God of Pain novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Boathouse

A night of banter and old scars; Livia offers double for him to look away, and in the morning Tino is waiting in the school courtyard with flowers.

"Ten thousand," I said.

Cormac was sitting on the floor with his back against the bolted door, his long legs stretched out in front of him.

"Ten thousand what?"

"Dollars. That's double. I pay you to tell Tino you never found me."

"You have ten thousand dollars in that dress?"

"I have a trust fund I can't touch until I'm twenty-one."

"Then you have nothing."

"I have my mother's pearls. They're in my room in Milton, and I know where my father keeps the key to the safe."

He gave a short laugh, not a happy one.

"Princess, you can't go back for the pearls. You'd be in the back of a car before you reached the stairs."

"Stop calling me princess."

"What would you like instead?"

"Livia."

"Livia," he said, as though he were testing the weight of it.

It was the first time I had heard him say my name in four years of sharing a hallway.

The boathouse was cold.

My dress was thin, and my teeth had started to chatter before I noticed.

Cormac shrugged out of his Hartwell jacket and tossed it across the floor.

"Put it on."

"I'm fine."

"You're blue. Put it on."

I put it on.

It was warm from his body and it smelled like soap and old leather.

It came down to my knees.

I tucked my hands into the sleeves and watched him from the dark.

"Why do they call you that?" I asked. "The God of Pain."

"Because a kid on the wrestling team broke my hand in tenth grade and I finished the match."

"That's it?"

"It was a good match."

"Did it hurt?"

"Yes."

"So you do feel it."

"Everyone feels it," he said. "I just don't give it to people for free."

I looked at the line of his shoulders under his thin shirt.

There was a pale scar along his forearm, and a second one that crossed the back of his hand.

"Who did those?"

"Different people."

"Do you ever answer a question with a whole sentence?"

"Not if I can help it."

I laughed.

I had not expected to laugh, not tonight, and the sound surprised both of us.

His grey eyes came up, and for a moment he almost smiled.

Then he looked away at the shells hanging in the dark.

"Go to sleep, Maradei."

"Livia."

"Livia. Sleep."

"Where will you be?"

"Right here."

"On the floor?"

"I've slept on worse."

I lay down on a stack of folded sail covers, with his jacket pulled up to my chin.

For a long time I stared at the green roof beams and listened to the river slap at the dock.

I thought about my father's face, and the diamond falling to the bottom of the glass.

I thought about my brother.

At some point I heard Cormac's breathing change, slow and deep.

I turned my head.

He was sitting upright with his arms crossed over his chest and his chin dropped down.

He had not moved from the door.

He had put himself between me and the entire night, and then he had fallen asleep doing it.

I should have been afraid of him.

He was a boy who took money to bring girls like me to men like Tino.

Instead I fell asleep watching the scar in his eyebrow rise and fall with his breath.

I woke to grey light through the high windows.

Cormac was already standing, tying his shoes.

"Seven fifteen," he said. "First bell is at eight. If you want to disappear, today is the day to do it in a crowd."

"Go to school?"

"Where else would you go? Tino's men are watching your house, the train station and your aunt's."

"How do you know about my aunt?"

"Because I read the list."

He handed me a bundle of cloth from behind the oar rack.

A spare Hartwell blazer, a grey skirt, a pair of lost-and-found shoes that were half a size too big.

"Nobody looks twice at a girl in uniform," he said.

"That is almost clever."

"It's very clever. Turn around."

I changed behind a stack of oars, and he stared at the wall with remarkable dedication.

We walked up the hill together, ten feet apart.

The campus was waking up.

Buses were pulling in and seniors drifted across the lawn with coffee cups.

A girl I knew from French waved at me.

For one stupid second, I thought it might work.

Then I saw the flowers.

There were two hundred of them, white roses, banked along the steps of the main hall like a funeral.

And in the middle of the roses, in a navy suit with his hands folded, stood Tino Dellarocca, smiling at me across the courtyard.

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