Greymoor Academy: I Accidentally Bonded With Four Lycan Royals! novel Chapter 67

Chapter 67: 67. Growing A Spine

Maisie

I walked back to my bedroom and stared at the mirror for a long time.

My fingers ran across my face, through my hair as I tried really hard to understand just how I’d reached this point. The point where looking back at my reflection in the mirror had become difficult.

Who was Maisie Adams?

I was the girl who hadn’t been given a single day to mourn her parents before being handed a mopping stick at twelve years old and told that was who I was and all I could ever be.

You do not have the luxury to dream, Maisie Adams. Take what I give you and be grateful for it.

I was the girl who refused to accept that reality. I was the girl who fought her bullies, scrubbed her fingers raw until they bled, and still got the perfect scores. And got into Greymoor.

I was my own woman. Had always been.

And then I had come to this house.

And I had gotten so lost chasing an idea of something that didn’t exist that I completely forgot who I was. To the point where I, who had fought tooth and nail to get out of servitude in the Night Shade Pack, was now happily mopping the floors of this mansion.

When exactly had I traded one hell for another?

When had I decided that mattering to them was the measure of whether I mattered at all?

I might not have been beautiful or perfectly poised like Tessa or Lana. But those had never been my strengths anyway. My strength had always been my mind. It had never mattered what direction my stupid, bleeding heart tugged me towards.

My mind was my own.

And maybe I was in danger leaving this place and the protection of these men. But I was in an even graver danger staying.

The danger of losing sense of who I was.

I went straight for the dresser and grabbed the only thing I owned in this entire house—the dress I’d come here with the night I was accused of working with the rogues—and I shimmied into it.

It barely fit my new body. But it was mine.

I took all the things the Lycans had ever gotten me out of the dresser. I walked over to the front on the mansion dragging them behind me. Dumped them at the front steps. Dragged over in my ball gown to the garage. Took a keg of gasoline. Doused it over the clothes. The shoes. The bags. All the while humming "Pretty Little Psycho" calmly under my breath.

And then, I set the heap on fire.

I looked up and saw Soren and Jericho watching me from the window, their reflections flickering in the blaze.

I smiled.

Then I raised both middle fingers and held them high.

I thought I saw a flash of dark amusement in both their gazes, right before I turned around, hefted up my ball gown and left the mansion.

****

Every student in Greymoor was assembled in the school’s Grand Hall, packed wall-to-wall with students. The usual morning chatter was louder than normal, buzzing with barely-contained excitement.

It’d been four days since I left the mansion and it was exactly one day before The Wedding.

Admittedly, showing up to the hallways of Greymoor’s lodgings in a ball gown and rat’s nest of hair had to be the highlight of everyone’s week. Someone had taken a photo of me in the hallway at four in the morning and plastered it on the school board with the hashtag, #UNHINGEDEX.

I wasn’t even mad.

That, along with the videos circulating the internet of me gyrating on the stripping pole, and I totally understood why they’d think I was crazy and why Counsellor Vesper had stopped me in the school hallway three days ago and asked if I wanted to talk about my mental state.

Either way, I was slumming it with Regina—she was fighting with her parents again and every time that happened, she crashed at her room at school—and it had been a blissful three days of doing everything but talk about the Lycans. Or the wedding. Or why I left.

My head felt clearer than it had in days and I was eager to keep it that way. Every day I ran into the Lycans in the hallways or Cafeteria, I blatantly ignored them.

I channeled all of my energy and focus into fixing my grades. I’d had five make up tests in the last two days and somehow, I redid my term paper in that time, too.

Mrs. Belarus had explicitly told me she wouldn’t take it. But I forced it down her throat anyway, with an entire bag of organic handmade cookies.

Eventually.

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