“Everything you do is important,” I growl, shaking her. “This stalker of yours? You’d better believe he watched that night in the pit. He knows when you leave the house, when you get to campus—hell, he probably knows you just fucked Rath.” A gnawing disdain grows within my chest. I don’t like this guy knowing more about her than I do. It makes me wild, crazed, turning my voice into a deadly hiss. “You can lock me out of your room, you can turn off the cameras, you can flaunt your pussy in here with Rath. That’s all fine and fucking dandy. But you will not shut me out of decisions that involve you showing your tits and ass to the entire Royal system.” I fume right into her face, mouth pulling into a sneer. “If you’re that hell-bent on being a whore like your mother, then I’ll go find an ATM right now. Maybe then, you’ll actually—”
I see the strike in her eyes long before it’s made flesh. It’s a spark of fury—the twitch of the vein in her temple—and then, astonishingly, her palm cracking hard against my face.
For a long moment, everything goes white.
“How dare you,” she seethes, face boiling red. “You use your body every day to get ahead, be it out on the field, or over in South Side, muscling your way around, showing off your tattoos, trying to look so big and tough. But you—all three of you—look down your noses the second a woman tries to do it.” Shaking her head, she gives a low, humorless laugh. “God, you’re all unbearable hypocrites.”
I’m rigidly still, the roar in my head too much to contain. I try anyway, desperately struggling to shove it all down, to breathe, to keep my fingers from crushing the bones in her arms—from wrapping around her pale, slender neck. This is the second time she’s struck me. The first time, I worked off my anger jumping in the ring down at the Duke’s gym.
This time, I uncurl my fingers, one by one, rusty knuckles protesting against it. It’s in opposition to every ingrained instinct, but I let her go, dropping her to her feet with a bitten out warning. “Keep testing me like this, Story. One of these times I’m going to decide this agreement of ours is a failure.”
I leave her before I do anything else—before I react to the defiant fire in her eyes, the one that’s daring me to make good on my promise. Maybe Rath is right about that, too. Story is more like us than I want to admit, which doesn’t bode well for her.
No one hurts us more than we hurt ourselves.
9
Tristian
I watch as Story builds herself up, dabbing her mouth with the napkin before jabbing her fork into her mashed potatoes. Cutting her eyes to Killian, she asks, “Can you please pass the salt?”
Ah, there it is.
The words are perfectly polite, but the tone is all low and cutting, as if he’s been holding the salt hostage just to inconvenience us all.
Killian doesn’t even look up from his plate when he reaches toward the salt, and in one quick snap of his wrist, flicks it down the table. She flings a hand out to catch it, mouth pressing into a tight, angry line as she glowers at him.
“Thanks,” she drawls, giving the salt a violent shake over her potatoes.
Rath and I share a long-suffering look.
Jesus, dinners in their old house must have been straight up theater.
It’s been like this now for three days. I figured with us heading back to classes and everything, it’d settle down. We’re busy and overbooked, and have way too much to worry about to indulge all this petty, bullshit squabbling, but here we are, watching Killian shoot daggers at her with his eyes the second she looks away.
The way Killian tells it, Story had disrespected him, left him to stew in it, and then slapped him in the face when he confronted her. The way Story tells it, she was just minding her own business when Killian stormed in and went into full caveman mode. They both had the marks to prove it—Killian’s red cheek, Story’s bruised upper arms, and most of all, the tension that’s been sparking between them since.
Rath hasn’t been helping. “You know, this is the first time I’ve really felt like I was living with siblings.”
Story’s head snaps up. “We are not siblings!”
Desperate to go one meal without their bickering, I try, “I saw the new Princess today.”
Rath hums, sounding only halfway interested as he scrolls down his phone. “She hot?”
“Naturally.” Not that it would have mattered. The Princes struck out with that one girl—Autumn, I think her name was—so they forfeited the chance to cherry-pick. “Some Phi Nu guys in my stats class were taking bets on how long it’d take to put a baby in her. I’m in five Gs deep for it happening before the new year.”