Dare Me: A Bully Romance (Legends of the Ashwood Institute Book 1)

  DARE ME

  DARE ME

  By

  Jayla Kane

  Dare Me by Jayla Kane Published by Amazon Digital Services, LLC

  © 2019 Jayla Kane

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact the author.

  Cover by designacover from fiverr.com

  Note from the author: the following work is a product of fantasy. It is not meant to mimic real-life situations or people and should not be regarded as anything more than entertainment. All acts depicted in this work feature consenting adults and are fictional and should be treated as such; the viewer is responsible for the legal ramifications of engaging with the text in the place where they live. No laws were broken in the country of its origin (US).

  Author’s Note

  I would like to include a warning in the beginning of this book: it is a dark paranormal romance with mature sexual scenarios that include challenging power dynamics and behavior that only belong in the pages of a romance novel of its kind. It is a bully romance that operates as a vehicle of fantasy. Please do not read it if you find the idea of these things immediately unromantic—you will not enjoy it. There are many fantastic books available to you, and I sincerely hope you put this one down and find another.

  Furthermore, this book is part of a series. It is not a stand-alone. And to once again reiterate: it is meant for adults, not younger audiences.

  Take care, reader—

  JK

  Prelude…

  I have a secret.

  I know where the body is buried--I helped do it myself.

  And somehow... He knows I know. And he's going to torment me until I tell... But that's because he doesn't understand that the truth could destroy me. Or maybe he does. Maybe he just doesn't care.

  Maybe he wants to finish the job--but I'm not going to make it easy on him. I was chosen as Ashwood Institute's Sineater, and I'll give him a fight he'll never forget... Even if it means ripping my own heart out in the end. He won't win unless he jumps in the fire with me.

  No one can know...

  About that hidden grave.

  About my hidden heart.

  About the fire he lights in my soul.

  No one can know.

  Chapter One

  Raven

  I tapped my pencil on the edge of my desk and gave Christa my sloppiest, cheesiest smile—the big one I practiced in the mirror for teachers, for my mom. For the whole damn world, really. But it didn’t fool anybody who actually knew me, and unfortunately—or fortunately?—my best friend since freshman year knew me pretty damn well. I felt the grin sliding off of my face almost as soon as she saw it, and sheepishly laid the pencil down instead of letting it continue to drum out my nervousness with a desperate sounding tap-tap-tap.

  Oh, shit, I thought, and readied myself.

  This is what I get for not just admitting right at the beginning of the summer that I wasn’t leaving. That I was skipping out on the most coveted placement an eighteen year old middle-class small town pariah could possibly hope for—and the only person who could possibly understand was Zelle, who could give two shits where I went to college.

  I got this entirely too meaningful look, a perfect cocktail of disappointment and exasperation, and an awkward good-bye with my best friend of four years.

  Cool.

  “Seriously?” Christa cut her eyes at me before rolling them so hard at the ceiling I thought her glare might melt the ancient plaster. The glow-in-the-dark stars I’d put there with my sister when I was ten were probably the only thing keeping it over my head. “Raven… You never could say no to a dare. Jesus.” The edge in her voice wasn’t the only clue that she was really worried; her fingers echoed my nervous tap-tap-tap as they drummed on her bicep, her arms crossed defensively over her chest.

  “Christa, come on,” I told her, and dropped the pencil altogether so I could reach over and squeeze her hand, leaning across the desk to do it. She let me, her gaze now trained on the floor, her expression deliberately blank. Christa was gorgeous, with beautiful tan skin, chocolate wavy hair that curled perfectly around her sweetheart’s face, and a brain that rivaled Einstein’s. She squeezed me back, those big dark eyes blinking at me with a sadness she didn’t bother to hide.

  “This is stupid—really stupid. You’re doing something dangerous, and for what?” I couldn’t tell her. No one could know.

  Except Zelle, because she already did.

  “I’m just putting my name in for it,” I told her, but she blew out a frustrated breath and yanked her hand back so she could throw it up in the air, giving a little jump to begin pacing properly, with real oomph. I knew she’d been wanting to do that since I told her I was volunteering to be considered for Sineater two minutes ago.

  She probably guessed part of the reason why; we were friends, and secrets were hardly my forte. But there were certain things I just couldn’t tell her—couldn’t tell anybody. She knew about my obsession with the Ashwood Society, knew I’d been probably been pretending to waffle about leaving my tiny home-town to attend Harvard, or stay here and go to the Ashwood Institute… And possibly, hopefully be chosen to join the Society. She knew, because she was too brilliant not to—but she couldn’t intuit everything. Some things went way beyond even best-friend telepathy. Some things contradicted common sense, defied all logic, denied gravity itself.

  That was me, right now. And she knew it, and didn’t know why.

  And I couldn’t tell her a damn thing.

  “It’s all just so dumb,” she snapped, getting worked up. Her pacing was picking up speed. “You should be going to Harvard with me—not the Institute. Sure, it’s a decent enough school, and sure you’ll be able to get any internship you want, but it’s not fucking Harvard, Raven, which you got into.” She heaved a sigh, still staring up at the ceiling, her hands wringing the air as if she wished they were currently wrapped around my neck. “You’re playing with fire—being the Sineater isn’t a cakewalk for anyone and for you—”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said nonchalantly; I had no idea if it would. In fact, I was pretty sure it would be at least fifty percent disaster, if not slightly more—if I wasn’t one of the four most hated people in Ashwood that might not be true, if he wasn’t practically a shoe-in for Game Master that might not be true, if the rumors were all just rumors and nothing was real and I was wasting my time, that might actually be safer in some ways… But considering how things were… Yeah. Disaster. “I swear, Christa—it’s not your ass on the line. Lighten up.”

  “Okay, sure,” she said, glaring at me this time instead of the ceiling as she crossed her arms. “’Cause that works.” She had a point, and I tapped my pen on the edge of my desk again, completely out of excuses and flippant remarks. If our positions were reversed—not that they ever could be—I would be dragging her outside and locking her in the trunk of my car until I actually got to Harvard. She was dead-on. Worrying about each other was kind of what we did; she was brave for being my friend, and I loved her. And I owed her for that bravery, too—it wasn’t like being associated with one of the Creepy Kellers came without a price. Christa stuck by me through thick and thin. Mostly thin.

  I owed her as much of the truth as I could give her.

  “You’re right,” I finally said, and met her eyes. “It’s a gamble. A big one.”

  “It’s a suicide mission,” she told me, and then came over and gently placed her hands on either side of my face, staring into my
eyes. “Seriously, Rae—doesn’t Harvard have a good enough occult section for you?”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes. The Ashwood Institute was not as fancy as Harvard in most ways, although it cost just as much money and had just as many swanky, uptight prep school assholes strutting around campus… Well, almost as many. The real difference was that whereas Harvard took in, theoretically, the cream of the crop, the top of America’s fanciest-shmanciest boarding school elite who were groomed for MBAs from kindergarten… The Ashwood Institute attracted those with the same blueblood pedigrees (and bank accounts) but with less stellar grades. The problem children, if you will—the kids who rocketed through four prep schools in a year, who got expelled for doing too many lines of blow off of the maid’s ass, who accidentally drove their lambos into the water polo pool—you get me. That’s who went to Ashwood.

  That, and people who were obsessed with the occult. Like me.

  My mom is a witch.

  Or at least she claims she is.

  “I don’t want it to get worse,” Christa suddenly burst out, and I had nothing to say to that at all—least of all the truth.

  It took me a minute, but then I got up and looked her in the eye, putting my hands on her shoulders. I never should’ve been flippant—I’m such a shitty liar. It’s like a curse. “I don’t think it can,” I told her honestly, and she bit her lip, staring at me.

  “What if he—”

  “I seriously can’t imagine it being much different,” I told her, but she shook her head at me and shoved my hands off of her shoulders, jumping up again to start rapidly pacing back and forth between my desk and the window overlooking the Rose Avenue below. The light was bright, the weather balmy; we were getting a little taste of autumn, even though it was still August.

  “Really? If they elect him Game Master, and you’re the Sineater… Rae, he’ll own you. Do you know what I heard? Last year the Game Master was that prick Tanglewood from Connecticut, and he got the Sineater pregnant.” Christa stopped pacing to glare at me. “She had to have a fucking abortion, Rae—and I know about it, a complete stranger, and a hundred other complete strangers. That’s the life of the Sineater.”

  “Okay, so first of all: that’s bullshit,” I said, sitting down on the edge of my desk and crossing my arms, deciding a logical approach would be best. “That’s a lie, a rumor. Because if it’s not, she’s a fucking idiot—and one thing we can guess about someone who got into the Society as the Sineater is that they’re not a fucking idiot. Why the hell wasn’t she on the pill if he was making her fuck him? Why isn’t he in jail?”

  “Rae, that’s a shitty thing to say. And besides, you’re not listening—”

  “No, Christa,” I told her adamantly. “All of that stuff is crap the Society spreads around to scare people off. There’s no way in hell that’s allowed—even in Ashwood, if you rape a girl and get her knocked up, there are consequences. I’m sorry. That’s just rumor-mongering bullshit.”

  “Alright, then let’s talk about the stories where the Game Master doesn’t rape the Sineater,” she retorted, raising her eyebrow. “Like Darryl Jameson eating dogshit off of peoples’ front lawns two Christmases ago.”

  “He ate a bite of one—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Christa said, covering her mouth as if she were about to puke, then pointing at me once she’d recovered with the same defiantly enraged expression on her face as before. “He did it, is the point. And the year before that, the Sineater went to jail for being drunk in public after pissing in all the fountains, and his family had to pay those crazy fines—do you remember that?”

  “Yeah, but I’d do that for free,” I said, fighting the grin on my face. The woes of the rich kids the Society generally chose didn’t really make me sad for them, if you catch my drift. The Sineater is the only position that is open to someone from the lower socioeconomic classes, for whatever reason, and both of the guys Christa had mentioned were grade-A asshats that went home and wept into their trust funds. I couldn’t remember the last time the Society chose someone like me—just that they had. And if I was ever going to join, this was my one and only chance. “If the Game Master tells me to, I’ll just record it and play it for the police so his rich ass can pay the fines instead. Problem solved.” Sure. Because it was that simple.

  “And then you’ll never get in the Vault,” she said pointedly, and I bit my lip. She was right; everybody knew the basic rules of a secret society: it was secret.

  The Society ran the Ashwood Institute, and everybody knew it; that was out in the open… If the town of Ashwood, conspiracy theorists online, and scholars on medieval and American witchcraft counted as ‘open.’ A secret organization that dated back to the founding of our town, it supposedly had the largest collection of occult objects, books, and general knowledge in North America--it even had a Wikipedia page, which is hilarious because if you strolled down Rose Avenue and asked literally anyone in Ashwood, the Society doesn’t exist. It can’t exist in modern society, because all its rules are stuck in the Middle Ages—which is probably when it was really founded, and how they got such an incredible library of witchy shit—and won’t let women hold any positions of power without a serious blueblood pedigree and a boatload of money. They do let women join, at least, but the highest position a lowly, scholarship-recipient local girl like myself can hold if they are allowed to enter the Society is Sineater. The Game Master’s assistant, right-hand, and, for all intents and purposes, slave. The rumors were ridiculous; no one in the Society was actually above the law. They were just campus royalty, with more than the usual dose of jack-ass superpower.

  But the reason Christa was worried—even though the rumors were upsetting, I’ll admit, because there was no way in hell I was eating any goddamn dogshit—was because Jacob Warfield was probably going to be the new Game Master.

  And he hated me.

  If Jacob Warfield was Game Master, there’s no way I would be eating dogshit. I’d be eating his. Off of a plate, every night, in the center of campus with a spotlight right on my face so everybody could see.

  Game Masters didn’t always treat their Sineaters badly; it wasn’t exactly tradition. But sometimes the pairing was a way of checking a particularly blood thirsty Game Master, a means of forcing their attention in one direction instead of letting their games run rampant on campus, disrupting ice cream socials or whatever rich brats worried about—thus the title. But I needed to be Sineater.

  I needed to get in the Vault.

  So I had to be Sineater. It was the only position that would available to someone like me, and I was perfect for it: excellent grades, relatively poor, fresh meat on campus, if not in town.

  I had to get into the Vault.

  And Christa was right; I would put up with almost anything to do it. Maybe not dogshit—I might find a way to fake that, though, and just about anything else your garden variety rich boy could think up.

  But not Jacob.

  Jake.

  That was another thing entirely.

  “It would be different if it wasn’t him,” she continued, reading my thoughts on my face as if it were an open book. “But he’s dangerous, Rae.”

  He was. In general, Jacob Warfield was one of the angriest people alive. He’d been a hard kid since we were young, before we understood how strange it was that our parents were friends—my mother the wanna-be witch, his parents the financial analysts. He had good reason, back then; back then, I’d been a lot more than just sympathetic to his rich boy woes. We grew up together, played together… But I couldn’t dwell on those memories now.

  I had to focus on the more recent ones—the ones where he tormented me. Day in and day out.

  Our town was small, and we attended gigantic county schools where everyone was bussed in from all over the place. But even in a high school with 1500 students, miles and miles away from Ashwood, he found me. Every day.

  And every day, he found a way to hurt me.

  Shoving ice through the crac
ks in my locker so it would melt and ruin my books. Framing me for bullshit so I was constantly serving detention. Pelting me with food in just about every setting you can imagine, publishing my phone number on craigslist, starting terrible rumors everyone was too eager to believe—he got away with a lot, being ungodly rich, regrettably charming when it mattered, and horribly good-looking. A lot of what went on was never directly connected to him, as he was always shielded by scads of minions; besides, it probably wasn’t hard to convince people to join in the fun of torturing one of the Creepy Kellers. By the time we graduated, Jacob Warfield and I were at outright war.

  I was better with school. Always have been. I made better grades, made better connections with the administration, the teachers—all of the adults who actually decide what happens to you once you leave the hell of high school behind. And I found Christa, a genius who helped me decipher anything I couldn’t figure out on my own.

  So when the time came, I got accepted to Harvard… And the Institute.

  I wasn’t sure he would go there; I thought he might not go to university at all, maybe pull a rich-boy stunt and move to LA for a while, or Amsterdam. Somewhere he could splash cash at pussy and seedy sycophants and just generally enjoy the life he’d settled on since his mom and dad died and he gave up being a normal human being altogether. But no—he was attending the Institute, right here in our small home town, the only major landmark besides the historical marker in the center of town mentioning we were founded by witches.

  My plan was to enroll at the Institute and become the Sineater so I could get access to the Vault; maybe by second semester I’d have enough research to do what I needed to do, finally ditch Ashwood, and go to Harvard. By sophomore year at the latest, I planned on living in Boston. But that was before I knew Jacob Warfield was staying here.