Gothicana

CHAPTER 5

Corvina

There was something wrong with the castle.

Something very, very wrong.

Or maybe it was her. Maybe it was her mind slowly splintering.

Corvina looked at the corner of the classroom where she’d seen the light flicker in broad daylight. Her heart was racing, galloping like a horse ru

“You can leave the class if we’re boring you, Miss Clemm,” the hard, gravel voice broke through her perusal. She shifted her eyes to Mr. Deverell sitting on his desk, tapping a pen to the side, his silver attention focused on her. 

It had been a week since she’d encountered him in the woods that morning, a week since he had addressed her directly. She had bumped into him in the corridor one day, and he had simply looked into her eyes and given her a greeting, “Little Crow,” in that deep voice of his that had left her hot. And over the week, he’d watched her. He’d been around her classes, going up the stairs when she’d been going down, passing through the hallways when she stopped to admire a sculpture, just been all around her more. She’d felt his eyes on her, she’d felt them a lot. She’d felt them in the dining room when she ate with her new friends, on the grounds when she walked all alone, in the class when she took notes and kept to herself. And she’d liked it, though she shouldn’t.

He might not have been speaking to her verbally but his eyes said a lot. His eyes had been giving her words that only fa

Right then though, his eyes looked pissed. And that somehow made her want to fan her face even more.

“I-” she began to speak before he raised a dark eyebrow up, inching it towards that streak of grey in his hair, and she shut up.

“You can sit with me if you’re bored, Purple,” Jax, one of Troy’s boys, called from the front with a smirk. “I’ll keep things interesting.”

A few snickers sounded around the class but her eyes, which were still on Mr. Deverell, watched as his jaw clenched. He broke their co

“And what makes you think this kind of bullshit is okay in my class, Brown?” Mr. Deverell asked, putting his pen down on the desk and turning the full force of his attention on the boy.

The boy sat up straighter. “My name’s not Brown, Mr. Deverell. It’s Jax.”

“Oh, my mistake,” Mr. Deverell said with what Jade called his ‘resting bitch face’. “I thought we were calling each other by the color of our eyes and not given names.”

That shut the boy up.

Corvina felt something warm take root in her stomach, fluttering in her belly as she watched the silver-eyed devil casually defend her. Her eyes had always been something she’d been teased or taunted about. No one had ever defended her. Even with her mother, she’d been the one doing the defending. This felt new, unfamiliar, yet enlivening.

“I don’t like him but swoon,” Jade whispered from her side.

Swoon indeed.

“He’s defending you.”

Yes, he was.

“Anyone else has issues referring to people with their names?” he asked the class.

No one moved.

“And am I still boring you, Miss Clemm?” he asked her directly, his mercury eyes on hers again.

Oh, he was doing something for her but boring wasn’t the word she’d use. She shook her head, her words stuck in her throat as those eyes rested on her for a split second longer.

“Then let’s continue,” he looked out to the class again just as the bell rang.

“Alright, we’ll pick back up on Monday. I expect you all to have read about the motifs that emerged during the Middle Ages over the weekend. Stay back for a minute, Miss Clemm,” he ordered, picking up the diary he’d kept on the desk, reading something inside as the classroom emptied, students giving her odd looks before exiting.

Corvina stood frozen to the spot for a second. She felt an elbow nudge her in the side and looked to see Jade mouth ‘good luck’.

Swallowing, she picked up her brown bag, slinging it over her shoulder, hugging her notebook to her chest. Taking a deep breath, she turned to the front of the class and walked down the levels towards where he sat on the table, still reading something in his diary.

Corvina observed him in his dark black jeans and a shade lighter black sweater, the V-neck exposing the thick yet somehow graceful flesh of his neck, the fabric hugging the broad expanse of his chest, defining his pectoral muscles. She quietly watched as he read, tapping the pen on the side, a pen that looking tiny in his large hands with the long, skilled fingers. She wondered how those fingers would feel sifting through her hair, stroking the side of her face, sliding over the skin of her neck down to her breasts, playing her like the piano she’d seen him on that first night.

Her nipples pebbled.

“That’s not a look you give your teacher, little crow.”

It took her a second to realize he’d stopped reading and she’d been fantasizing as his hand simply rested on the diary. Chest heaving slightly, she looked up to find his intense gaze on her. Her hand tightened around the bag’s strap. She liked it when he called her that. She didn’t know why but the familiar way he used the words, the fact that it felt special just for her, oh yes. It made the warmth in her stomach move lower.

“That’s not a name you call your student,” she retorted quietly, wanting to use a special name for him as well but knowing that vocalizing it would make it much more real. “How am I looking at you?” she tilted her head curiously.

His eyes seared her. “Like you’re inviting me to play.”

She wasn’t the only one. Her breath hitched. “You look at me like that too, Mr. Deverell.”

He tapped his finger on his diary, observing her. She gripped her notebook tighter.

“Did you want something?” she asked after a long moment of silence, realizing a second later the words could be construed in a deeper, more erotic way.

Before he could respond, something flickered in her periphery. Corvina looked to the corner of the room, the space where the wall met the window, seeing a silhouette flicker for a moment in the sunlight filtering in before it disappeared.

Her palms began to sweat.

“What?” his voice came to her but Corvina couldn’t look away from the corner, focusing, trying to understand what she had seen.

“What are you looking at?”

She didn’t know. God, she needed mama to tell her what the hell was happening to her.

A firm grip on her chin turned her face, her eyes locking with his silver ones.

“You were looking at that corner during class too,” he asked quietly, his voice dripping with authority. “What were you looking at just now?”

“I don’t know,” she told him honestly, letting the sensation of his warm thumb on his chin anchor her, relishing the touch she’d never felt like this. “It was probably a trick of the light.”

He considered her for a few seconds before letting her face go, and she bit her tongue to keep from calling the touch back.