Chapter 1
The sky is the same color as the inside of my head; gray. It’s cold and cloudy, the weather as dismal and depressed as I feel inside. Like pretty much everyone at Hawthorne Academy feels today.
I stare out the window of my rideshare, but I don’t actually see anything we pass by. This isn’t the first time I’ve visited Dana in the hospital since the incident, but it’s the first time she’ll be awake. I should be so grateful, but now that she’s out of the coma … it means we have to tell her the rest of the news. She might be awake, but others weren’t so lucky.
For a while there, I thought she might be one of them.
The coma was the result of a Christmas party gone so very wrong. It seems strange to think back to how it began, just a week ago towards the end of the school semester, when all of us were so hopeful. Everything was finally working out all right; I was excelling in school, college was finally on the horizon, and most importantly—Blair and Wills were mine again. I was so happy.
That feels a world away now, like I was living a dream and only just now, since, woke up.
I don’t want to think about it, but I have to. Thinking about it is the only thing that makes me believe it’s real. That it even happened.
I’ve seen a lot of shit in my life.
I’m an orphan. I lived my whole life moving from foster home to foster home, all around the state of New York. I was never in good homes for very long. It seems like I always spent the most time in the bad homes, and my last foster home was the worst of all. My foster mother, Ms. Martin, was an abusive, neglectful alcoholic.
But all that, as bad as it was, was never as bad as this.
At least I had the chance to escape that life. I had to steal the identity of a dead girl to do it, but still … it had to be done. Sadie’s death gave me a new life, but if Dana had died …
I shake my head.
No good would come of Dana’s death—unless you count Victoria’s subsequent death that surely would have followed. If Dana had died, I would have murdered the bitch that did it.
As it is, I’m still considering the possibility.
She’s been a thorn in my side ever since I got here. For a short time, I thought Victoria might be something more than she appears to be. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
She and I didn’t have to end up as enemies.
I just hadn’t counted on falling for three of the most popular boys at school. That alone might not have been enough to seal my fate as the object of Victoria’s jealous rage—but the fact that they fell for me too, that did it.
Wills Stryker; a super fit jock with long blonde hair and eyes the color of a stormy sea. Blair Rashnikov, a green-eyed darling devil of a boy with silvery-white dyed hair, a motorcycle, a penchant for mischief, and an insatiable hunger for me. And last, but definitely not least, Astor Hawthorne. Clean cut and gorgeous with dark golden-brown hair, and warm, deep brown eyes. His family founded Hawthorne Academy almost a hundred years ago, and he—ever the young prince—rules it now as a student-come-lord.
Astor might be hers now, but she’ll never forgive me for stealing his heart first.
Just like I’ll never forgive her for what she did to Dana. She might be alive, but she almost wasn’t. Once, Victoria took everything from me. She made the whole school, including my boys, turn on me. When that wasn’t enough, she tried to take away the only person who was loyal to me the entire time. The only person she couldn’t sway.
When the boys found out the truth about me, they turned on me. Not just them, the entire school; all of them except Dana Rutherford, my best friend. Dana who just came out of the coma and is lying in a hospital bed.
Victoria doesn’t want me in her world, and she’s willing to do anything to make sure that I am removed from it, no matter the cost. No matter what it takes.
Even if it takes setting an explosion at a secret Christmas party deep down in the wine cellar of the school. An explosion that took the lives of people who sit beside us in class and were supposed to stand beside us this spring at graduation. An explosion that put my roommate and best friend Dana into a coma.