the party, but they’d wheedled and whined until she’d relented. So she’d been a little pissed to be standing alone in a place she hadn’t wanted to be, but that didn’t mean she wished hurt on them—and certainly not that kind of hurt.
“I’m fine. But I heard you were with Jackson last night. Were you?”
“Not for long. He—” she stopped, not sure what she should say about what Jackson had apparently meant to do. “Not for long. I left early.”
She’d been flattered when Jackson had come over to her. He was a major catch on campus—good looking, athletic, charming, from an old-money New England family. The Crenvilles had controlling interest in, among other things, a major banking conglomerate.
Lia had plenty of money and didn’t care about that, but it was nice to get attention from a guy everybody wanted. Jackson hadn’t noticed her at all last year.
She shuddered, thinking what might have happened. Apparently, he hadn’t actually been interested; she’d simply looked like easy pickings. And she would have been, if not for Alex.
It dawned on her that there was a lot of background commotion coming through the phone. It was barely past seven in the morning on a Saturday. The world of Brown University should be unconscious. “Where are you? What’s going on?” As she asked, she heard a siren in the background.
“Here. I’m sending you a photo.”
The photo came through. When Lia understood what she was looking at, she almost dropped her phone.
Jackson Crenville, billionaire’s son and heir-apparent to one of the biggest financial empires on the East Coast. Entirely naked, duct-taped to the flagpole in the front yard of the Sigma Rho fraternity house. He was unconscious.
The word “RAPIST” was written across his naked chest, spanning from shoulder to shoulder and all the way down to his nipples.
The word looked strange, rough black letters rimmed with red. Lia spread her fingers over the screen of her phone and enlarged the image so only his chest showed. It was grainy, but she understood the look of the letters.
They’d been tattooed into his chest.
“Are you still there?” she asked Harriet.
“Yeah, obviously. Basically everybody in the world is. There’s an ambulance here now, and cops. They’re getting him down. It’ll be over before you get here.”
She wasn’t going to gawk, and it turned her stomach to think of a crowd of people staring, taking photos, but not helping him.
Why did she feel sorry for him? He’d meant to rape her, for fuck’s sake.
And why did she feel this compulsion to go to the scene?
She didn’t know, but she did feel compelled. Maybe because it was the men in her world, her protection, who’d done this.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Hang out, please.”
“Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” her friend said, her tone greedy. “This is too big to miss.”
Lia shuddered and ended the call.
~oOo~
Lia wasn’t supposed to leave her apartment without Alex or David—she couldn’t bring herself to call the poor guy Bluto—on her, but Alex wouldn’t be here until almost nine, and she didn’t want to call him early and wait for him to get here. Besides, he probably would make a fuss about where she wanted to go.
Lia wasn’t like her little sister, Carina. Carina did whatever she wanted and flicked her chin at anybody who told her not to. She wasn’t like her big sister, Elisa, either. Elisa was a nervous wreck about literally everything all the time. And then there was Ren, their baby brother, who was not like any of them and the source of a whole different kind of parental consternation.
Since Carina was old enough to show what a little shit she was, and Elisa was old enough to decide that the world was a horrifying place, Lia had sat between her two drama-queen sisters and tried not to make a fuss. It had become her whole guiding principle in life: leave a small footprint, don’t cause trouble, don’t be the source of any fraught family meetings.
It was probably ironic that she’d ended up being the actually dramatic person in the family. Or maybe it wasn’t: on stage was the only place Lia felt like she could act out.
As she pulled her hair into a quick ponytail and headed out of her apartment, she knew that there’d be an alert on some computer or phone somewhere that she was leaving. Somebody would know she was heading out without a guard, and it would trigger some kind of frenzy, no doubt. She felt a guilty