Beautiful Dirty Rich: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Blood and Diamonds Book 1)

by L. A. Sable

  Then I notice that the word deadly is underlined and a slightly different color than the other text. When I touch it with the tip of one finger, another screen pops up and I’m redirected out of the app and into my web browser. The word is a link.

  An archived version of a news story slowly loads on the screen as I wait impatiently, damning my old phone to the very pits of hell. The headline jumps out at me first, starkly bold against a light background:

  The Greenwich Herald

  STUDENT DIES AFTER POSSIBLE HAZING RITUAL AT CONNECTICUT SCHOOL

  Early Saturday morning, an unidentified female student of Black Lake Preparatory Academy was transported to the Greenwich Medical Center after presumed cardiac arrest, dying hours later. Though exact details remain unclear, the deceased student had taken part in a frozen lake swim the previous evening as part of some sort of initiation ritual. Other students were present at the time, but no other injuries have been reported. Police have opened an investigation into what is being called a possible “hazing incident.” In a written statement, school officials announced that the school has a zero tolerance policy for bullying and hazing, although no suspensions or expulsions of individuals involved have reportedly occurred.

  The phone drops from my numb fingers to the surface of the desk with a loud clatter. Even though the story is from last school year, a shot of fear still rockets through me. Someone died and under incredibly suspicious circumstances. The message combined with a link to this story feels like a threat, but I have no idea how to respond to it.

  A concerned citizen. What does that even me?

  Picking up the phone again, I do an internet search for the headline, trying to find more information. All I can find is the same story, but the live version has a huge bolded retraction at the top refuting most of the details. The girl who died isn’t identified, but they’d changed her cause of death to accidental drowning.

  Except the original article said that other students had been present at the time, even if that detail is now missing from the version currently on the newspaper’s website. Why would anyone try to swim in a lake that was almost completely frozen over? And it’s difficult to understand how someone could accidentally drown surrounded by a bunch of other people.

  Unless it wasn’t an accident.

  I’d seen a lake on the school’s campus as we drove up. It’s located on the far side of the grounds near the winding road that leads up to the main building with nothing else nearby. You can’t even see it from any of the buildings and it’s far enough away to be well outside the prying eyes of any school officials. Anything could happen in a place like that and no one would ever know about it.

  Despite the late summer heat, I feel a cold chill like icy fingers running down my spine. I’m afraid, even though I don’t have any real idea of what’s happening here.

  It has to be Asher, I tell myself, just trying to scare me away because he hates me for reasons I’ll probably never understand. Except I get the sense that this cloak and dagger stuff isn’t really his style. And I haven’t even seen him since I got to campus. For all I know, he’s not thinking about me at all.

  Maybe Asher isn’t the only person here who I need to be worried about.

  Chapter 5

  On my way to the dining hall, I stop by the front office to pick up my schedule. When the receptionist hands it to me, an apologetic smile crosses her face. “Just remember all of your elective choices were full. You may be able to transfer after the holidays.”

  Well, that doesn’t exactly bode well does it?

  I thank her and turn on my heel, only opening the envelope once I’m back outside, hoping the sunshine will do something to ease the blow that I know is coming.

  First Term Schedule for Lily Murphy

  (Third Year)

  A Days

  Period 1: Homeroom, Ms. Pitt, Atrium

  Period 2: Algebra II, Mr. Cardill, Chamber 17

  Period 3: French III, Ms. Posey, Chamber 24

  Period 4: English, Ms. Lake, Atrium

  B Days

  Period 1: Homeroom, Ms. Pitt Atrium

  Period 2: Chemistry, Mr. Douglas, Lab 1

  Period 3: World History, Ms. Harris, Chamber 18

  Period 4: Diving I, Mr. Cardill, Pool

  The remedial English class isn’t a surprise. They’d warned me over the summer that my scores on the state reading test were behind the curve so I would be getting extra help. I can read just fine, but the dyslexia makes everything take longer than it should so I end up skipping questions on the tests the state gives every year. It sucks, but I can deal with it.

  What really causes unhappy surprise is that they put me in diving for my physical education class. Diving. I can barely swim so I have no business in a class like that. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they mean the sort of diving you do with a scuba tank to look at fish. Like most people with any sense, I have a healthy fear of heights and high diving sounds like a great way to break my neck.

  Not for the first time, I think about calling up Trish and begging her for mercy. But my mother has already made it clear that the opportunity to attend a school as good as Black Lake Preparatory Academy isn’t one she’ll let me give up without a knockdown, drag out fight. There’s no way she’ll let me go back to the city by myself and right now she’s accompanying Carter on an extended business trip for the next few weeks so I can’t even stay at the house in Greenwich.

  And as much as part of me wants to rebel, I can’t bring myself to do it. Trish has spent her entire life sacrificing for me and ultimately there’s a good reason why I want to see her happy, why I feel obligated to make her happy.

  I owe her some happiness. I’ll spend the rest of my life making up for how I’ve robbed her of it in the past.

  For better or worse, I’m stuck at Black Lake Prep. I have to make the best of it.

  On that thought, I enter the dining hall and my jaw immediately drops. The room has been designed to look like a French cafe only on a more massive scale. There are dozens of round tables, each with eight chairs surrounding them. With enough seats to serve the entire student body, everyone can have their lunch period at the same time. Each place is set with real china and gleaming silverware with a lit candelabra at the center of the table. Aside from the extensive salad bar that runs along the back of the room, all the food is served by staff in matching uniforms. Little menus on the table describe the offerings for the day, with different sections for dietary restrictions and allergies.

  The menu here is higher class than most of the restaurants in the Bronx.

  I briefly scan for Charlie because I could use moral support, but her distinct shock of strawberry hair is nowhere to be found. None of the tables are full, but none of them are empty either. The thought of just sitting down next to someone I don’t know makes my skin crawl.

  It probably makes me a total headcase but I always have flashbacks to that scene from Mean Girls. Lindsay Lohan’s character goes to lunch on her first day and when she tries to sit down at a table everybody picks their trays up and leaves. If I remember right, she ends up eating a sandwich while sitting on the toilet.

  That is my worst nightmare.

  And then I catch sight of Kai. He’s sitting alone with a charger plate in front of him, meaning he hasn’t ordered yet. It’s easy to assume that he’s waiting for me which sends a little thrill coursing down my spine. Even from across the room, I regretfully notice that he changed into his school uniform. It’s too bad because judging from the way the jeans he’d been wearing hugged his body, they’d practically been made for him. The neatly tucked dress shirt and blue slacks with a gold sweater that has Black Lake’s crest stitched on the breast leaves way too much to the imagination.

  He raises silver eyes to meet mine, sending the same flash of heat through me that I felt the first time we met.

  Before I can think through the consequences, I wind through the tightly packed tables and past curious eyes. As of yet, no one seems particu
larly unfriendly and I can only pray that it stays that way. My entire awareness is focused on the hot guy with the slight smile tipping the corner of his mouth who somehow miraculously decided to ask me to lunch.

  “I didn’t think you’d wait for me,” I say as I sit down at the setting across from him and pick up the napkin to smooth over my lap. “It’s been longer than twenty minutes.”

  Kai raises an eyebrow, expression curious. But before he can say anything, one of the immaculately dressed waiters that serve the dining hall appears at my shoulder.

  “What can I get for you?”

  I pick up the menu and rattle off the first thing on the list, feeling completely out of sorts. It’s not like I have any allergies so if I just ordered deep fried horse liver, at least it won’t kill me. The waiter disappears as quickly as he had appeared and I look up to find Kai watching me, a strange look on his face.

  But he doesn’t say anything so I just start prattling on which is what I normally do when I’m feeling nervous.

  “Thank you for inviting me to lunch, by the way. I was supposed to meet my friend, Charlie, but she’s not here yet. One of my worst nightmares is to walk into the cafeteria and not have anywhere to sit, which is really silly I know.”

  The look he gives me is strangely assessing like he’s not quite sure what to make of me. His eyes are bright in the artificial light and sharp as serrated metal. “It’s a dining hall, not a cafeteria. There aren’t any lunch ladies here.”

  His tone is droll and mocking, enough for me to be slightly taken aback. Where is the charmingly relaxed guy that I met a half-an-hour ago? “I didn’t realize there was a difference.”

  “And you pronounced your order wrong. It’s a soo-flay, not a sooffle.”

  “Got it.”

  There’s a crueler set to his features than I remember. And while he’s still just as gorgeous as the Greek statues I originally likened him to, now he seems to be made more of stone than flesh and blood.

  Maybe the invitation to lunch hadn’t been what I thought it was. I could see someone like him offering an olive branch out of pity and not actually expecting me to take him up on it.

  “What was your name again?”

  I look at him in dismay, realizing I was way off-base. Does this guy have multiple personalities, or what? “It’s Lily.”

  Large hands come up to rest on the table and he leans forward like he’s about to share a secret with me. “Well, Lily, you’re about to have a really bad day.”

  And stupid me takes just a minute too long to realize something isn’t right. “What are…”

  “Who the fuck are you?” A girl with a long cascade of black hair and a cruel twist on her gorgeous features is glaring down at me when I look up. “And why are you talking to my boyfriend?”

  Kai smiles without humor. “Chloe, this is Lily.”

  “I don’t care who she is,” Chloe sneers, like every popular girl who’s ever made a point of cutting down somebody beneath them. She’s beautiful, obviously, but at the moment it’s hard for me to see her as anything but evil incarnate as she shoots me a look full of sheer hate. “Why are you talking to my boyfriend, slut? He’s off limits.”

  On trembling legs, I stand up from the table, wanting nothing more than to be as far as possible from this situation. I know without looking that we have the attention of everyone in the room. “I think there’s some mistake. He just invited me to have lunch.”

  “Oh, I doubt that very much.” Her voice is pure venom as she spits the words at me. “No girl has lunch with him, but me. No girl talks to him, but me.”

  “I…I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.”

  She immediately catches the stutter in my voice and mocks it. “You…you…you…are a gigantic whore. That’s the only explanation that makes sense to me.”

  “Just let me leave.”

  And before I even really understand what’s happening, the girl is in my face, so close that our noses practically touch. “There’s nowhere for you to run, Lily the slut. I plan to make damn sure of that. Now get your ass out of here.”

  I stumble away, vision blinded with rapidly approaching tears. And if things couldn’t get bad enough, that’s when I hear a slow, mocking clap.

  And I look up to see the real Kai standing a few feet away, Asher right beside him with a shit-eating grin on his face. This time, I know it’s Kai because he’s still wearing the same jeans that I’d thought were so hot an hour ago.

  “Did I forget to mention that I’m a twin? My mistake. That’s my brother, Lukas. All the girls know not to sit next to him at lunch, well almost all of them.”

  Wheels are already turning in my head and none of the conclusions that I’m drawing are good ones. “Why would you—”

  “And you really picked the wrong person to piss off. Chloe was the top Diamond last year and she can get a little insane with the jealousy.”

  My face burns, but this time it’s with both shame and anger. He set me up. How stupid could I be to not see it coming? I’d really believed that a guy who looked like that and comes from the kind of family he does would actually want to have lunch with me.

  I walked right into this. But I know who the real mastermind is and turn to glare at Asher as a sick feeling roils in my stomach. “What did you do?”

  But Asher barely bothers to look at me, just buffs his nails against his shirt with a bored expression on his face, even though I know that he’s heard every single word. “I told you not to come here. You didn’t listen.”

  Lukas rises from the chair with all the grace of a panther, limbs long and graceful. Now that I know the truth, it’s impossible to understand how I hadn’t seen it from the beginning. Where Kai’s face had been open and friendly, even if it had been a trick, the twisted smile on Lukas’s lips reminds me of the Cheshire Cat or a trickster god. There is nothing friendly about his expression.

  “The next time you want to use me for one of your little tricks, give me a head’s up,” he says to Kai, ignoring me. “I was over the whole trading places thing by kindergarten.”

  Chloe is wrapped around him like a Boa constrictor, sparing me a glare as they walk by and out of the dining hall.

  Kai watches them go with a smile before turning back to me. “Asher bet me that you’d be a social pariah by the end of your first day. I figured it would be at least a few weeks into the semester. We haven’t even cast votes on Inner Circle yet.”

  “I told you she was easy,” Asher says, voice like venom. “Goldie practically threw herself at me when I met her at the wedding. Girls like her are basically hound dogs when it comes to sniffing out cash.”

  “When you’re right, you’re right.” As I watch, horrified, Kai pulls out a wad of cash and waves it in front of his face. “I guess that means you win the bet. How much was it again?”

  “The usual.” Asher’s voice is casual, but the glare he continues to level at me is full of fire, as if he’s never seen anything in his life that he hates as much as me. I just don’t get it. “She isn’t worth anything more than that.”

  Kai makes a big show of peeling a single bill off of the stack before shoving the rest back down into his pocket. “A dollar it is then.”

  Fighting back tears, I turn to Kai. He had seemed so nice before, all of that couldn’t be a lie. There had to be some humanity left in him. “Why would you do this?”

  “What am I supposed to do, not take a bet?”

  “Not when it means humiliating someone.”

  He actually has the nerve to laugh. “That’s how I know you haven’t been here very long. Better wise up, Goldie, before you get eaten alive.”

  And all I want to do is punch him in the face, even as tears burn in my eyes and threaten to fall. The last thing that I want to do is cry in this den of monsters. They don’t need an excuse to see me as even weaker than they already do.

  Heedless of the destination, I head straight for the exit and try to ignore the titters and outright laughter that mark
my passing. If I thought it was possible to remain invisible here, Asher has made sure those plans are crushed into dust. Because I can’t just be a nobody, I have to be the girl who pissed off the most powerful Diamond in my class. Everyone will know who I am and that is not a good thing.

  I’m so focused on my own misery that I don’t even notice Charlie is right in front of me until I nearly mow her down.

  “Whoa, why are you in such a hurry?” she asks, narrowly avoiding a collision. Then she gets a good look at my face. “Lily, oh my God, what happened?”

  “Nothing. It’s not worth talking about.” I try to push past her but Charlie catches my arm, arresting the motion. “Please, just let me go.”

  “I’m going to walk you back to your room, at least.” She wraps an arm around my shoulder and turns me toward the Pavilion. I didn’t realize until that moment that I was about to run off in the wrong direction. “And if it’s as bad as I think, you might as well tell me. I’ll just hear about it later on the Inner Circle.”

  She says it like a joke but her words are heavy with truth. There’s no such thing as a secret in a place like Black Lake.

  “I let my guard down, okay. Some cute guy invited me to lunch, and I fell for it because I’m a total idiot. Turns out that I was cozying up to that guy’s twin brother and now his jealous girlfriend is determined to destroy me.”

  Her eyebrows go up. “Are you taking about Kai and Lukas Greenfield-Walton?”

  Those twin sets of silver eyes and devilish smiles are imprinted on my brain. How is it fair that God can bestow so much beauty on people and then allow such cruelty to live underneath that pretty package? At least Asher had the decency to make his intentions clear from the beginning, but the twins had played me like a violin. “You know them?”