Defiant Princess (Boys of Oak Park Prep #2) - Callie Rose Page 0,20

trying to force myself to feel something for him, to be attracted to someone who might be good for me for once.

The headache I had made up to escape the after-party was rapidly becoming real, so I made my excuses and slipped inside. As I padded up the stairs to my second-floor room, I rubbed hard at my temples, trying to banish Mason’s words from my mind.

The Princes had acted like they still had some claim to me, like I was some thing they could use, toy with, or break whenever they wanted.

I’d kissed Oliver to piss them off, to prove them wrong. But I couldn’t help but think that despite my little demonstration, there was some truth to Mason’s words.

For the two and a half months I’d been in Sand Valley before Erin Bennett showed up, not a day had gone by when I didn’t think about the Princes. I’d spent every free moment in the library researching their lives, trying to dig up dirt on them. I had a little black book with a section for each of them, and a flash drive to store incriminating evidence.

Obsession with those four boys, with the vengeance I was determined to wreak on them, had taken over my life, blotting out all other dreams and goals.

In a way, I was theirs, even though I’d never wanted to be.

To remind myself of who I was—of who I wanted to be—I threw myself back into dance on Monday.

I kept expecting Adena or someone else to invade my little sanctuary on the second floor of the gymnasium. All the Princes knew I came up here to practice during class. Hell, Finn had spent almost half the previous year hanging out with me in this little room. It was one of the few memories I allowed myself to keep, to leave untarnished by the bullshit that had followed.

The small dance studio had been our neutral ground, our Switzerland, and there was some part of me that still believed everything that’d happened in this room had been real. As if, like in a true demilitarized zone, Finn and I had both shed our weapons and armor before we stepped through the door.

As if the person I’d gotten to know inside these four walls actually existed.

Somewhere.

I shoved thoughts of Finn aside, refusing to let my gaze track to the spot near the door where he used to sit, and sank into a low plié. It would take a bit of time to get my body back into the swing of things, but nowhere near as long as it’d taken last fall. I had trained hard all last year, and although three months off was a long time—in dance terms, anyway—I was determined to reach and surpass my old level quickly.

This was the real reason I was here. To pursue the life I wanted.

Bringing down the Princes will just be a “side benefit”.

The girl in the mirror grinned evilly at me as she rose up onto the balls of her feet.

I spent the rest of the period going through drills and stretches, reawakening muscles in my body that’d started to lose tone. It felt good to be in this familiar room, with the abandoned mats and heavy bags piled in the corner, and for that single hour, I let myself focus on something besides my revenge.

The rest of the day passed without incident, but Tuesday and Wednesday were awful. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was related in any way to the party after the football game, and the anger on the Princes’ faces that night. A couple of times, Oliver stepped to my defense when people called me names or threw shit at me in the halls, though I couldn’t help but notice he only did it when it was underclassmen or people so low on the hierarchy they were basically invisible.

I couldn’t really blame him. I hadn’t asked him to stick up for me, and he was one of the only people in school who did. At least he was doing something, even if what he did made no difference at all.

On Thursday, Adena stole all my books and notebooks from my locker and burned them in a dumpster near the adjunct buildings. Every note I’d taken for half my classes was lost, and I had a sudden flare of panic that she’d burned my little black journal—but I never kept that in my locker. It stayed in my backpack, kept with me at all