“There you are,” she said with a smug grin. “Guess who just got expelled from school?”
“What? Who?” I asked, ready for some stupid gossip from her end.
“Guess,” she said, and her little gang burst into desperate snickers.
“I don’t know, Victoria. I don’t have time for this,” I said with an irritated huff.
“Luke fucking Lancaster,” she crowed, and her fans shrieked with laughter. “He’s gone. They’re taking him away right now.”
I wanted to punch her in the face and wipe that grin right off it, but I was too busy sprinting down the hall past her.
If Luke was leaving Crimson, so was I.
CHAPTER7
A crowd had formedat the base of the steps in the entranceway. The same steps I’d been driven up to by my parents that day just a few short months earlier.
I could tell there was something going on by the exclamations of horror from the Lowers and the outbursts of mocking laughter from the Uppers.
God, I hated them at that moment. I had never felt so detached from the world I was in until I saw them all grouped together over somebody’s misfortune and saw how differently it affected them on an emotional level.
Uppers were fucking sociopaths. They didn’t care, everything was a game to them, and they took great pleasure in coming up with ways to riff on somebody else’s pain and misfortune.
Lowers just saw him as a lesson for them, which is why the Academy made such a public spectacle of it, I was sure. They had him walking through the crowd with four security guards surrounding him. They were big, burly guys who were dressed in all-black uniforms and tall black lace-up military boots. Like a police force, but more dangerous because they were private and operated outside the law.
I ran into them at the medical building sometimes, and I was sure one of them had been bringing me my gruel in the Pit. I was just lucky they were satisfied with my humiliation in that way and hadn’t done anything else to satiate their cruelty. Sometimes being an Upper had its perks, like protecting me from the likes of them. I wondered about Harlow, though.
“Luke!” I screamed as I ran barefoot across the grass. I was so full of adrenaline that I didn’t feel the ground beneath my feet. “Luke!”
I could no longer contain my emotions. His name came bursting out of me unchecked and without concern to those around me. I didn’t care who saw my headlong tumble towards Luke, and I didn’t care who heard me screaming.
People turned to figure out the source of the cries, and several were surprised it was me, an Upper, making such a commotion over a Lower like him.
I used my body and shoved my way through the crowd, elbowing and practically tackling anybody in front of me. I heard exclamations of pain and anger as I plowed through and finally got to his side.
“What happened?” I asked, the level of desperation in my voice making it difficult to breathe. I could still feel where he’d been inside of me and where his fingers had been around my throat. “Where are they taking you?”
He turned to me, and his face was a broken mess. His thick, shaggy blond hair was streaked with rust-colored blood, and his eye was bruised shut.
His lips were swollen and split, and I thought I saw one tooth missing inside his mouth.
I grabbed his arms and clung to him as they kept dragging him away.
“I defended you, kitten,” he said with a wry smile. “I’d do it again, too. I won’t have anyone talking about you like that.”
“No, no, no, this is a mistake,” I exclaimed and held tighter. I turned to the guards with a frantic need to make them understand. “You can’t take him away like this! You don’t have the right to do it!”
“Get out of the way,” one of the guards yelled and slammed his baton into my arm, trying to break my grip. Pain exploded from the point of contact on my wrist and sent a shock wave of rage along my body. A tsunami of white-hot heat spread through me like a wildfire, and before I could think about anything, my body reacted.
Muscle memory took over, and the moves I knew deep in my core flashed along my limbs, pushing me into a fight before I understood what was happening.
I clenched my fist and punched the first face I saw. The guard wasn’t expecting it, so he didn’t understand what had happened at first until a spray of bright red blood sputtered from his nose. His eyes widened in surprise, but rage replaced it immediately, and he reacted.
I was prepared when he brought his hand down on my arm again, trying to break the grip I had on Luke’s arm. My other hand snaked out and blocked him, bouncing his blow off my forearm.
Luke couldn’t help himself, he wasn’t restrained, and as soon as he saw what was happening with me, he began to fight again.
Fists flew, punches landed, and Luke and I stood together again. The violent onslaught of anger from the guards rose to a crescendo, and they descended on the two of us with intense, single-minded purpose to knock me down and take Luke away, whether he left on his feet or on a stretcher.