Killing You Softly by Lucy Carver

Galina screamed at Mikhail. ‘Do you watch me use lavatory? Are you there when I take shower? I bet. Yes, I tell Papa he has perverts
    working for him. You and Sergei are finished, Mikhail – wait and see!’
    The wind whistled in and I remembered the sinister rattling at my window, the small voice pleading, ‘Let me in!’
    A girl’s fingers tap at the glass, her desperate voice sighs inside my head. Frantically she breaks a small pane and reaches through the jagged gap. ‘Let me in!’
    A tube of moisturiser was leaking on to the windowsill. Galina was still yelling at Mikhail as I screwed the top back on to the tube then recoiled.
    There was a small bird lodged between two aerosol cans, its wings spread wide, its neck limp and broken.
    ‘Let me in! Rescue me!’
    The bird’s breast was red, its eyes glassy.
    I gasped and backed away, heard the shouting stop and Galina’s footsteps enter the quad.
    Poor robin dead on the windowsill, oozing blood on to the stone. A small bird lying in a crimson pool. Not imagined, but stone-cold and real.

chapter three
    ‘No big deal,’ Galina told me. ‘It is dead bird – so what?’
    She’d stalked in out of the cold and then immediately blocked the broken panes with a copy of
Vanity Fair
and chucked the feathered corpse into the metal waste bin.
    The robin landed with a light thud.
    ‘Poor thing,’ I murmured, wondering whether it had been a bird’s wings fluttering against the window that had been the real ghost-child of my dream.
    ‘Stupid
thing,’ Galina insisted. ‘It flies at glass and breaks neck. Glass is old and cracked. Anyway, how long does it lie there dead if I don’t share a room with
you?’
    She’d found me cowering in a corner, admitting that I daren’t touch it, that it creeped me out.
    ‘You’re weird, Alyssa. They tell me, oh she’s so clever and so brave, she finds killers of roommate. But no. You run away from tiny dead bird – what do you call
it?’
    ‘Robin,’ I muttered, and shuddered at the memory of almost putting my hand on the cold, feathered corpse. ‘Why were you yelling at Mikhail?’ I asked, quickly changing the
subject.
    ‘He’s so stupid – that’s why.’
    Everything, everyone for Galina was ‘stupid’, pronounced with an explosive ‘p’.
    ‘You want to talk about it?’ I asked.
    Slumping on to her bed fully dressed and with her boots still on, Galina glowered at her fibreglass fingernails. ‘These two men – Mikhail and Sergei – they follow me everywhere
like shadows. I’m not free.’
    ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t like it,’ I agreed. ‘And they don’t exactly blend in here at St Jude’s.’
    ‘I tell my father they’re mafia, not nice men. He replies nice men cannot be bodyguards. Bodyguards need to shoot people; they must have cold hearts.’
    Realizing that the magazine wasn’t doing its job of keeping out the wind, I decided to pile some books against the gap instead. ‘What does Saint Sam think about your security?’
I wondered. ‘Saint Sam – the head teacher, Dr Webb. That’s his nickname.’
    Galina shrugged. ‘He knows Papa doesn’t let me stay alone since accident in Monaco. He pays extra money for Mikhail and Sergei to be here. Dr Webb agrees.’
    ‘But they don’t actually live here in the grounds?’
    ‘No. They have hotel in Ainslee, I think. In the day they work together, guarding school gates, buildings. At night, one goes to hotel to sleep, other stays here. But don’t ask me
– I know nothing about their stupid lives.’
    ‘So the accident on the boat – it must have been serious for your dad to need these guys around 24,’7?’
    ‘Scary, yes. We’re in harbour and another boat drives fast towards us and doesn’t stop. It hits us – bang! Our boat tips over. Me, my friend Isabella and her boyfriend,
Carlos, we all fall into water. Engine of our boat doesn’t stop like it should and now there is no one to steer it so it goes crazy in water while other boat goes