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Daddy always told me our world is forged in blood. I might be only thirteen, but I know who he is, what he’s capable of. I’ve heard the whispers. I’ve seen the way people hurry to appease him whenever he enters a room. I’ve had the lessons from Antony in what to do if I find myself alone with one of Daddy’s enemies. Of course, they never taught me what to do if one of those enemies buries me alive.
My mind flies to my father’s favorite quote from Julius Caesar – the words he spoke when he crossed the Rubicon and started a civil war. Alea iacta est. Let the die be cast. Welcome to Stonehurst fucking Prep.
“I’m taking time off from the band to finish senior year.” “What happened to ‘diplomas are for wankers who don’t have groupies’?” I quote Gabriel’s final words when he left at the beginning of summer for his European tour.
Fuck. He doesn’t just look like Gabriel Fallen, he is Gabriel Fallen. My ears ring as the lyrics to my favorite songs filter through my head. How did I miss the fact that Gabriel Fallen goes to Stonehurst Prep? Fuck me dead. Thanks, universe – way to make my ‘no boys’ rule infinitely more difficult to follow.
“I guess we’re partners,” he says, flashing me that smile – the smile of a guy who isn’t used to hearing no. I desperately want to be the one to fling that word at him and make it stick, but he’s Gabriel fucking Fallen, and I’m only human.
“You know, the hard-to-get act is old, Malloy. I’m king at this school, and my friends are like a royal court. You’d be well advised to take this offer before it’s rescinded and you end up another one of the plebs. I know for a girl like you that’s a fate worse than death.” He hisses the last word, the death. He wants me to feel it. His hot breath curdles my skin, and it takes me back to another night, another guy’s hot breathing on my ear, another set of hands on me that I didn’t ask for. Stale air. A satin-lined box I couldn’t escape… I’m done. I don’t even think. I slam my fist into Alec
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“You should have stayed hidden. You should never have come back.” His shoulders square, and the hatred in his eyes is so deep, so dark, that a shiver of fear runs down my spine. “An eye for an eye, Mackenzie Malloy,” he hisses, and my blood turns cold. “You took something special from me. I’ll take everything from you.”
Queen Boudica sits on the rug, her black fur gleaming from the shadows, her head cocked to the side as if she’s been waiting there for me all day.
I'm loving all the ancient historical references! Visigoths, Boudica, can't wait to see what else.
Gabriel Fallen goes there. And I broke some teen actor’s nose.” “I knew you wouldn’t last one day at that stuck-up school.” Antony laughs. I love his laugh – it’s so him; uncontrolled, teetering on the edge of mania. People fear that laugh, because it usually precedes bloodshed. I find it comforting. What that says about me I don’t like to consider.
Be careful, Claws.” The irony of Antony telling me to be careful when I just heard a guy’s skull crack against the concrete behind him makes me smile. Antony and I are more alike than we first appear.
“Why are you back?” Eli fixes me with that stare of his, what I like to call his ‘Sherlock-Holmes-Orgasm’ face when I feel like pissing him off.
She’s tempting. She’s dangerous. I see myself reflected in those cold eyes. Behind that shell of ice, Mackenzie Malloy is bleeding on the inside. When her pain and my pain crash together, the world better watch out.
Mackenzie stole the class snake and hid it on his chair. When he sat down, it bit him on the ass. We were friends ever since. But her parents and my dad had this stupid rivalry. Some kind of business deal that went sour when Dad first came to the city. I brought her over for dinner one night, and you’d have thought I proposed marrying a streetlamp the way they reacted. Our parents forbid us from being friends, so we hung out in secret.”
“I don’t need permission,” he hisses. “I own this school. I’ll make your life a living hell, and don’t you forget it.” The urge to laugh bubbles up inside me, but I stamp it down. This pampered ass playing at the bad boy wouldn’t know hell if it stole his fancy car.
Eli tilts his head to the side, his tone friendly, his words anything but. “You’ve got your hand on a woman who’s not yours, and violence in your eyes. I consider that my business. Let go of her.”
“You can’t ignore me forever, Mac,” he whispers in my ear. “It’s better to give up now, because I have a black belt in annoying the shit out of people until they pay attention to me.”
“She your girl, Fallen?” Alec flashes him a smile that’s all teeth and violence. Gabriel shakes his head. His cheek presses against mine, and the touch feels so intimate it sends a shiver of desire through my veins. “Mackenzie Malloy is no one’s girl.”
Gabriel gives a dark chuckle. “That’s a rather revisionist view, Cleo. If I recall, you broke into my hotel room after junior prom, and when I politely declined, you pushed me through the French doors and cut yourself on the glass. I may be a man whore, but I don’t do crazy.”
And leave Gabriel alone – he’s mine.”
Methinks you don't know the definition of "mine".
“I don’t think you’ve looked at yourself in a mirror recently. You’re putting out total hot freaky rocker chick vibes. That guy with the Metallica bandana down there is totally checking you out.” George glances down at the guys, then back at me, and I see a million questions burning in her eyes. “Who are you, and what have you done with the real Mackenzie Malloy?” I smile. “I’m holding her hostage so I can steal her life, obviously.
“I’ll go on one condition.” “Mmmm?” Gabriel tilts his head to the side. A lock of dark hair falls over his eye, and I think I might swoon. “I’m not talking about where I’ve been the last four years. Don’t ask. Don’t ply me with alcohol or tell me sob stories about Dylan in an attempt to make me talk. Mention my past, and I’m gone. Got it?” “Oh, phew.” Gabriel pretends to wipe sweat off his brow. “And here I was thinking you wanted me to do something taxing, but ignoring deep-rooted emotional trauma to clear the path for superficial fun? That’s my specialty. It would be an honor to have you as
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I pull up the Notepad app on my phone and start typing names. Alec, for invading my home and hurting my cat. Noah, because it was probably his idea. I kicked him in the balls so hard he’d be swallowing. No way did he not have anything to do with this. Eli, for telling them about my secret entrance. Cleo, because she’s a bitch and I hate her guts. I add all of their dumb jock friends and Cleo’s minions. Gabriel… I pause over his name, feeling a tiny stab of guilt as I add it to my list. This is for shoving me into the pool, for taking my first kiss and turning it into something ugly. I push the
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I’m going to die tonight, and it’s almost a relief because I know I won’t be afraid any longer.
Somehow, I push through my fear, and I find something else on the other side. An anger so cold and final it’s beyond wild rage – it’s something calculated, focused. I take all the fear bottled up inside me, all the dark thoughts I’ve screamed into empty rooms, and I focus on staying awake, staying alert, keeping my mind clear and ready. Because if I die, these fuckers will get away with it.
Cleo I can handle, but when we step into third-period English and Alec LeMarque glares at me from a seat in the second row, my body recoils against Gabriel. It’s this visceral sense of wrongness, like space bends around Alec’s body, and he not a person so much as a portal into a dark void where a cosmic god devours souls.
That’s right, I, Mackenzie Malloy – the Ice Queen witch bitch ghost slut extraordinaire – am officially a base for the Stonehurst Prep cheer squad.
I need to have normal, high school sex. And who better to do it with then flirty, beautiful, no-strings-attached Gabriel? Who better to take me to the stars than the one who sings them? It doesn’t matter that Eli’s ocean-eyes haunt my dreams, or I can’t stop thinking of how powerful I felt with Noah’s hard cock rubbing against me at the party. It’s not as if I can have all three of them. I mean, there’s normal high school sex and then there’s… reverse harem. And that may be fun in books, but it doesn’t happen in real life. Does it?
I park up next to my brother’s car. The white cover flaps in the breeze swooping in under the garage door. I launch myself at the car. I tear at the cover, my nails scraping on the paint beneath, my fingers tight with rage, with a wanting that will never go away. I wish everything was different. I wish he never died. I wish she could be mine. But wishing is for losers, and nothing will ever be the way I want it.
“I’m not doing it,” the man snaps back, his voice rising with every word. “I don’t care what you do to me. I’m not going near that house again, and I won’t send one of my boys, neither.” “You’re being ridiculous. This is a seventeen-year-old girl we’re talking about. How can she possibly—” “You can’t know what I saw.” The man – Brentwood – rasps his words, his voice tight with terror. “You find someone else, Mr. Marlowe. That’s no sweet-sixteen beauty queen you’re facing off against. She’s a cold-blooded killer.”
This is just the kind of spot a serial killer would take me before he cuts out my heart and turns my tits into a pompom hat.
Hmm... I wonder how one would turn nipples into pompoms?
