SNAPPED (The Slate Brothers 1)

Sebastian didn’t kill my aunt, but he doesn’t seem to care that his father might have. What the hell am I doing, wanting him? I feel sick, twisted around, the nightmare version of the orgasm Sebastian coaxed out of me. I’ve got to get control of myself. I’ve got to forget about Sebastian Slate.

Except, that’s going to be pretty hard at a school like Berkfield.

“Are you still coming with us?” Maddy calls through the door. “Because we need to leave like…now.” She’s growing impatient, and I know it’s only a matter of moments before she flings my bedroom door open.

I’m lying in bed, staring at my laptop, at the dozens of articles on the Slate family I’ve got pulled up. I’ve been reading, Googling, bookmarking, berating myself since almost six o’clock. It’s now nearly ten— about twelve hours since Sebastian and I hooked up— and it’s time for my roommates and I to head to the football stadium. We all entered the same dates in the student ticket lottery, figuring that if nothing else, we’d always have someone to go to the games with.

So now I sort of have to go to the football game with them. Because if I don’t, it’ll be incredibly obvious that something is going on. After all, I came home just a few days ago wearing a football player’s jersey.

“I’m almost ready,” I lie, then spring from my bed, throwing on a mustard yellow sundress and twisting my hair into a topknot. It’s fine, I tell myself. It’s great research for the New Recruits Week case.

Which, by the way, I really regret getting involved with, now. How did I go from barely knowing a thing about the football team to hooking up with a star player in less than three days?

I burst from my room a few seconds later; I can tell my roommates are not impressed by my lack of makeup, but whatever— I’m choosing my battles, today. We make our way to the stadium with what feels like the rest of the college, everyone a sea of burgundy and yellow-gold. I’ve never been to a college football game before. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have even entered the ticket lottery if it weren’t for my roommates’ enthusiasm.

“You should have worn Sebastian’s jersey!” Maddy says in a way that tells me she’s been wanting to nag me about this since the moment I stepped out of my bedroom. “Why didn’t you? You’re probably the only one in the school that has one.”

“I just didn’t think about it,” I lie. “Besides, I’m sure he’s given one to someone else. He didn’t act like it was a big deal.” That second part is true, at least. He had a drawer full of t-shirts he could have given me; impressed as my roommates were by the jersey, it must have been decidedly un-special for Sebastian to select it. I mean, he did so before he started looked at me like…

Well. Like the way he looked at me last night, on the patio, when I came in his arms, staring into his eyes.

I feel my breath quicken, and fight off the memories, instead trying to focus hard on what Emily is saying.

“He doesn’t date. I’ve heard he doesn’t even hook up, but there’s no way that’s true,” Emily says, looking to Maddy for confirmation.

“Yeah, no quarterback has ever turned down the amount of ass I’m sure gets thrown Sebastian Slate’s way,” Maddy says through a snort. “I’ve heard he only started not hooking up after his dad became a suspect for killing that lady.”

“That’d make sense,” Becca says, always the most introspective of my roommates. “I mean, your dad goes to jail for maybe killing a lady he was having casual sex with. That can’t make casual sex look too appealing, can it?”

I shake my head in agreement with my other roommates, hoping my face doesn’t give anything away. There’s so much to give away, after all: My hookup with Sebastian, sure, but also, my aunt’s death— my roommates have no idea that the “lady” they’re talking about has anything to do with me. My aunt’s last name was Miller; mine is Sawyer. My mother and I mostly stayed out of the press after my aunt died— our lawyer said it’s best we save everything for the actual court rather than the court of public opinion. Plus, Aunt Tessa died a few weeks before my high school graduation, and I was pretty eager to get to college and not be “that girl whose aunt got killed by that famous football guy”.

So, I didn’t tell anyone at school about my aunt. It’s been easier, this way, but it also feels weird— like I’m living some kind of double life. Aunt Tessa’s death was— is— such a huge part of my life, and here I’m just smashing it down, keeping it quiet, save using it as my motivation to join the student advocacy group. Worse yet? I sort of…like it. It’s nice not thinking about her every single hour of every single day. The downside, of course, is that all that not thinking about her seems to catch up with me at once. Like last night, for example, when I sat in my room for hours berating myself for what I’d done with the son of the man who killed her.