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She tried to point both thumbs at herself without spilling her drink and almost dropped the entire cup. She scrambled to catch it before it fell, and little blobs of liquid sloshed over the sides.
I made a face at her. “Pregame a little too hard, did we?”
“Dick,” she shot back with a laugh, and the four of us pushed our way through the thick press of bodies toward the main part of the house.
As we entered the massive, high-ceilinged living room, I caught sight of Adena near the entrance. She was dressed in a short red dress that hugged her curves, with her blonde hair styled in perfect waves. She’d never been subtle in the way she dressed off campus, but it looked like she’d put a bit of extra effort in tonight. Before I could wonder why, the answer sidled up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, hitching her obscenely close to his body and grinding against her in time to the music. She tipped her head back, letting Preston West run his lips up the side of her neck.
I couldn’t help the grimace that contorted my face. “Are Adena and Preston… together?”
Leah spared them a quick glance, puffing out her cheeks like she was going to barf. “Yeah, maybe. I’ve seen them hanging out together a lot recently, although they haven’t been quite that, uh, obvious.”
My face was probably still set in a mask of disgust when Adena glanced over at me, and maybe that was the reason her eyes narrowed in fury.
Then again, maybe not.
Adena had already invented a million reasons to hate me—she didn’t need any help on that front.
And she had definitely been lying about being back together with Mason.
“I’m not surprised,” Maggie put in. “Preston’s kind of a dick. Of course he’d go for the biggest bitch in school.”
“Yeah, he is,” I agreed fervently. He was the asshole who’d talked shit about Penny, and I didn’t feel bad about hating him for that. It had nothing to do with Cole and everything to do with the fact that Preston had made fun of an eight-year-old girl.
I pulled my focus away from Adena, who was still dancing with the blond boy like she was trying to get pregnant, and glanced around the rest of the massive space. The Princes were there too, because of course they were, but I ignored them, following my little group to a corner of the living room that wasn’t as crowded.
After a few minutes, Maggie and Dan were making out again, and Leah had gotten into a very heated debate with two juniors about which Halloween movie was the best, so that left me with not much to do but people watch and sip my Coke.
The four Princes were on the other side of the room near a large grand piano, lounging on a couch that was so angular and modern it looked horribly uncomfortable. When I’d seen them at parties during my first semester at Oak Park, they’d usually been surrounded by girls—covered in them, really—but they weren’t tonight. They sat on the couch watching the party just like I was, but even though they were surrounded by people, they didn’t blend with the crowd.
They never had. Not at their parties at Clarendon Hall, not here. Not anywhere.
The children of gods.
That’s what they’d looked like to me the first day I saw them, and I could still see it. That raw power. That otherness.
But even gods could fall.
They weren’t impervious. Not like I’d once thought them to be. I had information that could damage both Cole and Elijah, and Finn had looked unnervingly human when he’d spoken to me in the dance studio. There were cracks in the armor they all wore.
Half an hour later, I noticed Finn stand up and head down a hallway that led deeper into the house.
“Hey, I’ll be right back,” I muttered to Leah.
The Halloween debate was still raging, and she nodded to me absently as she explained to the boys in a patient tone why they were so very, very wrong.
My heartbeat picked up a little, and I couldn’t tell if any of the other Princes noticed me slip down the same hallway Finn had vanished into, but I didn’t glance over at them. Fuck it. Let them think whatever they wanted.
The hallway was dark and branched off into other wings of the house. I wasn’t quite sure where Finn had gone, and I was rounding a corner when I almost bumped into him, heading back the way he’d come. His hands reached out to steady me before he registered my face, and when he saw who it was, he froze.
“Talia?”
“Did you mean it?”
His grip on my arms tightened for a second and then loosened, but he didn’t let go. “Mean what?”
I swallowed, my gaze caught by his earnest brown eyes. Finn had always been the easiest to read—or at least, that’s what I’d thought. After what happened at the end of the year, I’d convinced myself that he was just the best actor out of all the Princes, the best at projecting emotions he didn’t feel.
“Do you really want to unbreak what you broke?”
