Royals of Villain Academy 1: Cruel Magic by Eva Chase

Author:Eva Chase [Chase, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989096383
Publisher: Ink Spark Press
Published: 2019-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Malcolm

The first thing I heard when I answered my mother’s call was my little sister crying in the background.

That sound was nothing new. Agnes was coming up on thirteen, and she still broke down way too easily. You’d have thought across all the years of our parents testing our limits and throwing our fears in our faces, she’d have developed more armor, like I had. That was why they did it in the first place: to harden us up before anyone else had a chance to take a jab at us.

Taking on the Nightwood name didn’t come easy. She needed to toughen up, or someone outside the family might destroy her. If I’d been able to think of a way to prepare her that would have been more effective than my parents’ tactics, I would have. Even at a distance, those sobs made my throat tighten.

She was old enough to be better at this, but she was also only thirteen.

“Hello, Malcolm,” my mother said in her tersely blasé voice, without any hint that she was aware of and most likely responsible for the muffled weeping.

I leaned against the hard mahogany back of my desk chair, my legs stretched out in front of me, one of my dormmates’ thrash metal songs filtering through our shared wall. He’d have turned it down the second I thumped on the wall, but I hadn’t bothered because it fit my current mood.

“Hello, Mother.”

I had the urge to ask her what had gotten to Agnes now, but showing concern wouldn’t help me or my sister. It would simply be an opening for some new attack. My mother knew I could hear Agnes; she’d called me in the right proximity as a reminder that no matter what Agnes had been through in the last half hour, I could find myself in even deeper shit twice as fast.

The first thing I remembered learning from my parents was, Never let your guard down. Taught with the sting of a conjured electric zap up my four-year-old arm at random moments when my attention strayed too far from the adults in the room.

Another early lesson had been, Hold your own counsel. I wasn’t going to ask her why she was calling either. She’d tell me when she was good and ready. Impatience looked like weakness.

“I trust your studies are going well,” my mother said, a cursory formality.

“I haven’t heard any complaints.”

“I understand you’ve had some chance to acquaint yourself with the recovered Bloodstone scion.”

There was the motivation behind this call. My gaze lingered on the view from my window across campus toward the lake. The rippling water reflected the pink haze of the sunset. On the other side of this floor in her own corner bedroom, Rory Bloodstone might be looking at nearly the exact same view right now.

Rory fucking Bloodstone, who kept throwing her preference for the pompous joymancers in the rest of our faces. Even this morning, she’d fought me. For what? For the pricks who’d slaughtered her

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