Footsteps echo in the hall behind me. I don’t have to turn to know who followed.
“You are a rat. You’ve built your little empire of shit on it.” I speak slowly, so her little brain can comprehend. “You can cover it with glitter and call yourself a gossip girl, but it’s still shit, and you’re still a rat. So spill it or admit you fabricated the whole thing to get attention.”
“I didn’t make it up,” she insists, her eyes widening when she takes in my posse behind me. They’re not all here, but enough of them followed me to threaten her reputation if I say something in front of them.
I know I’ve got her. I have more power in this school than she does, though I’m a monster partly of her making. But she knows I can destroy her with a single word. I can tell everyone her posts are not authentic, that she’s making shit up, and their trust in her will evaporate overnight. At the end of the day, she’s more worried about her reputation, about me exposing her as a fraud, than she is about protecting her sources.
“You already know you’re going to tell him,” Duke says, leaning on the locker beside her with a bored expression on his face.
“Okay, okay,” she says, lifting a hand to stop us from going on. “I’ll message you his name. I don’t want to say it in front of all these people.”
I lean down until I’m almost nose to nose with the bitch. I can see her pulse racing on the side of her neck. I want to wrap my hands around and squeeze until her eyes pop out of her head. “Cut the pretense and get it over with before this becomes more unpleasant for both of us. You know your face makes me sick.”
“A sophomore coming in late saw them leaving in Colt’s Denali,” she says in a rush.
“When?”
“Like, five minutes into first period. That’s all I know. I swear.”
I push away from her, but Baron leans in to have the last word. “You think you’re high up on the food chain, but you’re a scavenger,” he says to her. “You’re lucky the ecosystem needs scavengers to survive, or the apex predators would eat your ass for breakfast.”
She nods mutely, then scurries off down the hall, glancing back over her shoulder like she thinks we might follow. She should know we don’t chase snakes. If we wanted more, we would have gotten it already.
When she’s gone, I turn to my crew. “Why the fuck is she with Colt?” I demand.
“Maybe because you were an unforgivable asshole to her, and he’s not?” Lo volunteers.
I stare her down until she shrugs and drops her gaze. She’s not wrong. That’s exactly why. Wasn’t that the entire purpose of what we did to her? She needs to know who we are, that she can’t fuck with us, that she needs to stay out of our way. But she also needs to obey, and I told her to stay away from Colt Darling.
“Is it just because she’s with Colt?” Baron asks, narrowing his eyes at me. “Or because she’s with anyone?”
“You just told everyone she was nothing,” Duke points out. “I get why you’re pissed about Colt, but if she’s nothing, you wouldn’t care if I fucked her, right?”
I swing around and glare at him. “Don’t. Touch. Her.”
“Got it,” he says. “But you might want to tell the guys because they’re all back there talking about running a train on her at the next party.”
My fists clench involuntarily, and I glare at my brother. For whatever reason, Harper is my challenge. She fucked with the wrong guy, and now it’s personal. Now, it’s my job to break her. Maybe I finally did, and she won’t come waltzing through the doors on Monday morning like none of it affects her because she’s above it all. Maybe she won’t walk around all day like she doesn’t care that she knelt for me after all that talk about how she never would, like she doesn’t care that the whole school knows she’s trash who sucks off old guys in shitty cars in parking lots.
But I don’t think so. I think she’s with Colt because she knows it pisses me off. Because she’s showing me that despite what we did, we can never control her. That she’ll do whatever the fuck she pleases, no matter what we do to her.
She has no idea what she’s asking for.
I could let my brothers at her. Sometimes, they’re such psychos that they even scare me. But no. She’s not theirs to destroy. Not even my brothers get Harper. They had Mabel. This one is mine. This time, I’ll do the dirty work. I’ll make her suffer, and I’ll savor every moment of it. And when she breaks, when those walls around her shatter like glass, I’ll crawl inside and eat out her soul like it can replace the one I lost two years ago.