I spread her dripping quim and circled my slick fingers about her clit. She was past the point of speaking now, her words coming in tiny, helpless squeals.
“I’ll keep you safe, Biba. There won’t be anything to fear, but you must give yourself to me.”
Competing with my profound desire for this lovely nymph was an equally profound rage I could not subdue—a virulent rage against Dean Schmidt, hiding behind his Stormcloud billions, acting tough. As if impelled by this anger, I released Biba’s breast and wrapped my left hand around her neck. Her soprano squealing cut off immediately, but she didn’t get any less wet.
“Come for me,” I commanded her, one hand choking her gently, the other fingering her hard.
“Ah. . . .” she croaked. “Fuck, it’s so close. . . .”
“Give up, Biba. Give yourself over. There is nothing I can’t do. To you or for you.”
She was quaking uncontrollably under my hands. Her jeans and my bedsheets were darkening with her juices.
I was hard, no doubt, but this was more meaningful than that. I would have Biba Quinn, fully and completely. More than that, I would have Stormcloud. No goddamned pretender-to-the-throne administrator would deny me that.
“Oh, god! Fuck, Zephyr!” she shrieked as my fingers tightened around her throat. “I’m coming! Oh, fuck!”
And that was that.
CHAPTER 7
THEO
Getting a few minutes with Biba Quinn was akin to requesting an audience with the pope. That’s what it felt like, at any rate.
As the first week of classes drew to a close, I arrived at a sort of acceptance of my relationship with her. It killed me to know she was spending her nights with Zephyr, but I figured at some point that acute pain would transition to a dull ache, then nothing. That was just jealousy, which stung but faded. The yawning hole left in her absence was more profound. In such a short amount of time last year, I’d become accustomed to Biba’s conversation, her excitement for life, her radiant smile, her scent. It was harder to accommodate that emptiness. It felt like she should be there—like she was a vital organ. Without her, I was hemorrhaging.
Once it had become clear that I wasn’t going to win her back, though, I’d resolved to get over it—cold turkey. I would focus on something else, anything.
Easier said than done.
It’d taken me one night to finish all my homework for the first week. So the next night, I’d gotten a head start on my midterm paper for Gianas’s class: a biographical study of Otto Von Bismarck, whose inner circle of military advisers were all Stormcloud men.
Late Thursday night, I tried just to take it easy, watch a movie in my room. It didn’t take, though. Biba kept creeping back into my mind, needling my sense of wellbeing. I scrambled for a distraction.
Then I remembered Gail. I had stopped looking into her death after Zephyr came back to campus and Biba had disappeared. The Gail thing was intimately connected to Biba, so bad as it felt, I’d just walked away. In the back of my mind, a voice kept telling me to get to the bottom of it. It told me that Gail’s death was more significant than me and Biba. And while I didn’t have the resources of a full-fledged King like Zephyr, there were people in Wachsbrunnen who owed me favors.
At midnight, I got a hold of a junior officer at the village’s one police outpost. I’d come to know the guy when he’d worked in the kitchen at Stormcloud, back when I was a freshman. He had been chomping at the bit to join the village cops, but they were a notoriously closed club. I’d liked this kid, though, and I had convinced Miss Amelia to write a letter of reference on Academy stationery, which took a little doing. Amelia could be tough, but she always listened to me. That’s what I loved about her . . . she valued my thoughts more than any administrator should. Maybe she felt for me, not having a family of my own, and wanted me to know I counted for something.
Her letter had been enough to get the guy’s foot in the door as a desk clerk. He had risen quickly to actual enforcement, and he now had access to the files of Chief Inspector Soglio, the man who interrogated Biba.
By the next morning, I had confirmation of something I’d hoped for and something I feared.
The inspector had ruled Gail’s death a murder—which was good—but Biba was his prime suspect. I needed to talk to her right away, hell or high water.
Going to Biba’s room was the longest of long shots. It was apparent that Amelia had assigned her a private room as a formality or a means of discretion. How could Biba not be sleeping in Zephyr’s room each night?
Even so, I needed to talk to her immediately, and dropping by Zephyr’s quarters was not an option. Maybe Biba was using the room for storage. I figured I would slide a note under her door, and hopefully, she’d find it sometime over the weekend. It was worth a try.
With more than a bit of hesitation, I approached the door to Biba’s extraneous room on Saturday morning, a folded note between my fingers. Its message was short and direct: We have to talk. It’s about Gail. I’ll be in my room all weekend. TB. But as I squatted to slip the paper under the door, it suddenly opened, and out stepped Biba in a pair of sweatpants and an old Sleater-Kinney t-shirt.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Um . . . slipping you a covert message.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you sleep here?”