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“I need to talk to you about a rumor spreading among the families.”
Damn it...
I open the door wider to let her through.
Turning my back to her to keep searching for the silver sandals that will match my white Grecian style dress perfectly, I groan to hear the volume on my stereo lower and the faint squeak of mattress springs when she sits on the side of my bed.
“I don’t think I need to remind you that you’re promised to Mason Strom.”
Bile shoots up my throat to soak the back of my tongue. Not because Mason isn’t beautiful. The opposite happens to be true. He’stoobeautiful to be fair.
All of the Inferno are, really, and I have to wonder about the odds that nine boys who grew up together could all have such fortunate genetics.
It’s not Mason himself that makes me sick, it’s the idea that I have no choice in the matter when it comes to who I’ll marry. I’m not even entirely sure why the marriage is so important to my family and his.
The Stroms are old money. Wealthier than even Gabriel and Tanner’s families. But they’re not as powerful. Not the center of it all when it comes to the social circle I was born into. I often think that my father believes combining this family with the Stroms will somehow center more influence for him and knock Warbucks off the top.
I feel like an object more than a human being every time I’m gentlyremindedto whom I belong.
Not that Mason wants me either.
Being forced together has only made us hate each other.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I ask, relief dripping down my shoulders when I finally spot my shoes poking out from under the bed. Snatching them, I sit down to pull them on.
“There are whispers that you’ve been acting inappropriately with the Cross twins.”
My head wrenches her direction. “Where did you hear that?”
She’s not wrong. I messed around with Ezra for a few days, but after running away from him in the bathroom at school, I’ve dodged him. That boy is the most decadent of desserts, one who can be sliced open, only for poison to leak out of the center.
How much I want him can’t matter. I’m not dumb enough to lap the poison up just to die on the inside when it’s over.
Ezra kept pursuing me over the next few days after that incident, but then school let out for the weekend, and when he returned, his knuckles were busted and his face bruised.
Both Damon and Ezra looked like they’d fought an entire biker gang, their tempers so easily triggered over the past week that everybody avoided them.
Jackson Porter made the stupid mistake of saying something about it. He left the school with three missing teeth, a few busted ribs and a broken ankle.
As far as the story goes, he tripped and fell down the stairs. But we all know what really happened.
Even if Ezra is at the party tonight, there’s no way I’ll go near him. Not after that reminder.
My mother’s expression doesn’t change. It’s the typical haughty elegance, a required distance between her and anything real in the world. She has children but didn’t raise them. She’s eaten food but never truly tasted it. She preens and polishes everything with a strict adherence to a prim and proper reputation.
The same is expected of me.
“It shouldn’t matter where I received the information, just that I don’t appreciate what the information is. You are to remain chaste, Emily-“
“Oh, drop it, Mom. I have beenchaste. I haven’t had a boyfriend, haven’t had sex, haven’t let anybody touch me, just like you’ve demanded. Although, I think it’s unfair considering Mason runs around and does whatever he wants with whoever he wants, and nobody says a thing about it.”
Not that I care.
The last thing I’ll ever feel for Mason is jealousy.
“He’s a boy,” she insists, her voice a whisper because, even to her, it sounds wrong. “You know how it is.”
Before I have the chance to remind my mother what century it is, my phone vibrates from the bedside table. A quick glance at the screen tells me it’s time to go.