Because if I let Gray erase me like that, I have a feeling I really will disappear. That every part of me that means something will vanish into thin air, drifting away on the wind. Because I’ll have let the man I was falling in love with crush the last piece of my heart.
“No.”
My voice is a low rasp, my heart beating so hard I can barely hear the sound over the rushing in my ears.
Gray’s head jerks back, surprise crossing his face a split second before anger overtakes his features again.
“Are you fucking serious?” he demands.
“About not letting you pay me off like some whore you’re trying to get rid of?” I laugh, but there’s no hu
mor in the sound. “Yeah, I’m fucking sure. Why can’t you fucking understand, Gray? You don’t get to tell me what to do. You don’t fucking own me.”
I can barely think, let alone get out words at this point, and I hate him even more for making me feel unhinged like this. I feel like he kicked the world out from under my feet, and I’m spinning through space with nothing to ground me.
“I can have you thrown out of this school if I want to, Sophie!” Gray says, raising his voice. “I can get the scholarship pulled, and you’ll leave with nothing—absolutely fucking nothing. Don’t you know what that means, Sparrow? Nothing. I know what your life was like before you came here. You want to go back to that? You could leave with a million fucking dollars, and you really want to make me do this?”
My hands are still bunched into fists, my fingernails digging into my palms so deeply they might be drawing blood.
I want to punch him. I want to hit him almost as much as I wanted to hit Cliff. I can almost feel myself doing it, losing myself to the violence that erupted out of me when I felt trapped and desperate.
A crowd is growing around us. Some people already have their phones out, likely so they can plaster it all over social media. And if they catch me on video hitting Gray, he wins anyway. He won’t even have to work to get me kicked out—I’ll have done it to myself.
So I turn away from him, ducking my head as I push through the crowd.
Gray refuses to back down though. Refuses to let me leave. He shoves through the crowd, following close on my heels.
“Stop being so fucking stubborn!” he hisses, his voice low and angry.
Fuck it.
I’m about to turn around and put my fist through his face when I nearly run into two solid forms—Declan and Elias.
Declan catches me by the arms before I can slam into them. His gaze tracks over my shoulder, looking behind me, and his expression hardens.
“What the hell?” he grunts.
“Back the fuck off, Gray,” Elias growls. “We’re not gonna tell you again.”
10
Shit.
Declan, Elias, and Gray stand off with me between them, each looking pissed as shit. I’m not sure the three of them have spoken at all since the first day of classes, and if they have, the words haven’t been pleasant.
Right now, they look like they want to fucking kill each other.
Declan still has a grip on my arms, and he uses that hold on me to tug me behind him, as if he’s trying to physically shield me from Gray. Does he really think his onetime friend would do that?
Fuck. Do I?
I honestly don’t know what to think of Gray anymore. What to put past him. If I thought he was hot and cold last semester, this semester he just seems fucking insane.
The area around us is beginning to fill with people, passersby drawn by the obvious confrontation happening between the Sinners. But despite the small crowd that’s gathered, everything is quiet. Dead fucking silent, like a tomb.
Gray doesn’t even look at our audience, keeping his gaze trained on the two men who were his best friends less than two weeks ago, before everything blew up between all of us.
“I have to do this,” Gray says through gritted teeth. He’s trying to keep his voice calm, but he’s barely managing it. “You don’t understand.”