by Mj Fields
Kiki quickly snags it from me. “Nothing you need to worry about.” She stands up, rage on her face, and looks around the cafeteria. She then narrows her eyes and begins walking toward the opposite corner.
“Fuck,” Brisa says, jumping up. “Tris, grab our stuff and stay back but close, but—”
I hear Brisa stumble with her words while I hurry to catch up to Kiki.
Standing in front of the table, where the horsemen sit, she plants her hands firmly in front of her on the table, leans over, and snaps, “You think you’re gonna get away with all the shit you’ve pulled since we came here, you’re wrong.”
Harrison purses his lips, amusement dancing in his eyes as he leans forward. “Please, do tell; what is it we’ve done that has ruffled your feathers, Katherine Falcon?”
“You pretentious, condescending, entitled, little, tight-wearing bitch!” she yells.
Holy shit, I think as I step to her side.
“What the hell did you assholes do now?” I snap at all of them.
“Wasn’t Saturday night enough?” Kiki snaps at me, and I watch as three of the four pricks present lean back and cross their arms in sync, as if they choreographed it.
“No big thing, Kiki. No big thing at all.”
All of them begin pulling their phones out of their pockets and look at their screens.
When they all try not to laugh, Kiki reaches across the table and slaps the phone out of Kai’s hand. It goes flying across the table.
“You crazy bitch!” Kai starts to stand, but I reach across and shove him two-handed, so he’s forced to sit down.
“You think she’s crazy? Try me,” I spit.
Brisa steps beside me. “Try all of us.”
Miles holds his phone up, screen toward me, grip visibly firmer than the others. “You sure about that? Not sure I’m your type. Apparently, you’re all into each other.”
I watch as a montage of pictures and videos, including me on Patrick’s back the other night, to Justice sleeping in my bed, from outside my fucking bedroom window, and farm animals fucking, play on the screen while text rolls across them.
Kissing Cousins. Brotherly Love. Incest is Best.
“You’ve crossed so many lines. So. Fucking. Many.” I point a finger in their faces. “You’re done now.” I turn around and scan the room. “You’re all done now.”
I see Nina giggling. “What’s so funny, bitch? You and half the hoes in this place have swallowed our DNA, so you know this is bullshit.”
“Slander, actually,” Kiki adds then turns around. “Lawyer-up. We’re done here.”
I then hear Justice’s voice boom throughout the room, “What the fuck are you laughing at, Madeline? I’m pretty sure I have a video that you had me take on your phone of you bent over your daddy’s desk.”
“Principal’s office?” Patrick asks him.
Justice lifts his chin in response.
“How was it?” Amias asks.
“Mediocre, at best,” Justice says, looking to the horsemen. He then steps forward. “You want a fight? You’ll get one, and then this is done.”
I snap my head toward him. When his eyes lock on mine, I know he just agreed to something he never wanted to do … for me.
He looks back at them. “Saturday night.”
Chapter Nine
Tobias
No more
“What the fuck is this?” I slam my phone down on the coffee table between the two couches in a place I call home less than fifty percent of the time.
“Chill,” Miles sighs. To him, it’s no big fucking deal when someone with a bottomless purse and a legal team that could rival General Electric could come at you, because his uncle is the COO of that very company and pays his way through life.
“A harmless little prank.” Harrison smirks until he looks at my face. “Relax, my friend, we aren’t behind it, but it works in our favor to retain control over our environment.”
I slap the glass from his hand, and it flies across the room before it smashes against the cabinets. The glass shatters, and whiskey splatters all over.
Kai stands up and looks at me, nostrils flaring. “You jumping ship, Easton?”
“You don’t run the game. I run the fucking game. And in case you forgot, I don’t jump ship. I toss bitches off it. All three of you were already fucking close with ambushing me with a last-minute fight, knowing damn well I’m months from graduation.” I stop just short of mentioning Truth Steel’s name with all the shit that went down this weekend, no doubt putting a bigger target on her back, possibly fucking up my future. “Now you’re toying with the entire Steel crew.”
“We aren’t underclassmen anymore, Easton. We aren’t afraid of the new kid from the other side of the tracks who kicked Whitaker’s ass and overthrew the institution’s hierarchy that had been in place since 1899, or Reeves who had the balls to try to take it back from you,” Kai snaps.
My jaw clenched, fists balled, rage building inside, and seeing red, I nod my head up and down.
“Easy, man,” Harrison says, trying to defuse the situation building at a breakneck speed.
“Fuck that. Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you. I’m done. You hear me? I’m fucking done!”
They all look at one another with a recognizable look. They’ve done something, again.
Miles is the first one to look at me and speak up. “You’re done? Then step down and hand over the reins. Your shit’s getting weak.”
Harrison chuckles, and I glare at him.
“I’m not in any hurry, man.”
Fucker has no clue he’s not even a distant blip on the radar now.
They continue looking at each other, and I get a sick feeling in my stomach.
“You better start talking now, because this was the four of us right up until last weekend.”
“Don’t kid yourself. You pulled away right after they moved here,” Miles states.
Kai sits down now. “When you started skipping lunch with us and hitting the gym, we chalked it up to a natural need to get bigger, stronger, to protect what was yours.”
“Protect what was mine?” I huff.
Harrison shakes his head. “Don’t act like you don’t see eight strong and want to ruin it. We all do. Until Katherine’s dirty little secret came to light, I was gonna make that mine.”
Dirty little secret meaning she’s pregnant and having a child with a man she actually married a few months ago. She’s eighteen, not fifteen like my mother was when she had me.
“Truth? I’ll have to endure for longer, and she’ll be a bit more difficult to tame, but with Gabby and her butting heads, I don’t even have to try to get in that. She’ll come willingly.” Harrison smirks, and I want to wipe that fucking smug look off his face.
“You think, with the shit you pulled today, that’s gonna happen? Goats on videos bashing with pictures of her, and texts accusing her of fucking her crew? Really doesn’t shout I want to have a relationship with you.”
“Says the guy fucking Downward Dee, knowing she’s an onto-the-next kind of woman in about—”
“You don’t think that’s why I’m fucking her?”
“Where’s the hunt in that?” Harrison sighs, and I’m ready to snap when he says, “The video was unfortunate; possibly forced my progression from this weekend two steps back. But I’m telling you, it wasn’t us.”
“Then who the fuck was it?”
“More pressing matters to attend to,” Harrison states. “Justice Steel agreed to a fight this weekend.”
“What the fuck do you mean agreed to?” I snap.
“While you’ve been fucking the yoga instructor and stepping away from us, we’ve been looking toward the future,” Miles says.
“I’m not fighting again. We get busted, and I lose everything. You better find someone else to match up with JT.”
Kai glares at me. “You don’t fight him, you lose everything.”
I force a smile. “Don’t threaten me. And don’t you for
get what I have on you.”
As he narrows his eyes, I look at Miles. “You, too, motherfucker.”
“Come on now, we’re all—”
I shove my finger in his face. “You, too, Reeves.”
He stands up. “I’m bored with this bullshit.”
What he really means is I don’t give a shit, I have no conscience, no soul, no allegiance, and no worry that my purse strings will get snipped. Unlike the other two, he’s not merely a seed that rooted itself and has grown from a money tree. His parents aren’t out in the orchard, waiting for the low-hanging fruit to drop. His father has money, and as much as it pains me to say it, the fucker has talent. He’s already sought after as a choreographer as soon as he graduates high school because of his family name. And if he wasn’t, his father owns enough Broadway houses that he’ll never be out of work.
Kai and Miles don’t move. They expect that I’m just going to roll over and let them chill here instead of going back to the off-campus student housing, which isn’t happening.
“You two need to get the fuck out of here, too.”
They look shocked. Honestly, it’s a stupid fucking move on my part, but I’m sick of playing the damn game that I’ve been playing since some judge gave custody of me, a then fourteen-year-old boy who was orphaned, to his mother’s on-again, off-again lover.
They leave when they realize I’m not caving, and then I clean up the mess I made.
Picking up the shards of glass, I realize it is one from a bar that my mother worked at until I was about five—Sorority Sisters.
Up until she passed away, I didn’t know that the glass wasn’t from an actual sorority. How would I have? My earliest memories were of her dropping me off, backpack on my back, matching the one on hers, at her college’s daycare while she attended classes to earn her GED and then her associates degree. She had quit working her “night job” when she came home to find me standing next to the couch with a crack pipe in my hand and the babysitter, who was one of her “sorority sisters,” and some guy that she had over, passed out on the couch, butt-ass naked.
I don’t remember much more than the fact it was summer, and she was gone for most of it. I stayed with some family, not my own, in Central Jersey. I also remember crying a lot. Hated that fucking place; must have been ten kids there. It was hot, and the only thing that helped us cool off was a garden hose and one of those little plastic pools that we shared with the family’s dogs. And I remember when my mom came back for me, she was wearing a military uniform and no makeup, and the look on her face held a promise that life was going to get better.
The next year, Mom worked at a clinic while I was in school and on the occasional weekend. She only left for a couple weeks out of the year while I stayed with Frank who, like the Reserves, was a part-time gig. When she was home, she worked full-time as a nurse and eventually bought this place, and life was real good for those seven years until her last deployment. That’s when Frank became my guardian, got the checks from Social Security, got me a scholarship to Seashore Academy, and taught me all I needed to know about getting by and fucking the system.
When I turned sixteen and learned there wasn’t enough money to pay the taxes on this place, even though it had been rented out for two years, and it was about to be foreclosed on, I taught Frank that I was much smarter than he had given me credit for and told him that, if he didn’t help me get emancipated, I’d blow his ass in.
Don’t get me wrong: he taught me how to survive, how to fight, and how to take care of myself.
For two years, I’ve rented this place occasionally to make enough to pay the taxes, fought when I needed food, and even made jewelry, something he taught me. I got better than him, and he sold my shit at his shop.
As much as I love renting this place out during the summer, making enough to pay a year’s worth of taxes, I know damn well I’m not going to hustle on purpose all my life.
My plan was always to join the military. I had witnessed how it changed my mom’s life, and what it had done for us. I wanted West Point or Annapolis, but a criminal charge, even as a minor, kills that dream real quick, and I earned that one. So, now I’ll go to college, become legit—well, as legit as a kid born to a fifteen-year-old girl who became a stripper to get through life and stayed stripping after having a kid, to get through college could ever be. I’m going to break a cycle, get the fuck out of here, and never look back.
Frank tells me I’m going to hate leaving the hustle and the freedoms it provides, but Frank chose that life as an adult. He has no clue what it’s like to be born into it and have to fight your way out of your situation. Hell, I applaud my mother for all she did, but it doesn’t mean I want to be like her, and as far apart as a stripper and a bare-knuckled underground brawler seems to be, it’s really just a hop, skip, and a jump from one to the other, and I want as many miles away from both as I can get.
Chapter Ten
Idiom
Free for all.
Truth
Nothing is ever free.
Monday
“Makes no sense to me, T.” Justice stretches out on my bed.
“What doesn’t make sense? They’re assholes, set me up, and I fell right into it, and dragged you along,” I whisper-hiss as I close the blinds to my bedroom, completely freaked out by the fact that someone took pictures outside my window last night.
The fact that we messed with the surveillance cameras so that we could sneak in and out, or sneak someone else in and out, to do stupid shit bit me right in the ass, especially since that situation hasn’t arose yet.
“And if you are being blasé about the situation because I didn’t tell you everything that happened that night—”
“Or show me the phantom texts from last night.” His eyes harden, and he lifts a brow.
“They were there. I saw them. I wasn’t imagining them.”
He sits up. “And you know how fucked up that sounds, so don’t get pissed at me, Truth. I’m gonna do what I said I would.”
“You said you would out of anger. No one will fault you if—”
“No. It’s a one and done situation.”
Anxiety swirls around me, and my chest tightens. “What if it’s not? What if you like it, or what if they somehow suck you in and —”
“By Saturday, they’ll know my word is my word, and that crew is life.” He nods once then lies back.
When I don’t move, he sighs and sits back up. “Stop personalizing. They’re nothing but billionaire bullies who are doing what they can to keep the order they’ve kept for hundreds of years. If anything, feel good about the fact they’re focusing on us and not giving the scholarship kids shit. We’re a threat, and we haven’t proven provokable until now. Disappearing text messages or not, we’ve seen the video. They fucked with us on our home turf. I knock out their leader, and they’ll try to be our best fucking friends.”
My chest burns, and I begin to feel hopeless at the fact that he’ll never believe me.
“They were real. I told you that’s what scared me last night. I didn’t say anything because it was about me.”
“Regardless, they made it about you, me, and Patrick today. I’ve stood back and have watched you struggle. Honored your need to deal with it alone, but I’m done. Now we’ve got this, Truth. You, me, and the rest of them together.” He grabs my hand and yanks me down next to him. “One fight and done, T. No big thing.”
I sigh. “You better not let him fuck up your face.”
He chuckles sleepily. “You worried about my face, T?”
“Your eyes and your mouth.”
He opens one eye and looks at me. “Not my nose?”
I shake my head. “Nope.”
“And why’s that?”
“We have the same eyes, same mouth.”
He smirks as he closes his eyes. “Pretty tired. Gonna crash here. Since you’ve seen him fight, tomorrow, you and Patrick can give me some tips.”
“He has a nasty uppercut.” I sigh
as I sit up and walk over to the other bed. “And he moves like a gorilla.”
He chuckles. “Night, T.”
“Night, Justice.” I crawl under the covers of the twin bed. “Love you.”
Tuesday
Head up, eyes forward, was the last thing Justice said to me before we parted ways this morning. And it’s exactly what I did … until Gabrielle reared her ugly head.
Walking out of the bathroom stall, I see her leaning against the sink, arms crossed and toe tapping.
Head up and eyes forward, I walk to the sink, wash my hands, and completely ignore her.
When I start to walk out, she steps in front of me.
Head up, eyes forward. I tell her how it is. “My grace has run out for you.”
“Is that so?”
Head up, eyes on her, I give it to her straight. “I haven’t done a damn thing to you, and you nonstop run your mouth. Newsflash, bitch: I’m better than you.”
“You’re better than me?” She laughs snootily.
“In every way that counts.” I take a step forward, and she steps back, staying in front of me. “You run your mouth one more time, and I’ll smear your name … in peanut butter.”
Quicker than the words leave my mouth, she slaps me across the face.
The shocked look on her face gives me pause from going full-out Jersey girl on her.
Eyes wide, her jaw stamped shut, she looks like a caged animal. And then she smiles, ill intent erasing the fear.
I couldn’t care less. “Bring it.”
Walking out of the bathroom, her hot on my heels, into what should be an empty hallway since third period began ten minutes ago, but leaning against the lockers is none other than Harrison Reeves.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I mumble as I walk past him to get to my classroom.
Behind me, I hear Harrison say, “Leave her alone, Gabrielle, or you’ll regret it.”
