Spycraft Academy by B. Miles (sites to read books for free .txt) 📗

Relief blew through Sam like a soft gale. Perfect memory. Right. She just proved how valuable a crewmember she was.

"Then we have a plan," Sam said. "Mattie and I will get the ingredients. Drina, Rosin, you two set up a brew station and wait on us to get back. We'll do it tonight."

"Sure, yeah," Drina stood up and walked to the door. "Great plan, captain. Now can we go eat? I'm about to get grumpy from hunger. You don't want to see me grumpy."

Sam smiled at the back of her head and gestured for Rosin and Mattie to follow the brunette. It was settled. They'd do it before Apelles had a chance to do any more damage.

18

Getting into a classroom after hours turned out to be rather easy. The patrols had lessened considerably, and locks had stopped being challenging for the two of them by the time Sam hit puberty.

It took ten minutes to get from the dorm and into the poison master's storeroom. The most difficult aspect of the mission was trying to find everything Rosin had written down for them. On top of the actual brewing ingredients, they also needed tools to brew with, and those were difficult to find among the jars and packaged plants, powders, and liquids. It took them the better part of half an hour to find everything and shove it in Mattie's satchel.

They brought a tiny sliver of a candle for light, just enough to make out Franklin's elegant scrawl across each label. Sam browsed the shelf in front of him, not looking for anything in particular while Mattie crouched a few feet away, gathering the last ingredient and tucking it away.

His eye snagged on a small jar stuffed with shriveled grey matter. It was labeled 'Visier Bellot.' So that's what it looked like.

His attention was drawn away from the shelf when Mattie stood up with a satisfied smile. They were done here; Rosin and Drina would be tapping their feet by now. Well, Drina would. Rosin would probably be wringing her hands.

The deep shadows from the candlelight filled the hollows of Mattie's cheeks and the ridge of her brow, casting her bright blue eyes into the darkness. Sometimes, in rare moments of quiet, Sam would look at her and remember how breathtaking she was. Like now. She caught him staring and gave a rare, shy smile, tucking her auburn locks behind her ear.

This was the first time they'd been truly alone since they got here. Even when they weren't surrounded by the other students, Drina was always around, and if Drina wasn't around, Fletch was lurking nearby. And now Rosin would be too.

He didn't mind it. He liked being surrounded by people he gave a shit about and who cared about him in return, but it meant the days of just him and Mattie were essentially gone. This may be the last chance he got to talk about what was going on within the crew—at least in private—for a while.

He didn't know what was going through Mattie's mind on the subject of Drina and Rosin. Mattie's behavior was abnormal, their crew dynamics were abnormal, and everything Mattie had done thus far in regard to Drina and Rosin was unexpected, shocking, and without context.

Maybe she welcomed the other girls into their relationship because she had some misguided notion that he would be unhappy without them. Maybe she did it for fear of losing him. He'd never, never given her any indication that he would want an arrangement like this. It wasn't that he minded it, quite the opposite, but he'd never even considered something like this before. Likewise, Mattie had never given any indication that it was something she had ever considered.

Mattie was always good at hiding the things she felt and thought, buried behind veneers of smug smirks and casual shrugs, but they'd been partners since they were children, and Sam learned long ago how to find the things she tried to conceal. They knew everything about one another; their pasts, likes, dislikes. The way they thought, the way they worked, the things that made them smile, the things that made them cry.

He should be able to guess her mind as he usually could, but in this, Mattie was a stranger.

Mattie's shy smile turned confused and inquisitive. He was staring at her, searching her face, trying to decipher what she was thinking. Her eyes bounced from his nose to his eyes to his chin, probably trying to do the same.

Something nameless and formless passed between them. Something that made the air in the storeroom thin and cold. A great distance had stretched between them, shoving each of them to opposing edges of a vast canyon, uncertainty and hesitation yawning below them, between them.

He was unsure of where to start. How did one ask whether somebody else was afraid of losing them? How did one ask what this was? This intangible and emotional sensation, this thing that filled his stomach with air and ran up his spine.

"Sam?" Mattie whispered, her voice a little higher than usual.

"What are we doing?" He said, simply blurting the only words he could grab onto.

She knew what he meant. He could tell by the way her eyes widened and her mouth thinned before she looked at the floor, scuffing her shoe. He didn't interrupt her thoughts nor did he elaborate. He just watched her.

"Are you angry?" She asked. "Because if you are, you need to tell me. I'm sorry if you are, I didn't think you would be."

She was turning this around on him. She usually did this to people when she didn't want to answer a question. It was one of her many conversational tricks, turning the attention away from herself and onto the person who was questioning her, making them supply an answer she didn't want to give.

"Oh no," Sam said crossing his arms. "You're not getting out of this one. This wasn't my idea. You're the one that encouraged Rosin to kiss me. Why?