“Maybe it’s a good thing it happened,” he murmured, although I could hear a twinge of pain in his voice as he spoke. “At least now we’re closer to even. If you hadn’t gotten back at us somehow, I don’t know if I’d ever be able to forgive myself for what we did.”
“So you will forgive yourself? Someday?” I asked, my gaze catching on the bright flecks of green and brown in his eyes. They were mesmerizing. Beautiful and varied, as complex as the boy himself.
“I will when you do,” he whispered.
I didn’t know if he meant when I forgave him or when I forgave myself. But I didn’t ask. Instead, I tilted my head up, wordlessly asking for another kiss.
He gave it to me, slipping his tongue past my lips right away this time, kissing me breathless as his oak and sage scent surrounded me.
We ended up being twenty minutes late to class.
But I didn’t give a fuck.
Adena, the raging unpoppable pimple, didn’t stop trying to drag the Princes down.
And despite Elijah’s promise that people would eventually stop caring if she kept bringing up things she’d already revealed, I could see it affecting the way people looked at the guys. By the beginning of the second week of classes, they’d become the butt of jokes to some and persona non grata to others.
Every time things started to calm down, Adena would pull out another page from her little stash and wave it around like a fucking flag.
She used me against them too, claiming that only trash fell for trash. And unfortunately, the Princes had done such a good job convincing some members of the student body that I was worth less than wet garbage that it came back to bite all of us in the ass now. I had some money, but everyone knew I’d been kicked out by my grandmother, which meant I was no longer really a Hildebrand.
The Princes may have changed their tune, but there were still a ton of Oak Park students who judged someone entirely based on their last name and family’s net worth.
As the dynamic on campus began to shift, Adena doing everything she could to drain power away from the Princes, I realized I’d been wrong about a few things when I’d first arrived at this school.
I vividly remembered Leah chattering at a mile a minute, describing the different tiers that existed in the school, each one lording over the ones below them. But what I hadn’t fully realized—what I was only realizing now—was that the Princes hadn’t created that system.
They had only fought their way to the top of it.
Some sort of similar power structure had probably existed in the school since all of our parents ha
d gone here, and even long before that. It probably existed in every fancy prep academy in the country.
Knocking the Princes off their thrones didn’t end that system entirely—it just created a power vacuum, an empty spot for someone else to grab.
And Adena was determined to make that person her.
Personally, I didn’t know why it fucking mattered. We were about to graduate. We had one semester left, and then it would be over. What the hell was she hoping to gain that was so important it could make all this worth it?
Maybe she really is that petty. Maybe she’d fight this hard for the chance to rule the school for even a single damn day.
It worried me though, to see her edging her way into power even as the Princes’ hold on the school slipped. Sable and Preston were her constant shadows, although unlike the Princes, the three of them didn’t function as a cohesive unit at all. That little trio was ruled entirely by Adena, with the other two just hanging on for the ride.
The guys, for their part, hardly seemed to notice or care about their slipping rank in the school.
It wasn’t that they weren’t paying attention to Adena. They were. But all their attention was focused on me and her—on making sure she didn’t get a chance to hurt me again in any way, large or small. I felt like a celebrity or the daughter of a dignitary or something with the way they escorted me everywhere on campus. The only time I was ever really alone was when I was tucked away safely in my dorm room—and I was pretty sure if I’d allowed it, the Princes would’ve started sleeping over in shifts too.
“You guys don’t have to do all this, you know,” I told Finn on Saturday when he came over to study with me.
I’d done a shitload of research on dyslexia and had some ideas I thought might help him. I also wanted to try to get him to go to a reading specialist, but considering how much his parents had messed him up about it, I figured we’d start with baby steps.
“Do what?”
He followed me to the couch and sat down next to me, dropping his books onto the coffee table. There was a foot of space between us, but I found myself hyper aware of his proximity anyway, of every little shift and movement of his body. I’d been alone in a room with the blond boy plenty of times, but not recently, and not in my dorm.
I tugged my gaze away from the taut muscles of his forearms, shaking my head and hoping he hadn’t caught me staring. Fuck, Tal. Stop it.
“This whole ‘guard the princess’ thing,” I said. “I appreciate you wanting to watch out for me, and I know I told Mason not to go after Adena for the car until we know for sure. But what about what she’s been doing to you? Aren’t you going to do something about it?”