Brutal Prince (Brutal Birthright)

“I came to talk to you.”

I take a false step on a stone hidden in the grass, my ankle bending uncomfortably under me.

“Ouch! Fuck!” I hiss, stumbling a little.

“Careful,” Oliver says, catching my elbow.

“I’m fine,” I say, trying to pull my arm away. But I’m limping slightly now. I don’t think it’s sprained, it’s just that thing where it’s tender and wonky, and you have to baby it a minute.

“Come over here,” Oliver says. “Sit down a second.”

He steers me away from the parking lot, over to an underground walkway, at the head of which is a stone bench, partially hidden under an overhang.

Oliver is so big and overbearing that I can’t really pull away, not without hurting myself. I sink down on the bench. Oliver sits right next to me, almost forced to put his arm around me because of the tightness of the space. I can smell that cologne he always wears, pleasant but a little overpowering.

“I can’t stay,” I tell him. “Somebody’s picking me up.”

I pull off my sneaker and massage my ankle, trying to work out the kink.

“They can wait a minute,” Oliver says.

He takes my socked foot and pulls it into his lap, kneading and massaging my ankle. It feels good, but I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. So after a minute I say, “That’s good, thanks,” and take my foot back.

Oliver looks down at me with his big brown eyes, his expression reproachful.

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“Aida, what you did cut me to the bone. Do you know how painful that was, to see a picture of you on fucking Facebook, wearing a goddamned wedding dress? Standing next to him?”

I take a deep breath, trying to be patient.

“I’m sorry, Oliver. It was sudden. I was pretty fucking surprised myself.”

I don’t know how to explain it without telling him too much. All I can really say, lamely, is, “I didn’t do it to hurt you.”

“But you did hurt me. You’re still hurting me. You’re killing me every day.”

I let out a breath, both guilty and annoyed. Oliver can be a bit . . . dramatic.

“I didn’t even know you were dating him!” he cries.

I press my knuckles into my forehead. My ankle is throbbing. It’s actually kind of cold here, out of the sunshine and close to the chilly cement tunnel.

I feel bad about the way I dumped Oliver, I really do. It was the weirdest thing. He never did anything wrong, exactly. He took me on trips, bought me about a thousand gifts, told me how desperately infatuated he was with me.

It started out as a casual fling. I didn’t think some country club, uber-capitalist trust-funder would pursue me so aggressively. I figured Oliver just wanted to get fucked by a bad girl. Tired of the Madisons and the Harpers of the world refusing to make eye contact during a BJ.

We happened to be at the same party, two summers ago. We drunkenly kissed in the boathouse, then he tried to put his hand down my bikini bottoms, and I shoved him in the lake.

A couple of weeks later, we met again at a party in Wicker Park. He gave me shit about the lake thing, I told him he was lucky we were swimming, not mountain-climbing.

The next day he sent a bouquet of three hundred pink roses to my father’s house.

That’s how it was from then on. He kept chasing after me with these grand, exotic gestures, and I went along with it for a while. Dinners, dancing, weekend trips. But I didn’t take it seriously. I doubted that he’d want to bring a gangster’s daughter home to meet Mr. and Mrs. Castle. Even around his friends, I could tell he was sometimes proud to show me off, sometimes nervous, like I might pull out a switchblade and shank somebody.

I was tempted, a time or two. I already knew some of Oliver’s friends, from running in the overlapping circles of the party crowd, the criminal crowd, and the wealthy heirs of Chicago.

They weren’t all bad. But some of the would-be upper crust made me want to puncture my own eardrums just to avoid the sound of their idiocy.