Chapter 15: The Dormitory

Dell's POV

Sabina took me to the Wing at midnight, with Cass on speaker in her coat pocket.

"Rule two," Sabina said, tapping the phone. "Somebody knows where we are."

"I'm eating a gas station burrito and listening to you breathe," Cass said from the pocket. "Don't make it weird."

I had not said a word to Sabina since the tavern.

I had not known what words there were.

The Gorski Wing stood behind the old house, two stories of tan brick with white trim and a plaque by the door.

It had been built when I was fourteen, and I had slept in it for three years.

Sabina had a key.

She opened the side door and held it for me, and I walked into the smell of floor wax and cold radiators.

The girls who lived there now slept on the ground floor, behind the kitchen.

The east dormitory upstairs had been shut since the pipes froze.

We climbed the stairs in the dark, with Sabina's phone for a light.

The door at the top stood open an inch.

I pushed it.

Three iron beds stood in a row at the end of a long room, stripped to their mattresses.

Mine was the one by the window.

Sabina's was the middle one.

Cass's, at the end, was smaller than the rest, because she'd come in at three years old and they had never replaced the frame.

I stood in the doorway.

I had thought I would be angry.

What I felt instead was a weight in my knees.

"I know the boards," Sabina said, from beside me. "There are three hundred and twelve in this room. I know every one."

She crossed to the middle bed, got down on her knees and pushed it aside.

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