He smirked that sexy, infuriating smirk. “I think I would go . . . home to the Cyclades Islands—to Andros. I haven’t been there since I left.” He paused. “I wonder if anyone is really even there anymore. Not a lot of people lived there when I was there. It wasn’t a very populated island.”

If he’d told me he was secretly a huge fan of One Direction, I wouldn’t have been more surprised by his answer. Based on how harsh his childhood was, I couldn’t imagine him wanting to go back there. “Why there?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just want to see it. Kind of hard to explain.”

I thought about it for a moment and wondered if it had to do with laying to rest the demons of his past. “Would you want—?”

A shout of surprise cut me off, loud and harsh. As my heart stuttered a beat, a horrific cracking sound tore through the quad, a snapping that echoed through the marble statues. A scream, high-pitched and reedy, followed. Then another. I spun around at the same time Seth stepped in front of me, shielding me from whatever was happening.

But it was too late.

I saw it.

“Fucking gods,” Seth muttered.

Horrified, I smacked my hand over my mouth and stumbled a step back, blinking. I thought I was hallucinating what I was seeing, but I wasn’t. It was real.

A body hung in the air, right in front of the training facility, where Seth and I had just walked out. The denim-covered legs hung straight as they swayed back and forth. A chain of some sort was right around the neck that was bent at an unnatural angle.

Someone had hanged himself.

Oh my God, no. My gaze zeroed in on the chest. No. Someone hadn’t hanged himself. He’d been hanged.

On his chest was a piece of paper—a piece of notebook paper stabbed into the chest with some kind of knife. The words were easy to read, even with the red drenching the stomach, and hard to forget.

NO FREE HALFS.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Asmall crowd gathered quickly, their faces a blur. Nausea twisted up my insides and I had to look away. The body—the person—he couldn’t have been any older than me, maybe younger. There was no forgetting his face. The slack jaw. The ghastly pallor. The open, unseeing blue eyes.

“This is so wrong,” a girl said, her voice trembling. “This is so messed up.”

Another girl spoke up. “Oh my gods, that’s Brandon.” She pushed through the cluster of people. Tears filled her eyes. “Someone get him down. Please.” She twisted at the waist, toward some guy in the crowd. “Why isn’t anyone getting him down?”

But Seth was already moving.