Kings of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #1) - Caroline Peckham ,Susanne Valenti Page 0,199

beside the door as he snarled in my face. “You and your little friends have already got detention with me tonight. After that you can pack up this toilet paper and deliver it back to Brown’s office. Are we clear on that, Memphis?” he yelled.

My jaw locked and my anger rose again, but I couldn’t let it rule me. I needed to play this right. There were a lot of things I could buy my way out of. Hitting a teacher wasn’t one of them. Not easily anyway.

“No problem, sir,” I agreed, though the death threat in my gaze would be letting him know there was a problem alright.

I shoved away from him and headed up the stairs, meeting Tatum as she tried to step out of my closet dressed in her school uniform.

“Move,” she snarled, but of course I didn’t. I backed her into the confined space and shut the door behind me.

“Are you gonna keep up the kicked puppy act all day, Barbie?” I asked, eyeing her uniform carefully before reaching out to straighten her tie.

She jerked back so I couldn’t touch her and I pursed my lips. My gaze snagged on that fucking hicky on her neck and I fought against the urge to ask her what Kyan had done to earn the right to put his mouth on her flesh. He said he hadn’t fucked her and I believed him, but clearly something had happened between them. I just didn’t know if I wanted to hear about it or not.

“Just so long as you keep up the evil asshole routine,” she growled, making a move to push past me.

I caught her arm to stop her, glaring down at her as she tried to walk away from me. “You agreed to belong to me. To all of us. You can’t have thought that would be easy.”

“I hate you,” she hissed and the raw emotion of those words hit me like another punch. “Now let me go or I’ll scream for Monroe.”

I released her without a word and she strode to the door, flinging it open.

“Oh, and you should probably fix your face before class,” she said acidly. “That fucked up nose of yours really looks like shit.”

The door snapped shut in my face and I stood in the silence as chaos reigned inside me. My ritual had gone to fuck. My only friends had been lying to me. Monroe was inside my Temple. And Tatum Rivers had just gotten the last word in. My life was officially in tatters.

School was just about bearable. I put on my fiercest resting bitch face, sucked up the Night Keepers’ bullshit and even got to partner with Mila in English for an assignment. Not that I told her what they’d done to me. I gave her a false smile and said nothing could hurt me. I had a heart of iron. And by the time I was back in The Temple, cooking dinner for the assholes who owned me, I wished I did.

I’d made many wishes in my life; wishes on stars, wishes on birthday candles, wishes in wells. And I’d wasted them all. Because if I could exchange just one of them to replace my heart with a lump of cold, hard metal then fighting back against them would have been easy.

Every time I saw them laughing and smirking together, I thought of those letters. I thought of all of those private words being poured secretly into those pages only to be burned out of existence. And my heart felt it all.

When I’d finished washing the dishes at seven thirty, Saint called me upstairs. There had been few words shared between any of us today. I’d answered their requests with as little syllables as possible and done all of it with a mask of indifference on my face.

My stomach knotted as I headed across the room, feeling Kyan and Blake’s eyes on me from the couch. We had detention with Monroe at eight and I wished he’d done me the favour of only giving it to the Night Keepers. A couple of hours here alone would have been a dream come true. Even if they’d locked me in the bathroom.

I made it to the top of the staircase, finding Saint lying on the bed and gazing up at the vaulted ceiling. He’d somehow managed not to wrinkle the sheets around him and was dressed for a workout like Monroe had requested. His grey T-shirt clung to his muscular frame and