The Seduction Game novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Assembly

The whole school filled the chapel by five to two.

Four hundred students sat in the long pews with their coats still on, because the heat had been turned down for the winter.

The candles in the side aisles were lit, and the stained windows were pale gray with snowlight.

I sat in the fifth row between Hattie and Nash.

Hattie was holding my left hand so tightly that my fingers had gone white.

"I'm not nervous," she whispered. "I'm just going to die a little."

"Please don't."

"I'll try."

The center table from the dining hall had come in together and sat down in the third row, as they always did.

Camille's seat was empty.

I watched the people around it.

A girl who had laughed at me on move-in day looked at the empty seat, and then at her own hands.

Another girl moved her bag, very slightly, into the space.

By the time the Dean came to the lectern, a gap two seats wide had opened on either side of the empty place.

Nobody had said a word about it.

That was how the whole school saw it happen, without anyone speaking.

The Dean waited for silence, and she did not have to wait long.

"This morning, during the Founders' Examination, a student attempted to plant a violation on another student," she said. "The attempt was recorded."

A hum went through the pews.

"I will not read names. The chairman will speak to you instead."

The chairman walked up to the lectern with a sheet of paper in his hand.

He set it down and did not look at it again.

He was a silver-haired man in a gray suit, and he looked, for the first time since I'd met him, like somebody's tired father.

"This morning I listened to the recording from the examination hall, and I did not need it explained," he said.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Seduction Game from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.