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“What are you talking about?”
Shrugging, I led Victor off. Without talking about it, we grabbed seats together in the third row, far from where I usually sat. I didn’t know when we landed on sitting together in every class.
“Cute panties, Sinclair.” Chester—a tall, dark-haired Dreg who was among the first to snap pictures of my underwear—twisted in the seat in front of me to show them off. “Are the ducks wearing little rain boots? Can I see—?”
Victor flung his phone at the wall, raining bits on two shrieking girls. “Say one more fucking word to her, and it’s your face in that wall next!”
Not another word was said.
No, I didn’t know when we decided to sit together every time, but I was starting not to mind.
“This isn’t true!” Iris sounded from the hall. “My grandfather would never do these things. Illegitimate son?!”
I relaxed in my seat—content.
Let them bang on about rubber duck underwear. Wesley, Annika, and Giovanni had a terrible night and Iris was in for a bad day. Everything was turning up roses for me.
I WAS IN MY LAST CLASS of the day, taking up a row in the back by myself. Victor didn’t have Intro to Psych, though he did walk me to class and say goodbye by asking if my rubber duck underwear was a sample of my taste in lingerie, because if it was, he knew what he was gifting me the night of our wedding. I tapped into my inner Cato, chasing him out the door.
It boggled my mind that the guy who defended me one minute could become such a rubber duck butthead the next.
My psych class was smaller and filled with less irritating people. No Eva, Iris, Alice, or Rose. Just fifteen students and one teacher coming in, focusing on the lesson, and behaving like this was a professional environment and not every bad high school clique movie ever made. It was no wonder this was my favorite class.
Silence blanketed the room, broken only by the occasional cough or Professor Burgess’s squeaky marker as she wrote on the board. I breezed through my quiz, marking the answers on functionalism and structuralism, while my mind wandered back to Iris shrieking that her human sewer rat of a grandfather was an honorable, upstanding man who laid the bricks in the foundation of Regalia and the country.
All right, she didn’t say the last part, but with how thick she was laying it on with their family’s charity work, how generously their company treats their employees, the lack of proof, and what a friend Grandpa Dalton has been to everyone in the community. By the end of her speech, we were the jerks for believing the horrible lies in the news.
In between replaying her splotchy, furious face, I pictured her smirk over Victor’s secret love child.
That can’t be true, can it? Just a vicious rumor like Victor said—thought up by someone trying to smear his reputation.
His reputation as a rich, handsome playboy who drops his pants for any pair of tits walking by, a harsh voice reminded. Knocking a girl up would fit in with that reputation, not ruin it.
I shook my head, refocusing to answer the last question and flip my paper over. Staring at the blank page, my thoughts flooded back.
Is that the real reason his parents got on board with marrying off their eighteen-year-old son to the tire king’s stepdaughter—the kindest title I was given. It wasn’t about his father’s health or proving he was responsible enough to run a company.
But how would marrying me help him? I’m not the one carrying his kid. A shiny new stepmom wouldn’t make him less of an irresponsible dick who didn’t step up for his child.
If there is a child. Rumors about pregnancies tend to prove themselves in approximately nine months. From the conversation, June took her studies to another country. If she came back with an auburn-haired, gray-eyed bundle of chub, then there’s something to talk about. But if not, I wasted precious time out of my life worrying about something that came out of Iris’s poisonous mouth.
How do I know what’s true?
My hands clenched beneath the desk, fists pressing to my stomach to force the deep breath I sucked in to release. A sick heaviness was pressing on my gut, making the room spin.
So many people in so many ways—one of those people being myself—have questioned why on earth a family with such high standing would arrange this match. What if there was more to this than what Victor told me? What if I could find out the real reason?
“No one on this campus knows more than me.”
The heavy feeling lifted and a new, worse one crept in. I was living with four men who made it their business to know everything going on in Regalia. Wilder drained bank accounts without breaking a sweat. He tracked everything the Royals did.
