All the other students were probably sitting in the limo-bus St. R’s got every year, already eager for a break from the monotony of classes that had only just started. Even Jaya. Thinking about her made him feel less alone. It didn’t make any sense, considering how they bickered about very basic values. They had seemingly nothing in common and yet… Jaya was as tied to her family’s expectations of her as he was to his. For completely different reasons, but still. She was in a straitjacket of their rules and decrees too, even if she didn’t know it. And knowing Jaya, even if she realized it, she’d probably enjoy wearing the straitjacket as part of her royal couture. It was ironic, too, that he should feel any sense of camaraderie with her, considering her bloodline and the harbinger of his curse she’d brought with her.

Grey steeled himself for what he was about to do. Taking a deep breath, he walked down the empty hall and made a right into an interconnected hallway. The girls’ dorms were all here, twenty-five doors spooling out in front of him. Grey walked forward, his eye on Jaya’s door. It was an unspoken St. R’s custom that no one ever locked their doors. Friends came and went as they pleased, and if anyone needed privacy, they’d just hang a tie from their doorknob. The administration wasn’t crazy about this, but there wasn’t much they could do to force people to lock their doors.

Grey had never particularly cared about the open-door culture one way or another. Right now, though, he was infinitely grateful that he could steal into Jaya’s room unnoticed. A sudden pulse of guilt and shame heated his face as the doorknob turned easily under his hand and he slipped inside. He’d never considered himself a thief. He’d never ordinarily do something as underhanded, as dishonest, as taking another person’s belongings without asking them. But these were not ordinary circumstances. This was literally life and death.

Jaya had said at the mixer that she might begin keeping the pendant in her room because the rubies kept falling out. And then he’d noticed that she hadn’t been wearing it these past couple of days. Once he’d realized that, Grey knew what he had to do—what any normal person in this situation would do. He wasn’t sure at all that she’d left it in her room today, but he also knew he’d never have another opportunity like this one. She was going to Aspen to ski—if she was really worried about the necklace, she’d leave it here. That was all he had to go on, and it was thin as a newly formed skin of ice, but he was hanging on to it nonetheless.