Defiant Princess (Boys of Oak Park Prep 2)

Maybe it was because talking about our two passions was the first moment I’d felt an actual human connection with the blond quarterback, but it felt so unfair it made me want to scream.

Mina’s home was on the opposite side of Sand Valley from the apartment I’d shared with my dad, so I hadn’t had to go near the old place, and I’d made a point to avoid that part of town. She lived in a small two-story house, and Ian, Brick, and I were all stuffed up into the upper level, in three rooms that could only generously be called bedrooms. The boys were both younger than I was, but Brick cursed like a fucking biker and already boasted about his sexual conquests like a thirty-year-old manwhore.

I didn’t talk to either of them a lot, but I knew they both considered me “soft”. They’d both been in the system for years already, and the cynicism it’d ingrained in them was heartbreaking to see.

Then again, maybe they were right. Maybe I needed to learn the kind of cynicism they had, to stop viewing people I met as potential allies and instead separate them into just two categories—people I could use, and people who were in my way.

As I crept up the creaking stairs of the old house, Brick passed me, sneaking in the opposite direction. He lifted his chin when he saw me, the movement barely discernible in the dark. “Hey. Where you been?”

“Work. Where are you going?”

He snorted. “Don’t worry about it, sis.”

I rolled my eyes. I hated when he called me that. He called Mina “ma” and Ian “bro” too, and every time he uttered the words, they came out coated in bitter poison.

“Yeah, fine,” I muttered back, but he was already moving again, disappearing down the stairs like a ghost.

I slipped inside my small room and dug my Big Daddy’s uniform out of my bag to lay it over the back of the rickety chair in the corner. I would need to wear it again tomorrow, and I didn’t have time to wash it, so Febreeze would have to do. Then I changed into my pajamas and sat on the small twin bed, massaging my sore calves and quads, delaying the inevitable a little while longer.

Exhaustion tugged at me, a bone-deep tiredness that begged me to close my eyes, but I always resisted as long as I could. Because no matter how tired I was, no matter how hard I pushed myself during the day, it was never enough to keep me from dreaming.

And in my dreams, I sometimes forgot to hate them.

Chapter 2

My eyes snapped open as I sat up with a gasp, hands scrabbling for purchase in the empty air around me. My entire body tensed for an impact that never came, and after a horrible moment where I hovered between waking and sleeping, I let out a long, shuddering breath.

I’d had this dream before.

In the dream, my mother—or at least someone who resembled my vague memories of her, with hazel eyes and dark brown hair—found me again.

In my dream, she wasn’t dead.

She’d never been dead.

She told me, in a rush of words that didn’t make any sense, that she’d been hiding out, waiting, biding her time. Plotting her revenge, just like I was plotting mine. She told me it was time—time for us both to exact our vengeance.

Then she led me up to a cliff in the hills that overlooked Roseland, and as we stood up there together, gazing down at the pristine, luxurious town, she made me promise to never forget.

When I turned to ask her what she meant, it wasn’t my mom standing next to me anymore. It was Jacqueline, flanked by the Princes and Philip and several other faces I didn’t recognize. And she never answered my question.

Instead, she put a hand on my chest and pushed, and I tumbled backward through space, hurtling over the edge of the cliff toward the ground below.

My stomach churned with nausea at the memory of the dream, and I flopped back on the mattress, curling up in a ball on my side as I took several deep breaths.

At least that dream was better than the ones where I did forget. Where I dreamt of four boys who looked out for me, protected me, who held a piece of my heart in their open palms—and only remembered when I woke up how they’d curled their fingers into fists and squeezed those pieces of my heart until they bled.

When my heart rate was under control again, I stumbled out of bed, chucked my Big Daddy’s uniform in my bag, and threw on a pair of jeans and a ratty old t-shirt. I was scheduled to work at the gas station before my shift at the restaurant today, but I still had time before both to go to the library.

I headed out at 8:30 so I could get there when they opened at nine. If you were looking for a good book to read, the Sand Valley Public Library was the wrong place to go. They didn’t have a large selection, and anything new or

halfway decent was usually stolen. But they had a bank of old computers in the back that were free to use, so I’d become a regular fixture there over the summer.

The librarian on duty gave me a bored look as I headed toward the back, then returned to staring at her own computer.

Mason, Finn, Elijah, and Cole all had more of an internet presence than I did. Beyond social media, their names just popped up in more places—probably because they were the sons of the elite, the next generation of American royalty destined to take over their family legacies. What they did mattered to people more than what a nobody from Idaho did.

I hoped someday I could use that to my advantage.