My Mate's Last Message Wasn't for Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Two Hundred Messages

Pip drags Seren through the group chat flood and Margot's public tears, until a letter from the bursar says her tuition fund has been pulled.

By evening my phone had two hundred and six unread messages.

I sat cross-legged on my bed in the east dorm and watched the number climb while Pip ate noodles out of the pot on the other bed.

"Read me one," she said.

"No."

"Read me the worst one. I'll do the voice."

I held the phone out to her.

She took it, cleared her throat, and put on a deep, wounded tone that sounded nothing like Niles and exactly like him.

"Seren, I'm not angry, I'm only worried about how this affects Margot."

"That's the first one," I said.

"It's a good one." She scrolled. "There's forty of those. Then Margot has posted on the dorm board."

"What did she post?"

Pip turned the screen toward me.

Margot had written, in her round, warm hand: Some people leave their closest friends the day before they turn twenty-one and call it growing up. I'm not mad. I only hope she's okay.

Under it were nineteen replies.

Seven of them said I was a monster, and the rest said the funeral doll was the weirdest birthday gift they had ever heard of.

"Look at the last one," Pip said, grinning with sauce on her chin.

The last reply was from a second-year boy I'd never met.

You got a stuffed wolf and said burn it yourself? Legend.

I laughed, and it surprised me how much it hurt in my chest to do it.

"You laugh like you haven't done it in a while," Pip said.

"I haven't."

"Okay." She set the pot down. "I'm going to ask one question, and you can lie to me. What happened? Yesterday you were studying for the lab quiz and apologizing to Niles for breathing. Today you're a different woman."

I looked at her round, honest face.

I could not tell her that I had died old and sorry, so I told her the part that was true.

"I watched them for three years," I said. "They talk past me. Every conversation turns into something I'm not allowed into. I decided I was done being the one who asks if they've eaten."

Pip was quiet for the length of a breath.

Then she got up, crossed the room, and sat down on my bed and put her arm around me.

She smelled of noodles and cheap soap.

"Good," she said. "I never liked how he looks at her. I thought it was my business to say nothing."

"It was."

"It really wasn't. Next time I'll say it."

My phone buzzed in my hand with a new message.

Niles: I'm outside the east door. Please come down and talk to me.

I put the phone on the blanket, face down.

"Not answering?"

"Not tonight."

Pip nodded and did not push.

A minute later there was a knock.

We both looked at the door.

It was too soft to be Niles and too early for the hall monitor.

I opened it.

A runner from the bursar's office stood there in a green coat, holding an envelope with a wax seal.

"Seren Strangways? Signature, please."

I signed.

The envelope was thicker than I expected, and the seal was a small grey wolf's head I did not know.

I opened it standing in the doorway.

The letter was typed on heavy paper.

Dear Miss Strangways. The Friend of the Lab Fund has withdrawn its support for your studies, effective immediately. Your tuition for the coming term is due in ten days. A payment plan is not available for students outside the moon-vein program.

It was signed by the Ormond family office.

I read it twice.

For three years I had thought the academy paid my tuition out of kindness, because I was a loyal student and Niles's mate.

Now I understood that the Ormonds had paid it, and that Niles had let me think otherwise.

"What does it say?" Pip asked.

I handed her the letter.

She read it with her lips moving, and her face went from pink to white.

"They can't do this. Your father is a ferry pilot. He can't pay that."

"He can't."

"This is revenge! You said no to Niles for one day!"

"It's leverage," I said. "He is telling me where to come back to."

Pip crumpled the paper in one hand, which was a mistake because I needed the number on it.

I took it back and smoothed it flat against the doorframe.

The sum was exactly as large as I remembered it from my first life, when I had never needed to look.

I could pay it by selling every dress I owned and never dancing again, or I could take the other offer.

I had been trying not to think about the other offer all evening.

"Name your price," Cormick Vaux had said.

I had told him I needed the night to think.

Downstairs, Niles was still waiting at the east door in the cold.

I stood at my window and watched him lift his face toward my light.

Then I picked up my coat.

"Where are you going?" Pip said.

"To the Greywater Hall," I said. "To name my price."

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