Madame Kier has been director of the academy for about ten years now. She got to the place when I was about eleven years old, so we’ve known each other a while. But she’s never known me when I wasn’t trouble.
She gives me a long-suffering look as she sees me. There’s a glint in her eye, like she wants to really go off on me, but Einar is standing right next to me, and she doesn’t want to look unhinged in front of him.
“Hello, Darcy,” she says. “We’ve been worried about you.”
She doesn’t ask me why I’m wearing Delivery 2 Go leathers, or why I’m holding my helmet in my hand. She just accepts that of course I’ve been doing something functionally insane, because she doesn’t really care. None of them do. My absence from this place is irrelevant. They weren’t looking for me.
“Sure,” I say. “Real worried, I bet.”
Einar smacks my ass, an act that shocks me and everybody else. I did not expect him to spank me at the academy. It doesn’t feel like the sort of place he should be allowed to do that sort of thing.
“What the fuck!”
“Well deserved, I think,” the director says. “Thank you, Mr. Bitten. I don’t know how you thought to bring her here, or how you found her…”
“He abducted me,” I say. Two can play at the bullshit that shouldn’t happen in front of others.
I feel Einar stiffen, and if I weren’t so intent on selling this little story, I’d laugh.
The director doesn’t buy it anyway.
“I am certain he did not, and you would do well to not accuse ranking members of the King’s Guard with such crimes. You don’t know what you’re saying, Darcy, that’s your problem. Do you really not know who Mr. Bitten is?”
I give a little delinquent shrug.
“Of course not. His portrait only hangs in the study hall, and you go there so rarely I am sure you have no…”
“That’s where I’ve seen you before!” I exclaim, turning to Einar.
Einar doesn’t say anything. He is playing the stern stranger to the hilt. Almost too well, actually. It’s kind of freaky.
“Mr. Bitten is one of our most distinguished alumni, and at one time was a valued member of the faculty,” she says, ostensibly lecturing me, but actually really just taking the opportunity tosuck up to Einar. If she had any idea the things this man had done to me, she’d be a lot less obsequious. Or maybe that wouldn’t matter.
“Please, Mr. Bitten,” she says. “Allow me to give you some tea at least for bringing her back. Darcy, you are restricted to quarters.”
“Tea would be nice, thank you,” Einar says.
The director practically falls over herself ushering him away. At this point, I could pretty much leave again if I want to—and I do want to, so I do.
Fuck Einar’s warnings. I don’t care if he fucks me. My pussy might be sore, but I like sex. He can’t do anything to me that I don’t really like.
I make a show of going into the building behind them, of course, but instead of going upstairs, I zip through the halls, out the rear, and eventually end up on the reedy bank—where I am snatched up by the scruff of my leathers by a familiar figure.
“Kirin!”
“Hello,” he says with a grin of triumph. The smile sits very attractively on his features.
“Don’t tell me Einar told you to stake the perimeter out,” I sigh. “That’s…”
“No,” Kirin says, letting me go. “He didn’t. I knew this would be the exit you’d most likely take, and I knew you’d take it sooner rather than later.”
“You know about this way out?”
“We all attended the academy too,” Kirin reminds me. “Some of us even taught there.”
“You mean Einar. The director is fawning over him as we speak.”
“Yes. Einar.”
