Initiated Read online

  Initiated

  A reverse harem bully romance

  Steffanie Holmes

  Copyright © 2019 by Steffanie Holmes

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design: Amanda Rose

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Initiated

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  From the Author

  Want more reverse harem from Steffanie Holmes

  Agatha Christie meet Black Books

  Excerpt: A Dead and Stormy Night

  Possessed

  About the Author

  Initiated

  They were my tormenters. Now, they’re all that stands between me and my nightmares.

  Trey, Quinn, and Ayaz—the king, the joker, and the enigma.

  Three guys who’ve flipped my life upside down,

  set my heart on fire,

  and shown me that nothing is as it seems.

  Last quarter, they broke me. I thought that was the worst it could get at Miskatonic Prep.

  I was wrong.

  Twenty years ago, a tragedy changed this school forever.

  Arrogance turned this place of learning into a house of horrors.

  Greed awoke something from the deep.

  And that something waits, dead but dreaming, beneath the gymnasium.

  Waiting for its next target.

  Waiting for me.

  I want to trust the guys.

  I want their friendship.

  I want so much more.

  And right now, I need their help. But after what they did to me, how can I let them in?

  Secrets. Lies. Sacrifice.

  Welcome to my nightmare.

  Welcome to Miskatonic Prep.

  HP Lovecraft meets Cruel Intentions in book 2 of this dark paranormal reverse harem bully romance. Warning: Not for the faint of heart – this story of three broken bad boys and the girl who stood her ground contains dark themes, crazed cultists, books bound in human skin, high-school drama, swoon-worthy sex, and potential triggers.

  Can’t wait to find out what happens next? Grab book 3 – Possessed!

  To James,

  Who didn’t just stand up for me,

  but taught me how to stand up for myself

  “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.“

  – HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

  Chapter One

  “You saw the stones,” Ayaz said. “You know that Quinn, Trey, and I are dead. We’re all dead.”

  In my hand, the lantern flared. Flames licked the edge of my hand. Heat stabbed my skin like a knife, sending me back to another time and another fire that tore my world apart.

  I screamed and dropped the lantern. It rolled against the headstone, and the fire flickered out. Darkness consumed me, making the looming trees and the three guys standing around me all the more menacing.

  “Hazy, are you okay?” Quinn’s boots crunched over dead leaves. His hand reached through the gloom and brushed my arm. A hand that was very much alive, very much skin and bone and vein and sinew. The same hand that had touched my face so tenderly in the grotto, that had pulled me closer as he’d kissed me like a fire starved of oxygen…

  I should be terrified. I should be running as fast as I can away from these psychopaths.

  Instead, I was angry as fuck.

  I leapt to my feet and planted my hands on Quinn’s chest. He reached for my wrists, probably thinking I was clinging to him in some terrified stupor. Instead, I shoved him. Hard. Quinn grunted as he stumbled over his own gravestone and landed on his ass in a pile of leaves.

  “What the hell are you guys playing at?” I screamed. “You have been nothing but cruel to me since I arrived at this school. Now you drag me out here in the middle of the night, try to drown me in the ocean, and then you tell me this fucking bullshit story that the teachers are trying to hurt me and that you’re all dead? I’m done with this. It ends tonight.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Trey hissed. My eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and I could just make out the outline of his head. An owl hooted in the trees. Trey spun toward it, his shoulders rigid. He’s scared.

  But why? I’m the one who should be afraid.

  “I’m done taking commands from you, Trey fucking Bloomberg.” I shuffled backward, shifting my weight on my back leg, preparing to run. “The shit you’ve orchestrated goes beyond bullying… it’s fucking assault. I don’t care who your parents are or what you say about me being in danger. I’m in danger from you. I’m going back to Derleth, and I’m reporting all of you. And if Headmistress West doesn’t do anything about it, I’m calling the police.”

  “Hazy, please.” Quinn’s voice ached with emotion. He didn’t move from his pile of leaves. “We can explain everything. But you have to be quiet. They’re probably out looking for you by now. If they catch you here, you’re dead, too.”

  “You can’t possibly expect me to trust you.” Another step back. Moonlight pooled through gaps in the trees. I could make out the lumps of stone on the ground, the rough slope of the hill above. Ayaz shuffled out to the side, trying to close around me. But if I went the other way, I had a clear run toward the gate.

  “She’s right,” Ayaz’s voice cracked. “Of course she can’t trust us. This whole thing was fucking pointless.”

  “What whole thing? You mean the whole, ‘oh, we’re so sorry, Hazel. We’ll make you think we’re remorseful, that maybe there was some fucked-up reason we put you through all of this. And then we’ll drag you outside in the middle of the night to humiliate you in front of the entire school because really, we’re a bunch of dick-weasels.’”

  “I mean the whole thing where we tried to protect you. We tried to save you from ending up like us.” Ayaz’s voice sliced the darkness like a razor. “Now it’s too late. It’s always too late—”

  I sprung into action, flinging my body along a row of graves. So many graves. This cemetery was a lot larger than I expected. My chest burned as I wove between the stones, my feet catching on loose sticks and branches. I stumbled, came down hard on my knee, pulled myself up, kept on running.

  Let’s see you catch me, bully boys. I’d outran gangs, drunk fondlers, and creepy dudes outside Mom’s club. Dante and I once ran twelve blocks without stopping to lose a meth-head with a knife. You live in the Badlands, you get fucking good at running—


  Trey stepped in front of me, his broad chest blocking my exit. Damn lacrosse players. I guess he’s good at running, too. Although he wasn’t breathing heavy, like me. “We’ll explain everything,” he said.

  “Get out of my way,” I growled, lunging forward.

  To my surprise, Trey stepped back, raising his hands in surrender. I shoved past him, sprinting toward the iron fence. A bitter breeze blew up from the ocean below, tossing dead leaves against my legs. Shoes crunched in brittle foliage as the guys followed me.

  “Why’d you let her go?” Quinn wailed, but I didn’t stick around to find out the answer. I flung open the gate and jogged out of the trees.

  Pale moonlight cast an eerie glow over the pleasure garden – the trees bent in the wind, their shadows dancing over the ancient statues, making their features dance and twist. I looked out to my right, toward the top of the cliffs where the edge of the school grounds met the ocean. Flashlight beams swung through the trees. Teachers out looking for someone. For me.

  We’re dead, Hazel. Ayaz’s words repeated in my head.

  We’re all dead.

  I tried to push aside the memories of the horrible things those guys did to me and focus on the weird things I’d seen during my first quarter at Derleth Academy – things I couldn’t explain but that hadn’t held my attention like the immediate threat from the monarchs. The teachers checking the students were out of their dorms so they could sneak down to the gymnasium in black robes. The total lockdown against any kind of internet connection or transmitting device. Loretta’s disappearance and return. The article I found about the old school – Miskatonic Prep. The shadows that attacked me in the gym. The rats in the walls. All the things Trey, Ayaz, and Quinn spoke when they thought I couldn’t hear, about not being able to protect me anymore, and about someone called Zehra.

  I knew that even if I couldn’t trust them, I couldn’t trust Ms. West and the faculty, either. But I needed answers, and I wasn’t going to get them from my three bullies. I shoved down all the conflicting feelings I had for them – the warmth of Quinn’s arms when he saved me from the gym, the ferocity of Trey’s convictions and the hunger in his kiss, the searching darkness behind Ayaz’s eyes, and the giddy feeling in my stomach when I was near them.

  I squared my shoulders and set off up the path at a jog, scrambling around the edge of the grotto where Quinn had convinced me to swim with him in my underwear, where his kiss had melted something frozen inside me…

  Don’t think about it now. You need all your wits about you if you’re going to survive this night.

  I deliberately avoided looking at the ledge where I’d sat with Quinn as I scooted around the edge of the pool. Behind the grotto, a set of narrow steps cut into the rock, leading up into the woods that surrounded Derleth Academy. It was how most of the students accessed the pleasure garden – those who didn’t know about the secret passage.

  Without the lantern to hold, I had both hands free to steady myself as I scrambled up the rocks, pressing my body into the side of the cliff. My legs trembled with vertigo as I climbed above the grotto. The moon reflected in the pool below – a lidless eye watching me from the deep. It made me think of the horrible dreams I’d been having about the malignant thing hiding in the hole in the middle of that shadowy cavern. But dreams couldn’t hurt me, and I knew whoever was searching the forest for me didn’t have my best interests at heart.

  “Hazel, Hazel, don’t go up there!”

  The boys ran through the pleasure garden, faces tilted up at me, moonlight catching on their handsome features. But they didn’t follow me up the steps. Trey sounded so panicked, it spurred me on.

  It’s about time Trey Bloomberg learned what it’s like to be afraid.

  My nails scraped against stone as I scrambled over the top. The boys disappeared from sight. The steps gave way to a rocky path that circled through the trees on the edge of the cliff. I clambered around the rocks, heading in the direction of the lights but trying to stay low and not step directly into the beams. I had to know for certain it was me they were looking for – that I really was in danger from all sides. The trees grew thicker and stood straighter as they sloped up toward the school. Lights bobbed and ducked through the trunks, and voices called out to each other. They weren’t worried about being quiet. On the surface, this was every bit a concerted effort from the faculty to search for a missing student.

  To search for me.

  I’d locked the door to my room behind me. There was no late-night inspection at Derleth, and students frequently flouted the ‘no sleeping over in other dorms’ rule. Ayaz and I had come to the pleasure garden via the secret passage, so they had no way of knowing I was out of the school. So why did every staff member seem to be out here, hunting through the woods? Why did they care where I was? They’d never cared before.

  A beam swept across the path only twenty feet in front of me. I dived into the trees, my heart thudding in my chest. At least two people were nearby, talking in hushed voices. Footsteps crunched in the dead leaves. A branch snapped.

  Keeping low and stepping on the twisted roots where I’d be less likely to make a sound, I darted between the trees, trying to get close enough to hear their conversation. A vein of rock jutted up from the dirt, bending the trees outward as if they shied away from it. Ancient stratigraphy pushed up from below to form a low shelf and a scattering of large, cone-shaped rocks, like the towering dolmans of a Neolithic temple.

  I made my way toward the formation, letting the smooth stone beneath my feet muffle my footsteps. I crouched low behind one of the craggy stones, listening. In the still night, even their whispers rang clear.

  “We’ve checked the entire eastern wing, Headmistress,” Professor Atwood said. “Hazel’s not there.”

  “She can’t have gotten far,” Headmistress West snapped. Flashlight beams bounced across the grounds. “Alert the maintenance staff. Send them down the peninsula to guard the road. That girl cannot be allowed to leave the grounds alive.”

  Her words were a shard of ice, thawing the fire inside me.

  That girl cannot be allowed to leave the grounds alive.

  If I’d wanted evidence, I had it now. But what could I do? Where could I go? For the first time, the helplessness of my situation washed over me. There was no one I could trust at this school. I had no family, no one to call for help. Even if I did make it down to the town of Arkham, what good would it do? The police wouldn’t believe anything I told them. “The teachers are trying to kill me, Officer.” Yeah, right. I hardly believed it myself.

  Something brushed my ankle. I spun around, my heart leaping into my throat. Quinn’s face peeked out from between the rocks. He held out a hand to me, fingers reaching, grasping at air.

  “Trust me,” he mouthed.

  Trust me.

  Something invisible reached through the air between us – a flare of heat that sizzled against my skin. I flashed back to the gymnasium, where Quinn dragged me to safety before those shadowed things got to me. In a surge of heat, my body remembered the brush of his lips against mine and the times he’d let his guard down around me and had been more than Quinn the tormentor, Quinn the trickster.

  The beam of a flashlight flickered across the rocks, just above my head. The voices drew closer. It wouldn’t be long until they were right on top of me.

  Whatever Trey, Ayaz, and Quinn are involved in, they’re trying to help me.

  I think.

  Maybe.

  I hope.

  It was all I had to go on. But it was better than being caught by Headmistress West.

  I reached out and took Quinn’s hand. A pulse of heat flared up my arm. I allowed Quinn to pull me under the ledge. We slithered through a narrow gap and dropped down into a pitch-black cave. My ass cracked against wet rock as I slid and skidded down a steeply sloping rock face. Just as my feet slammed into flat rock and I wrenched myself upright, a flashlight beam passed over the entrance several feet above my head, flickering through t
he space without penetrating it.

  “I’ve got her,” Quinn whispered, one hand circling my wrist, the other resting protectively against my hip, radiating warmth through my clammy skin.

  A match struck. A moment later, a lantern burst into flame, illuminating Trey’s face. He appeared stricken. Dirt smudged along his cheek, humanizing his too-perfect, too-pretty features.

  “Hey, Meat,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “You’ve decided to trust us.”

  “Don’t make me regret it,” I growled. “Where am I?”

  Trey swept the lantern around him, casting the warm glow of the flame against unyielding stone. Unlike the secret tunnel connecting the storage room on my floor to the pleasure garden, this cave was rough – not hollowed out by humans or machines, but formed from water being forced up from somewhere deep underground, reshaping the rock, bedding planes and fractures in the immovable chunks and creating a giant’s staircase of abutting shelves leading down into an oppressive black hole. Stalactites hung from the underside of the rock shelf above our heads – a hundred tiny swords of Damocles just waiting to drop on me.