Page 52 of Hunted

Adelaide Sinclair was an enigma.

And I never had been able to let a problem go unsolved.

Hence the paper.

I leaned back against the armrest of the wingback chair I’d been tucked into before a tiny blonde hurricane came whirling through the library and beelined straight for it. For me.

She jerked her chin at my hand. “Explain that.”

And while I was contemplating the right words—the least creepy ones—her shoulders dropped as she heaved a heavy sigh and slumped against the windowsill. “Please.”

It was that one word—that solitary, defeated please—that broke through the sludge of my muddied mind. Surely, if anyone was owed the truth around here, it was the girl who’d just lost her best friend and had to continue on in arguably the hardest assessment they’d ever been given.

I couldn’t fathom it. If I had been in her position and lost either of my brothers, there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be functioning as well as she appeared to be. It would be absolutely out of the question that I’d make it through a compound assessment with live rounds and a psychopath hellbent on killing me like Sebastos was her.

Beck, Pearce, and I had done the exact same things—gone through the Academy’s training, been thrown together in the gauntlet that was its crash course in killing, endured torture, derision, injustice, and faced people who probably wanted us dead. But we’d made it through.

Fleur didn’t.

And Addie almost hadn’t, either.

Technically she still had a week to go. A week in which Varco’s hellspawn could choose to act on his hatred of her.

I rubbed the bruised corner of my chin, absentmindedly considering all the ways I knew how to dispatch a man, and if any were appropriately inconspicuous enough to take out the Commander’s son.

“Instructor Lockwood?” she ventured, reclaiming my attention.

Gone was the furious woman who’d stormed over here demanding answers. In her place, now stood a woman quietly astute. Her gaze fixated on my empty hand—the one massaging my jaw—and her expression looked almost… guilty?

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him sooner,” she breathed, shifting to look out the window.

Snowflakes danced gracefully in downward spirals, littering the ground in a soft blanket of white. But her eyes weren’t lingering on their trajectory. No. Instead, she stared at the lonely cemetery adorning the land beside the abandoned cathedral—used only for ceremony, and not of the religious kind. It was decorative, mostly.

It wasn’t convenient to bury every body that fell before Graduation. Some were street urchin nobodies—like the girl standing before me. Some weren’t even in enough pieces to send home in a shoebox—those were the ones we cremated and then mailed a sand-filled urn in the least ceremonious fashion imaginable. Some were whole, but were sent here by families who hoped they’d either make something of themselves—or die in the process.

We buried them.

And some, like Fleur, were notorious enough—loved enough—to warrant being sent home, whole, to their families. What they did with them when they arrived was up to them. I knew in Fleur’s case, her parents held a grand, elaborate funeral on French soil, because they couldn’t bear for her to be anywhere else.

But in doing so, it meant that Addie, the person who’d arguably loved her most, was left with nothing. Just a stone in the snow with her name on it.

In a graveyard filled with strangers.

“It’s not your fault,” I offered quietly. Half in answer to her guilt-riddled apology, half in reference to her fallen friend.

Addie jerked as if I’d slapped her, then threw up a mask of derision to cover whatever it was she was actually feeling.

“Of course it is,” she snarled. After visibly backtracking, she dropped the second subject thread to pick up the first. “If I didn’t run off and hide, Sebastos wouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

Taking a chance, I took a step closer—inexplicably drawn to her like a magnet. I ventured another, tilting her face up with my index finger, resting my thumb on her chin. Immediately rewarded by her sharp inhale, I leaned down.

Her eyes darted to my lips and back again, and for a moment, I wondered if she’d let me kiss her.

Not just yet, pretty girl.

“If you hadn’t, you’d probably be dead.” My thumb traced the curve of her jaw, brushing along the underside of her bottom lip, almost of its own volition. “And I’d take any beating in place of that.”

Her exhale stuttered, her eyelids blinking rapidly, as she tried her damndest to understand my meaning.