I couldn't help but feel sorry for her. She was so awkward and self-conscious. Anyone could have manipulated her, let alone her father, whom she loved and from whom she so desperately wanted attention. She would have done anything. Rumor said she'd stood screaming outside the detention center, begging them to let her see him. They'd refused and hauled her away.
Meanwhile, Lissa and I slipped back into our friendship like nothing had happened. In the rest of her world, a lot had happened. After all that excitement and drama, she seemed to gain a new sense of what mattered to her. She broke up with Aaron. I'm sure she did it very nicely, but it still had to be hard on him. She'd dropped him twice now. The fact that his last girlfriend had cheated on him probably wasn't helping his confidence any.
And without any more hesitation, Lissa started dating Christian, not caring about the consequences to her reputation. Seeing them out in public, holding hands, made me do a double take. He didn't seem able to believe it himself. The rest of our classmates were almost too stunned to even comprehend it yet. They could barely process acknowledging his existence, let alone him being with someone like her.
My own romantic state was less rosy than hers - if you could even call it a romantic state. Dimitri hadn't visited me during my recovery, and our practices were indefinitely suspended. It wasn't until the fourth day after Lissa's kidnapping that I ran into him in the gym. We were alone.
I had come back for my gym bag and froze when I saw him, unable to speak. He started to walk past and then stopped.
"Rose..." he began after several uncomfortable moments. "You need to report what happened. With us."
I'd been waiting a long time to talk to him, but this wasn't the conversation I'd imagined.
"I can't do that. They'll fire you. Or worse."
"They should fire me. What I did was wrong."
"You couldn't help it. It was the spell..."
"It doesn't matter. It was wrong. And stupid."
Wrong? Stupid? I bit my lip, and tears threatened to fill my eyes. I quickly tried to regain my composure. "Look, it's not a big deal."
"It is a big deal! I took advantage of you."
"No," I said evenly. "You didn't."
There must have been something telling in my voice because he met my eyes with a deep and serious intensity.
"Rose, I'm seven years older than you. In ten years, that won't mean so much, but for now, it's huge. I'm an adult. You're a child."
Ouch. I flinched. Easier if he'd just punched me.
"You didn't seem to think I was a child when you were all over me."
Now he flinched. "Just because your body...well, that doesn't make you an adult. We're in two very different places. I've been out in the world. I've been on my own. I've killed, Rose - people, not animals. And you...you're just starting out. Your life is about homework and clothes and dances."
"That's all you think I care about?"
"No, of course not. Not entirely. But it's all part of your world. You're still growing up and figuring out who you are and what's important. You need to keep doing that. You need to be with boys your own age."
I didn't want boys my own age. But I didn't say that. I didn't say anything.
"Even if you choose not to tell, you need to understand that it was a mistake. And it isn't ever going to happen again," he added.
"Because you're too old for me? Because it isn't responsible?"
His face was perfectly blank. "No. Because I'm just not interested in you in that way."
I stared. The message - the rejection - came through loud and clear. Everything from that night, everything I'd believed so beautiful and full of meaning, turned to dust before my eyes.
"It only happened because of the spell. Do you understand?"
Humiliated and angry, I refused to make a fool of myself by arguing or begging. I just shrugged. "Yeah. Understood."
I spent the rest of the day sulking, ignoring both Lissa and Mason's attempts to draw me out of my room. It was ironic that I should want to stay inside. Kirova had been impressed enough by my performance with the rescue to end my house arrest.
Before school the next day, I made my way to where Victor was being held. The Academy had honest-to-goodness cells, complete with bars, and two guardians stood watch in the hallway nearby. It took a little bit of finagling on my part to get them to let me inside to talk to him. Even Natalie wasn't allowed in. But one of the guardians had ridden with me in the SUV and watched me undergo Lissa's torture. I told him I needed to ask Victor about what he'd done to Lissa. It was a lie, but the guardians bought it and felt sorry for me. They allowed me five minutes to speak, backing up a discrete distance down the hall where they could see but not hear.
Standing outside Victor's cell, I couldn't believe I'd once felt sorry for him. Seeing his new and healthy body enraged me. He sat cross-legged on a narrow bed, reading. When he heard me approach, he looked up.
"Why Rose, what a nice surprise. Your ingenuity never fails to impress me. I didn't think they'd allow me any visitors."
I crossed my arms, trying to put on a look of total guardian fierceness. "I want you to break the spell. Finish it off."
"What do you mean?"
"The spell you did on me and Dimitri."
"That spell is done. It burned itself out."