Chapter 1: The Gates of St. Aurelia's
It had been a week since her eighteenth birthday. So far it had felt no different and she seemed to be less in control of her life than ever before. Chloe sat in the back seat alone, somber and brooding.
The taxi turned off the county road at a rusted sign that read ST. AURELIA'S, EST. 1887, and then there was nothing but gravel and pines and the slow climb of the mountain. Chloe watched the trees close overhead, gray branches knitted against a gray sky, and pressed her forehead to the cold window. Three hundred miles behind her. A father on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic. A stepmother's lipstick still, impossibly, on her memory.
The gates came out of the treeline all at once. Iron, twenty feet high, the bars twisted into vines and roses that had never grown in any garden. Beyond them the school rose out of the dusk, a sprawl of dark stone buildings with steep slate roofs, ivy black against the walls. It looked less like a school than a fortress that had given up on being defended.
"Here?" the driver said.
"Here," Chloe said.
He took her bags out of the trunk without getting out of the way of her sightline to the gates, and then he was gone, brake lights shrinking down the mountain, and she was alone with the wind and the smell of pine and wet stone.
A woman was walking down the gravel toward her. Chloe hadn't seen her come out of the building, and that unsettled her before anything else did. The woman moved like someone who never hurried because she had never needed to. Raven hair streaked with silver, pulled into a chignon so tight it looked architectural. Black blazer, white blouse, pencil skirt. Mid-forties, handsome in a way that had nothing soft in it, cheekbones like the building behind her.
"Miss Bennett." Not a question. "I'm Professor Vance the headmistress."
"Hi. I'm, um."
"I know who you are." The smile arrived fully formed, perfect in its symmetry, and stayed exactly as long as it was designed to. Her eyes did something else entirely. They went over Chloe the way an appraiser goes over a piece of silver, crown to base, unhurried. The wind pushed Chloe's hair across her face and she was glad of the excuse to break the look.
"It's cold," Professor Vance said. "Come inside."
She took the largest bag. She did it with such effortless grace that it didn't look like carrying, it looked like accepting tribute. Her fingers closed around the handle over Chloe's hand for a half second, and then her other hand came to Chloe's wrist, a light touch, guiding her toward the steps.
"Your letter said Friday arrival," Vance said. "Good. The weekend is when the school is at its most honest. No classes. No performance." Her thumb rested on the inside of Chloe's wrist, on the pulse, and it stayed there while they walked, a second, two seconds, longer than any touch had any reason to. "Welcome to your new home, Miss Bennett."
"Thank you," Chloe said. "I'm not sure how long I'm staying."
Something moved behind the dark eyes. Interest, or amusement, or both.
"They all say that at first." Vance released her wrist. "Your mother never said it at all."
"My mother?" Chloe stopped on the bottom step. "My mother didn't go here."
"Didn't she?" Vance climbed the steps without looking back. "The records are in the archive. They're quite thorough. We keep everything." She held the door. "Your introduction begins tonight. You'll want to eat something first."
Chloe stood a moment with her hand on the strap of her duffel, pulse still beating where the woman's thumb had been, and then the wind came around the building and pushed her through the door.
Inside was wood smoke and old varnish and lamplight. A hall ran away from her longer than any hallway had a right to, portraits on both sides, girls in old-fashioned uniforms staring out of oil paint with expressions Chloe found hard to read. Dinner was in a refectory with long tables and a vaulted ceiling, and there were maybe thirty girls scattered among seats that could hold three hundred, and every one of them looked up when she came in, and every one of them looked a moment too long.
Vance left her with a plate and a table and instructions about her room: East Wing, third floor, end of the corridor. Chloe ate little. Her phone had one bar and no messages from her father and one from Serena, sent that morning, a red heart and nothing else. She deleted it. Then she sat looking at the empty message field for a long time. Then she went upstairs.
The room was old and beautiful in a faded way, two beds, two desks, a tall window with the mountains going black behind the glass. One bed was already claimed, cluttered with a silk robe and an unmade nest of blankets and a smell of something sweet and smoky.
"You must be the new girl."
The redhead came out of the connecting bathroom with a towel around her neck and nothing else bothering her, twenty or so, pale skin scattered with freckles, hair the color of a struck match drying in loose waves past her shoulders. Her eyes went over Chloe in one slow pass, and Chloe felt it the way she'd felt the appraisal on the steps, but this one was hungrier and didn't pretend to be anything else.
"Chloe."
"Ruby. O'Connell." The girl smiled and did not cover up. She pulled a shirt on over her head with no particular hurry, and the towel around her neck was already discarded, showing a very perfect pair of breasts Chloe found herself admiring a little too long. Ruby watched Chloe unpack the whole time, sitting on her own bed with her knees drawn up, chin on them, like a cat watching a bird feeder. "I'm a Third year. You're eighteen."
"How do you know that?"
"Everyone who comes here as a first-year is eighteen." Ruby's smile widened. "It's a rule. You'll learn we have a lot of rules, and none of them are the ones in the handbook." She nodded at the window. "Bathroom's at the end of the hall. Showers are communal, no curtains on the stalls, don't bother being shocked. And don't bother drying your hair before you come back." She stretched, arms over her head, unhurried. "It's a whole thing. You'll see."
Chloe decided not to ask. She took her toiletry bag and a towel and went down the hall with her heart going harder than it should have.
The bathroom was tiled in white marble gone soft-edged with a hundred years, steam already in the air from other girls, the sound of water from behind the half-glass stalls. She found an empty one at the far end, stripped with her back to the room, and stepped under the water, which was hot and merciful. She stood there a long time, letting it beat on the back of her neck, trying to make the last two days arrange themselves into something she could survive. Serena's mouth. The ultimatum on the kitchen table like a card turned face up. Her father's voice on the phone, warm and distant and useless: it made her the woman she is today, Chloe. It will do the same for you.
She got out when the water started to cool.
Three girls were leaning against the tile between her stall and her towel.
They were all naked. That was the first fact, and it refused to be the second anything. One was tall and dark-haired with a swimmer's shoulders; one was blonde and soft-bodied and pink from her own shower; the one in the middle, the one a half-step ahead of the others, was compact and olive-skinned with wet black curls pushed off her forehead and a mouth that was already smiling.
"There she is," the middle one said. "The new girl."
"I'm just getting my towel," Chloe said.
"It's over there." The blonde pointed, unnecessarily, at the bench ten feet away. "We know. We've been waiting."
Chloe's hands went to the front of her own body, one arm across her breasts, one hand pressed over her pussy, the universal posture of the cornered. The three of them were not covering anything. The tall one had her fingers idle at the top of her own thigh, moving in a slow absent rhythm, not exactly touching herself and not exactly not. The blonde was rolling one nipple between wet fingers, pink and flushed, watching Chloe's face while she did it.
"You're staring," the middle one said, delighted.
"I'm not."
"You kind of are. It's okay. Everybody stares the first week." She came a half-step closer. Steam moved between them. "I'm Petra. That's Liv, that's Dot. We do the welcoming."
"The headmistress welcomed me."
"Vance does the official welcome." Petra's smile sharpened. "We do the real one."
Chloe reached for the towel on the bench without taking her eyes off them, and Petra let her get it, actually held it out to her, and Chloe wrapped it around herself under their three sets of eyes with the slow care of someone handling something fragile.
"That's better," the blonde, Dot, said, disappointed. "It was better before."
"Tell us honestly," Petra said. "What did they tell you about this place? Before you came."
"Nothing. That it was a good school."
Petra laughed. All three of them laughed, a warm chorus that had no cruelty in it, which was somehow worse. "They always say that. And then their parents ship them up a mountain and never ask a single question." She folded her arms under her breasts, lifting them, entirely casual. "Here's what it actually is, new girl. Four hundred girls. Nobody's father, nobody's brothers, nobody's town. Eleven miles of mountain road between us and anything else. What do you think happens?"
"I don't know what happens."
"Everything happens." Liv spoke for the first time, low and unhurried, her fingers still moving at her thigh. "It's what the place is for."
"Everyone here does this," Petra said. "It's not a secret. It's the whole point. Girls with girls, and nobody pretending otherwise. The seniors, the first-years, Professor Vance, all of it. It's the tradition underneath the tradition. And the girls who don't" she shrugged, and the shrug was its own sentence, "well. Three years is a long time on a mountain when nobody wants to sit with you."
Chloe's grip on the towel tightened. "That sounds like a threat."
"It's a weather report," Petra said.
Dot drifted closer, and she was warm from her shower and she smelled like soap and she reached out and took a wet strand of Chloe's hair between two fingers and smoothed it back from her face. "You're so pretty," she said. "They always send us such pretty ones."
"Come on," Petra said, softer now. "Watch. You don't have to do anything. Just watch."
And she turned her head and Dot turned hers and they kissed. It was not a performance and it absolutely was. Dot's hand came up to Petra's jaw, Petra's hand went to the small of Dot's back, and their mouths opened against each other, wet and slow, tongues visible, and Liv made a small sound and slipped her own fingers lower, between her thighs, and stood there with the water still drying on her shoulders touching herself with her eyes on Chloe the entire time.
Chloe should have walked. The path to the door was clear. Nothing was between her and it except her own legs, which had apparently not received the instruction.
She stood. She watched. She felt the heat climb her face and settle somewhere lower, and hated that it did, and could not make it not have happened.
"Good," Petra said against Dot's mouth, not breaking the kiss, her eyes finding Chloe's over Dot's shoulder. "You're still here."
She peeled off Dot slowly, one last drag of Dot's lower lip between her teeth, and came over.
Chloe took a step back and the cold tile met her shoulder blade.
"I'm not," Chloe said. "I'm not really. This isn't. I have a boyfriend, actually."
"Baby," Petra said, with such genuine warmth that it landed like a hand on her head, "that's the saddest thing I've heard all year." She stopped one pace away. Close enough that Chloe could see the water beaded in the curl at her temple, the fine goosebumps on her arm, everything. "You can say no. I want to be clear about that. You can always say no, and I will always stop, because that's a rule too, the real kind. I just want you to know what you're saying no to." Her hand came up, and she did not touch Chloe's breast or her waist or her mouth. She laid her palm, soft and warm and slightly damp, flat over the towel, low, over the mound of Chloe's pussy, and cupped it. Just that. Just the whole of her hand, cupping her through the terrycloth, fingers curving under toward the cleft of her, still, patient, a held breath.
Chloe's whole body went rigid.
"I think she likes it," Petra said, and did not move her hand. "Tell me new girl do you like it?"
"I don’t feel anything."she lied.
"I think you’re a liar." Her fingers did not move. Her palm did. Warmth radiated through the towel into Chloe's skin, through her lips, into the exact place she had spent two days refusing to think about, the place Serena's mouth had found in the dark of the stairwell, and her body did the terrible loyal thing her body had been doing since her birthday, which was to answer before asking permission. Chloe felt it happen and knew Petra felt it too, the smallest shift of blood and heat, the pulse ticking up under her palm.
The bathroom was very quiet except for the water and Liv's slow breathing.
"See," Petra said, gentle, cruel, gentle. "Look at that. It's not your boyfriend's fault. It's just a body."
One second. Two. Three. Chloe counted them like a diver counting depth. Her hips wanted, were actually leaning, a millimeter, an invitation she had not signed. Heat pooled thick and stupid under her own skin, and her face burned with it, and there was a moment, an ugly honest moment, when the leaving was only one of the options.
Then she got her hand on Petra's wrist.
"Enough." Her voice came out steadier than she deserved. "Get off me."
Petra lifted her hand away at once, clean, palms-out, smiling the same smile. "There it is. Look at you. You do have a spine." She stepped back and picked up her own towel and did not seem angry or embarrassed or in any way diminished. "That's good, new girl. Genuinely. Most of them take longer."
"We'll see you around," Liv said, fingers still busy, eyes still on her.
"Everything here comes around," Dot said, and blew her a kiss.
Chloe walked to the door with the towel clutched to her body like armor. Behind her she heard Petra say something and all three of them laugh, low and unbothered, and the sound followed her out into the corridor and down the cold hall, all the way back to her room.
She got the door shut and locked it, which the lock had not invited her to do, and stood in the middle of the floor dripping on the old wood, heart slamming, hand pressed over her own mouth. Not because of them. Because of the three seconds. Because she had counted them and they had been long.
"That was fast," Ruby said from her bed, where she was sitting cross-legged with a book she was not reading. She looked at the wet footprints, the towel, Chloe's face. Something knowing moved across the freckles. "Petra's group already found you, huh."
"They didn't do anything," Chloe said. "I said no."
"Sure you did." Ruby turned a page she hadn't read. "You will, for a while. Everybody says no at the start." She looked up, and her eyes went over Chloe's body under the towel in one slow, proprietary pass, and her voice came out soft and easy, like a hand opening. "Bathroom's free now, if you want a second try. I could come with you. Keep the wolves off."
Chloe turned her back to her and pulled dry clothes from her bag with shaking hands.
"It's just you and me up here, you know," Ruby said to the room, pleasantly. "Long weekend."
Chloe got under her own covers and faced the wall, and did not sleep for a long time, and every time she drifted toward the edge of it her own body handed the memory back to her: warmth through terrycloth, three seconds, a millimeter of leaning. Outside, the wind came down the mountain and moved through the pines, and somewhere below, the iron gates stood open on the empty drive, and nothing was coming up that road until Monday.