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My body—and even my shredded heart—still craved four awful, evil, irredeemable boys.
When I had kissed each of them, heat had bloomed inside me like a lick of fire. Every nerve ending in my body had come alive. It had been consuming.
Overwhelming.
Perfect.
And even though I would never kiss any of them again, they had ruined me for anyone else.
Chapter 7
Another week passed, and I started to seriously doubt the sanity of my plan. Of my decision to come back to Oak Park at all.
I hadn’t been able to get close enough to the Princes to get any dirt on them I couldn’t find on the internet, and nothing I found on the internet was good enough to bring them down.
So why the fuck was I here?
What kind of delusions of grandeur had made me think I could stand up as a one-woman army against the Princes and all their minions at the school?
It was a numbers game, and the math wasn’t on my side.
Still, I saw little signs of victory. I walked in on a couple students describing the Cole hair-cutting incident—and away from his threatening presence, they were laughing uproariously about it. Several students, including Sable, had stopped taunting me or interacting with me much at all, and a couple people besides Oliver had stepped up to defend me once or twice.
They were small things, but they represented exactly what I wanted to see. A crack in the Princes’ iron grip on this school, a crumbling pillar in the foundation of their power. If I kept standing up to them, weakening them in the eyes of the student body, making them look like assholes and fools, maybe more kids would defect from their camp.
The Princes were terrifying, and the power they wielded was real. But at some level, they only had power because enough people had agreed to give it to them. If enough people decided to stop… well, there were only so many battles the Princes could fight at a time.
I found myself oddly grateful I had no family left who cared about me—in a way, it made me invincible. The Princes had already done the worst to me. They couldn’t do it again. They couldn’t leverage my family against me or threaten them to coerce me or any of the fucked up shit I knew they were capable of.
I existed as a lone entity. It was just me against them, and I knew that threw them off.
But holy fucking goddamn, it was exhausting.
Maybe that was why my guard was down as I walked out of Craydon Hall on Friday. I’d had it up like a shield all week, fighting back against my tormenters in the hallways and classrooms.
But I
had made it to Friday. I was free. For two whole days, I was free.
Shoving open the doors of the school building, I tipped my face up toward the sun—it was late September, but the weather was still warm. My backpack was slung over one shoulder, stuffed full of books for a marathon study session over the weekend.
Just as I was about to start down the steps, Adena’s voice called from just behind me.
“Hey, Idaho slut!”
I turned to face her, some choice words about her mother already on the tip of my tongue, but before I could say anything, she shot both hands out and shoved at my chest.
My feet stumbled backward, catching the lip of the top step leading up to Craydon.
There weren’t that many steps. Just four.
But it didn’t matter.
A deep, overwhelming panic flooded my body like poison as my mind skipped back in time five years, putting me at the top of the stairs in the old apartment complex my dad and I had lived in.
He’d pushed me just like that. Two hands, right below my clavicles.
Not even a hard push.
