Greymoor Academy: I Accidentally Bonded With Four Lycan Royals!

Chapter 254: 254. The Competition Ii

Maisie

We turned and Juliette was waving as she made her way over through the frenzied crowd, her hands clutching the straps of her bag tightly.

I barely got a word in before she threw her arms around my neck and pressed me into a tight embrace. ”Mon ami,” she whispered against my neck. ”I’m sorry I couldn’t drop by at the mansion to see you. Quinn said you were resting. Do you feel better now?”

I nodded with a smile. It felt good to have Juliette back on my side. ”Much.”

”I might have dropped by this morning, but I was looking for Philip.” Her expression turned guilty. ”I was frightened I lost him and even more frightened on how to tell you. I couldn’t find him for five hours, Maisie–”

”Who’s Philip?”

Our gaze snapped to Jericho at the sudden hostility in his voice.

A grin of mischief spread along Juliette’s lips. ”Maisie’s new boyfriend.”

Jericho went rigid.

”He’s dark,” she continued and I wondered if she had a death wish, because Jericho’s eyes were starting to darken and she really didn’t seem to care about that. ”Has only the most beautiful green eyes ever. He’s even cuter than you, Jericho. And even better, he has a tail.”

”A tail?” Jericho repeated with a frown. Then all of the tension drained out of him, and he let out something close to a chuckle. ”It’s the cat, isn’t it?”

Juliette nodded happily.

”So, did you find him?”

I wagered she did not. It was highly likely he’d poofed to somewhere new when she wasn’t looking.

Gruer wasn’t the kind of man who liked to stay in one place for too long. It was Germany one night. Santorini the next. Singapore after that. He kept popping all over like this was his world and we were all living in it.

I didn’t want to break her heart since she really seemed to like the cat, but she was probably never going to see him again.

Which was good for her–

”Yes,” she beamed. ”Turned out he was in my closet the whole time. He was swaddled and hidden among with my underwear.”

What in the world...

”You’re sure you don’t want your cat back, Maisie?” She asked with huge, pleading eyes that said she totally wouldn’t have returned the cat even if I’d told her to.

A small purr came from behind her and I stared at her in disbelief. ”You brought him with you?”

A furry tail peeked out of her bag pack and curled around a lock of her hair. She smiled sheepishly. ”He wouldn’t let me leave my room alone. And I can’t say no to him when he’s looking at me with those beautiful eyes.”

Jericho and I exchanged odd looks.

She thought demon-green eyes were beautiful?

Clearly, me and my friends needed seperately planned trips to psych wards after all of this was over.

”Yeah, you can totally keep him,” I hadn’t finished saying before she threw her arms around me again and kissed both of my cheeks soundly.

****

Jericho’s office was an impressive space of endless shelves and tasteful oak. His rich, dark mahogany desk was tidy with stacks after stacks of books, files, a name tag, a photo frame that was turned down to hide the picture in the frame, a cute little fountain of marking pens and pencils, and sheets arranged carefully, like whoever did it had some severe case of OCD.

Even the shelves didn’t have a single tome out of place. It was all dark and masculine, and it also did nothing to help my ovaries that I could smell him around every corner.

It distracted me so much, he’d been talking to me for the last ten minutes and I couldn’t hear jack shit.

”Adams?” he said when I didn’t respond to his question.

No. I was too busy staring at his mouth.

”I’m sorry, c-could you repeat that?” I stammered, cheeks heated.

He reclined in his seat. His muscles strained against his crisp white shirt. He had dropped his coat around the chair behind him the moment we stepped inside the office.

The air conditioning was blasting through the space but it felt like I was being smoldered by the flames of hell for all the vile things I had been thinking about since he shut the door.

Jericho pushed the papers towards me. ”All eight assessments came back with excellent scores, Adams. Which I would consider impressive if it wasn’t abnormal. Not even the students who spent the full academic year scored that high.”

I blinked. ”You think I cheated?”

His calloused fingers laced together on the desk. ”Unless you’ve been studying every day in the last nine months, which we both know you haven’t, it will be extremely difficult to explain this to the school board.”

I folded my arms. ”That sounds like a ’you’ problem. If I took the entrance exams into Greymoor studying with an impossible time frame, believe me when I say this was a walk in the park.”

He didn’t buy it. ”One would almost think you were prepared for this, Adams.” He leaned over in his seat, eyes taking me apart piece by piece. ”Mercer bringing you back was no coincidence, was it?”

I kept my expression empty, but my heart had skipped a beat.

”What are you really doing here, Adams?” he asked. ”Why did you really come back?”

My palms went cold and clammy. How he’d drawn up the truth so fast from a bunch of test scores was almost alarming.

But it was Jericho. Give the man a branch and a rope and he could make a boat out of it.

”I’m not sure what you’re talking about–”

The doorknob turned. ”Mr. Ivanov?” came a feminine, almost sultry voice.

My head snapped up as a woman stepped into the doorway.

I remembered her from practice yesterday, and from the hallway. Zaytsev. The woman from the Council who had been batting her pretty lashes at Jericho.

But it wasn’t the memory or her heavily perfumed scent that set me off. It was the way she was dressed that had my Lycan snarling possessively in my chest.