stumbling, drunk. She wasn't crying anymore. In fact, she was laughing.
When she'd started, bursting into giggles, behind one of the girls' dorm houses, Juliet had met Raina's eyes worriedly. Amelie had shushed her and pulled her forward, leaving Raina and Juliet to follow in a daze.
Seth had offered to come with them as they left Cyan Hall but Raina had shaken him off. Her worry over Maye would only be worse when coupled with her Seth problem.
They'd been laughing, joking, as they usually did, as friends did, when Raina had stopped, noting Mayella struggling across the room.
She'd been keeping an eye on her during the night. Mayella had danced a while, on several persons, then by herself, hands flying in the air as her sleek hair swayed with her body. She hadn't put down the bottle once. In fact, Raina worried that she'd gotten a new one since they'd arrived. Then, she'd started dancing with Theodore Altringham, a grin splitting her lips as the song switched, and briefly disappeared from Raina's line of vision, leaving her to assume she'd gone upstairs with him.
But then, she'd caught the flash of Mayella's green dress and Theodore's bent blonde head.
He'd pushed her up against the wall on a less packed end of the room, hands roaming. Mayella was slurring complaints that Raina couldn't hear but they were complaints, she was sure, from the scowl on Maye's face as her palms flattened against his crisp shirt, trying to push him away.
That's when Raina jerked up, breaking across the room wordlessly, leaving Seth to blink after her. Her eyes were already narrowed into a glare that she would sear into Theodore Altringham.
She'd made it halfway across the dance floor when Mayella's bottle swung in an arc and clattered against Theodore's skull, cracking apart. Shouts and screams had erupted then. The music cut off.
Raina broke into a run when the boy crippled to the floor and Mayella slid down the wall, a broken end of the bottle falling past her hands. She screeched her friend's name, panicked, "Maye!"
Then, even more hell seemed to have broken loose.
Once inside the walls of Ebony House, Raina allowed herself a moment to breathe. But the breathing was short-term because Mayella started crying, hysterical drunk sobs, as soon as they managed to get her out of her champagne-soaked dress and into her shower. Juliet and Amelie calmed her with soothing words, washing off the mess of the night, then wrapping her in a fluffy robe and running a brush through her tangled, dark hair. A line of dark eyeliner still remained smudged beneath her red, teary eyes as they pulled her beneath the satin sheets of her bed.
