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more entertained already.”
    “Let’s say, hypothetically, that I do accept the scholarship. What happens next?”
    Sebastian smirked, as if he hadn’t expected any other response. People probably didn’t say no to him often.
    “Then you’ll go home, pack your things, and a car will arrive for you at precisely nine o’clock.”
    “What are the living arrangements?” I asked.
    My stomach lurched at the thought of transferring schools, no matter how temporary the move.
Ben.
I wouldn’t be able to see him, or Audrey, for that matter, if I was stuck keeping a low profile at Empty Academy while the cops
hopefully
shifted their focus back to the killer with the baseball cap. And okay, if I was being totally honest with myself, the thought of increasing my distance from Ben seriously freaked me out. Things had been
off
with our dynamic for a while, even though I couldn’t quite put my finger on when or why it had shifted. Ben and I still teased and bickered and spent time alone together. I helped explain multiplying fractions to his little brother, Cameron. I even shared my suspicion that his former lab partner, Shelby Thomas, wanted to conduct more than chemistry experiments with him. Nothing had changed. Except now the air between us felt heavily charged with anticipation, as if we were both bracing ourselves for something momentous. But the reason I’d never acted on the impulse to rise up on tip-toes and sneak attack him with a kiss was because it was, well,
Ben
.
    He was the one guy I had always been able to count on. My rock. Whenever my mom went through one of her frantic dating spree phases, determined to find The One she believed was somewhere out there searching for her on whatever new dating app just hit the market, I could always hide out at his place until I was ready to face an empty apartment. It happened frequently enough that his mom considered finding me eating cereal in her kitchen a normal event on a Saturday morning. Ben had been there for me through the Pierre years, the Dimitri era, the Hans episode, and he hadn’t so much as flinched when I told him about my mom’s current flame, Viktor. He had just tugged playfully on the end of my ponytail and said, “I’ll make omelets in the morning with pepper jack cheese.”
    Because he knew that was my favorite.
    Ben was my escape hatch and Audrey was my seatbelt. I
needed
them.
    If that wasn’t incentive enough to stay put, there was also the fact that my mom needed me. I was in charge of cooking and cleaning every time she got her heart broken and resisted climbing out of bed. It was my job to repeat over and over that she was a great mom, that she was going to be fine, that we would both be fine, every time she became withdrawn and secretive.
    I couldn’t do any of that from Emptor Academy. I didn’t care if the dorm rooms there came equipped with four-poster beds and enormous clawfoot bathtubs. It was only a matter of time before my mom was completely suckered in by her boyfriend. Again.
    Ben might think I was a hopeless romantic, but I knew better. I loved my romance novels because the hero
never
robbed the heroine on her daughter’s birthday. There was safety in a happily ever after ending. You could trust your heart in the pages of a romance novel.
    Watching my mom date loser after loser had dulled my own optimism.
    “Emptor Academy provides communal living at its finest,” Sebastian said, unaware that I’d already considered and rejected his offer. “You’ll be sharing a room with Kayla. She’s very clean. She’ll make you feel right at home.”
    I was momentarily distracted by the mental image of a faceless girl who obsessively wiped down windowsills. She probably wore Prada while she sprayed the doorknob with disinfectant.
    “And you would know this how?” I asked disdainfully.
    He leaned in closer and I caught a heady whiff of male arrogance, which should have been repulsive but somehow wasn’t.
    “Because—as previously