AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m going to be late for trig,” I tell her before she can say a word.
“No worries, I’ll walk you. I have a free period.”
Dammit.
“I’m sorry about last weekend,” Riley tells me. “I’ve been thinking about it all week. I can’t blame you for not answering my texts. I know it’s no excuse, but well, I was a little tipsy after Vi’s party. It didn’t occur to me that it all might have been a huge shock to you until Monday.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I walk in silence.
“I wanted to tell you that I’m on your side. That’s why I took that picture. I know what could have happened to you if you’d resisted. It wouldn’t have been good, Sarah. The club…” She frowns. “We value our privacy, for obvious reasons. If the higher-ups had heard that some random girl without any NDA had turned up, they would have stepped in. You don’t want to know what that means.”
I sigh. “I get the idea.”
And considering what happened the next few days, I can’t exactly blame them anyway. I—or rather, my clothes—did fuck with their privacy.
“Look, I don’t blame you,” I tell her, surprised to hear the truth in my own words. “I didn’t answer your text because I’d rather not talk about that day. Or think about it.”
“Oh. I…I understand. But we’re good, right?”
I look up to her, finally.
Riley’s a friend, but she’s a social butterfly, constantly surrounded by her fellow Raventhorn girls. We’ve never been close. After that Sunday, I doubt we ever will be. But I don’t hate her. I don’t have a problem with her. I just don’t want her to make me talk about that day. Speaking to Vi about it was okay, but I simply no longer trust Riley enough to want to get too personal with her.
“We’re good,” I say just as we reach my math class. “I’d better run before I’m late.”
“Of course. Are you coming to S.T.A.B. Friday? We’re all meeting up for one of the girls’ birthday.”
Usually, I’d think about my schedule, I’d consider my homework, I’d find an excuse. Today, I simply shake my head. “No, thanks.”
We’re good. We’re friends. I’m just done forcing myself to step out of my comfort zone for people who don’t have my back.
27
MARIUS
My elder brother speaks quietly, calmly, but anyone who knows him would hear the edge to his voice. “You mean to say that you had this information for days, and didn’t think it necessary to keep me in the loop?”
Magnus is only a few months older than me. Each of us was born from a different mother, over the span of two years. Yet he’s always had an air that made him look older, more mature, and certainly more dangerous than any twenty-four-year-old has any rights to be.
“I knew,” Markus adds unhelpfully, leaning on the mantelpiece of our grandmother’s dining room.
This house serves as a good neutral ground for us.
The fucking dick is stirring the pot.The only thing Magnus likes less than to be informed of anything relevant late is knowing after Markus.
Being the middle brother between these two is akin to waltzing in a minefield. I long ago learned to play it to my advantage; in other words, deflect the attention so the two titans attack each other and leave me the fuck alone.
“Yeah, Mark has looked into it,” I confirm. “You know he has the contacts to get information fast.”
Praising Markus for, well, anything, is one sure way of setting Magnus on the defensive. I’m redirecting their ire toward each other, so they leave me out of it, as usual.
To plunge the knife deeper, I add, “And you know you would have just told Pa. Sarah would be dead if we’d let you in.”
Magnus has held the reputation of the snitch among us since grade school, when he told after we raided the cookie jar before dinner, confessing after a simple question from Pa. And while I’m convinced he can, potentially, keep his mouth shut when required, I also know that he worships our father. Asking him to hide anything from Eriks Goltz is downright cruel.
I also admire the man, but I see his flaws; he’s the product of his demanding education, which made him too severe, relentless, single-tracked. We were raised by him, sure, but we also had our mother, and Marcella Keller-Goltz is the yin to his yang. Kind, compassionate, teasing, gentle.
We’re all a mixture of the two people who raised us, but maybe because I’m her only biological child, I took after her the most. Markus is all Pa, though I see flashes of our mother when he interacts with Dez. And Magnuswisheshe was like Pa; to his chagrin, he’s inherently warmer. That makes him try harder than any of us.
