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Luca ignores him, scrolling through the list with a vicious smile on his pale face, his grey eyes sharp as knife blades. “So many names missing from our illustrious list. Are we calling dibs on anyone, gentlemen? Or is every girl game this year?”
Luca has one type: girls his friends want. It’s the reason Evan would never in a million years admit he was checking for Sophie’s name on the list, the reason why Sev and Iakov both shrug at Luca’s question.
“Blackwood?” Luca asks, his playful tone hiding a dangerous edge. “I see Theodora’s name is still missing from the list. Are you claiming her?”
“She’s not an object or a territory, so no, I’m not claiming her.”
“You’re right.” There’s a glib smile on Luca’s pale face. “It’s not like she’d ever sleep with you anyway.”
He’s purposely misconstruing the meaning behind my words, but Luca likes nothing more than to provoke others. And I’m not so foolish as to fall for his artless manipulation.
“She’s not sleeping with anyone,” Iakov replies before I can. “Her father’s got a bounty on the head of anyone who touches her.”
I look up sharply, meeting Iakov’s dark eyes. He’s just spent the summer in Russia, where Theodora’s father lives. Of course, Russia is a large country—the largest country in the world—but I wonder if the world of the ultra-wealthy is as small there as it is here in England. I want to quiz him on whatever he knows, but not now, not here.
Besides, knowing Iakov, he might just have been joking. It’s almost impossible to tell with his deadpan tone and neutral expression.
I drop his gaze and find Séverin looking at me with narrowed eyes. Seizing his phone out of Luca’s hand, Sev speaks with sudden authority.
“Theodora’s off-bounds.”
Luca raises his eyebrows. “Why?”
“If Zachary isn’t sleeping with her, none of us are,” Sev responds with a shrug. “I’m just being realistic.”
“If she’s off-bounds,” Evan says, slapping me on the arm in a gesture of sportsmanly support, “maybe this year you can set your sights on someone you actually stand a chance of sleeping with.”
I shake my hand and shrug his hand away with a grimace. “That’s not happening.”
Evan blinks—as if he, of all people, should be confused with the concept of having your heart irrevocably set on one person.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“I’m not setting my sights on anyone. Theodora is the only one worthy of my desire. I couldn’t set my sights on anybody else if I tried. She and I are fated somehow. Anything else would be doomed by principle.”
My friends all stare at me without speaking as if I just spoke in a language completely foreign to them. Luca finally breaks the silence with a mocking snicker.
“If she’s your fated soulmate then why aren’t you two together yet?”
I shrug. “We’re seventeen. Life is long.”
“Fucking hell,” Séverin blurts out. “You’re already the only virgin left in the group and now you’re telling us you’re willing to wait until you’re an old man because of fate—what the fuck even is fate anyway?”
If I cared at all what they all think of me, I would perhaps bother explaining myself. But when I look at their faces, I find myself overwhelmed with indifference. Sev’s and Evan’s mouths droop open in child-like confusion, Luca’s is twisted in a derisive smirk.
Iakov alone, sitting a little away from us, seems utterly unconcerned.
“It’s his dick,” he says. “He can do what he likes with it.”
His blunt words of wisdom seem to shake Evan and Sev out of their state of stupefaction. Sev sighs and turns back to me.
“And what if you can never have her?”
It’s a good question—one I’ve thought of often, alone at night in my bed, hard and tense with frustration and desire and despair.
“Then life is going to hurt like a bitch.”
Chapter 14
