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5
Dean
I wake early, before the sun is even up. I know at once that I’m not in my old room at home. I can tell because the air isn’t musty and enclosed, with that awful lingering scent of neglect I could never seem to shake. Instead I smell the sea breeze and the fresh herbs growing in the terraced garden below my window.
Bram is still snoring in the bed across from mine. It’s weird sharing a room with another dude, especially one I barely know. Bram is an ally though, and that’s all that matters. I only just met him in Dubrovnik, but I’ve seen that he’s tough, aggressive, and reasonably intelligent, and that’s what I want in a friend.
In Moscow I always got up early to go for a run while the streets were still empty. I could probably run all over this island in a couple of hours. But I don’t know the rules well enough to know if we’re allowed to leave the school grounds.
Better to just use the gym our guide showed us the day before.
Slipping out of bed quietly, I open my top drawer and pull out the gym attire I purchased along with the rest of my uniforms. I already neatly folded my clothes and stowed them away in the dresser the night before.
When Bram asked if I wanted to room together, I told him bluntly that he’d better keep it tidy if he wanted to share space.
“I don’t want to see one goddamned sock on the floor,” I told him.
He shrugged, tossing back his dark hair out of his face. “Fine by me,” he said. “Guess I better learn to clean up after myself anyway, if we don’t have maids here.”
Like most spoiled mafia children, I’m assuming he had a full-time cleaning crew at his parents’ house.
Anyway, he’s kept to his word so far, and if he doesn’t, I’ll chuck his clothes out the fucking window. I can’t stand mess. It makes my flesh crawl. It makes me want to rip my own skin off.
I pull on the plain gray sweat shorts and white t-shirt that we’re expected to wear whenever we do combat training, or anything else physical. Even the white tube socks are mandatory.
I don’t really give a shit. I’ve never cared much about clothes.
Once I’m dressed, I slip out of the dorm down to the empty courtyard. There’s no one around, the first gray light illuminating the edges of the balustrades.
It takes me a minute to find the Armory again—I take a wrong turn, and end up on the opposite side of the building, over by a cluster of orange trees surrounding a flat, open platform that might once have been used for weapons training.
I would have walked right by, except I hear music playing.
We’re not technically supposed to have electronics at the school, though I guess it doesn’t much matter—there’s no internet co
It’s a girl. A blonde girl, dressed in a black leotard and torn-up tights.
She has on a pair of extremely battered pointe shoes, and she’s dancing on the cracked stone platform like a music box ballerina up on its stand.
The music isn’t classical—it’s something wistful and moody that I haven’t heard before.
Love Chained — Ca Spotify → geni.us/freshman-spotify Apple Music → geni.us/freshman-apple The girl is tall, which makes her legs look a mile long, especially up on tiptoe. She’s slim, but I can see the lean muscle flexing on her shoulders and back, and on her thighs and calves. I can see the muscle working, but her movements look utterly effortless. She seems to float across the rough stone. She bends and swoops like a bird in flight. The early-morning light gleams silver on her skin, and on her long sheaf of hair that whips around her face as she spins. The open back of her leotard shows several tattoos on her shoulder blade, tricep, and wrist. Her eyes are closed. She’s completely lost in the music, making up the dance as she goes along, or so it looks to me. I’ve never seen dancing like this. It’s vulnerable, it’s raw, it’s emotional. The song is sad and yearning, about a love unrequited. It’s not the kind of thing I would usually listen to—I don’t give a fuck about love, and I certainly don’t listen to maudlin, whiny music. But in this moment this girl seems to be embodying the emotion of the song to such a degree that I can’t ignore it. I can’t not feel what she’s feeling. My heart is tight in my chest. My hands feel cold, and I realize I haven’t blinked once since I first laid eyes on this girl. She’s been dancing with her back to me. Now she turns, and I can see her face fully for the first time. She’s stu She wears too much makeup—white powder that makes her look even paler than she actually is, dark lipstick, and a mask of smoky shadow around her eyes. Maybe she wants to look tough instead of pretty. It’s impossible. No amount of makeup can hide the loveliness of her features. She opens her eyes at last, and I can see that her irises are a pale, clear blue, like glacial ice, like blue diamond. Even through the leaves of the orange trees, those eyes fix on me at once, and her dreamy expression burns away in an instant, replaced by cold fury. I’ve already drawn back and turned around, striding away from her as quickly as possible. I didn’t mean to watch her like a pervert hiding in the bushes. I didn’t mean to look at her at all. It just happened—the music pulled me in, and then I was transfixed by the strangeness of what I saw. Now I shake my head, trying to physically shake the memory out of my brain. It was just a girl practicing a dance, which is stupid and has no place at Kingmakers. She must be a Freshman—otherwise she’d be working on something useful instead of prancing around. I jog over to the Armory, where I meant to go in the first place. Pushing through the doors, I’m hit with the not-unpleasant scent of sweat, iron, and rubber mats. It reminds me of the gym where I trained in Moscow, and that makes me happy. I spend the next hour punishing my body relentlessly. I alternate between hitting the heavy bag and the speed bag, jumping rope, and doing compound lifts in drop sets. The gym is impressively equipped. There’s nothing I want that they don’t have. As the sun comes up, I’m joined by a few other students looking to get in an early-morning workout—though not quite as early as mine. By this point I’m dripping in sweat, and every muscle on my body is throbbing. I’m working even harder than usual, trying to banish the image of that girl from my mind. I don’t know why I’m still thinking about her. Because she was pretty? I’ve fucked plenty of pretty girls before. I chug down a glass of cold water from the cooler, then head in what I hope is the direction of the showers. It’s obnoxious trying to find anything in this place—there are no signs like there would be at a normal college. Even the doors to the changing rooms lack the usual male and female stick figures. It doesn’t matter—I’m the only person in here anyway. The changing room is large and echoing, with double banks of lockers and a dozen showers in one open space.