Page 3

CHAPTER

TWO

REMI

When I get out of the student services building, I pull my phone from my hoodie pocket, and I ignore the emails indicated with red numbers. My stomach squeezes looking at them and I think about the most recent one I read.

A variation of something I’ve been told by anonymous keyboard warriors many times.

Ever feel like a cunt for ruining their lives?

I check my text messages, glancing around as I do, checking for anyone.

There are a few people strolling around, but the campus is relatively dead. Typical for Thursday night before classes start on Monday. Students are either moving in, or out partying to get ready for the return to school. When I see that Sloane has texted me, I just roll my eyes at her message.

Sloane 3

Come to Hyde Park with me tomorrow night.

It’s not the first time she’s tried to get me out of our dorm.

And every time, I said the same thing and encouraged her to go without me. My fingers fly over the keyboard, about to answer in the same way I did each time before.

But then someone shoulder checks me, and I drop my phone, my thumb poised over the N key.

My phone lands on the screen on the sidewalk, but I barely spare it a glance before I look up, my hands clenched into fists, brows pulled together.

Like, maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I was on the correct side of the damn sidewalk, and it’s big enough for me and a herd of fucking elephants so?—

No.

Fuck no.

That one word I was going to text to Sloane is blaring over and over and over in my head.

My mouth goes dry, and my brain is screaming at me to turn and run. But those screams are locked inside my head, not traveling to my nervous system, because I can’t move.

My pulse is racing, fear like acid in my mouth.

Two of them.

“Happy to see me?” Cortland asks, his voice soft and low, a smile on his face. His lip ring, off to the side of his bottom lip, glints in the waning sun at my back. I remember how it felt against my face. My mouth. My chest.

I remember all of it.

Those memories jolt my mind into functioning again, and I take a step back. But before I can take another one, his hand darts out, his fingers wrapping around my wrist and yanking me toward him, to his chest.

Storm—with dark hair, blue eyes, and a nose ring—steps behind me, trapping me.

My body is tense as my free hand flies up on instinct and my palm is pressed against Cortland’s white T. His skin is hot, even from beneath his shirt, his muscles coiled tight, as if being this close to me does horrible things to him, too.

But only one of us is shaking.

I swallow, one arm forced between us by his hand on my wrist, the other pressing against his chest.

“You wanna run, Remi?” Storm asks, his words low. He’s fucking scary. He was always scary, never spoke much in high school. Having him at my back, Cortland in front of me, it reminds too much of that night.

I need him off.

I have to get away from them.

I can’t do this again.

I push harder against Cortland, but he doesn’t move.

It’s like I’m right back there, the memories bursting again.

He’s pushing his way into me, gripping my throat, telling me it’ll be okay. I’ll be fine. “Shh, pretty baby, I’ve got you,” he murmured in my ear while his friends all laughed, save for Storm. He was just watching, leaned against a tree, looking bored as he stared at me.

I didn’t speak.

I didn’t fight.

My stepdad asked me about it so many times. “It’s almost like you wanted them to use you, Remi.”

But I’m not that girl anymore.

I’m not that fucking girl.

“Let go of me,” I say, my voice hoarse, barely more than a whisper. But at least I’m fucking saying it.

“Ah,” Storm says with amusement, “she does want to run.”

“She’s not gonna run.” Cortland’s voice is low as he tightens his hold on my wrist. “Are you, Remi?”

My hand is still trembling against his chest. “Let go of me,” I say again. “Let go of me or I’m gonna fucking scream.” I sound far braver than I feel, but I think he knows it’s a facade, the way his smile widens as he stares at me.

“Go ahead,” he taunts me. “Make it loud, too.”

I grit my teeth and twist my head to see Storm. Maybe make an appeal to him to let this shit go. Questions whirl in my mind. Why the fuck are you here? What the fuck are you doing?

But I don’t ask a single one.

I meet Storm’s eyes, only to find him staring back at me, expressionless, his hands in the pockets of his black pants. “Why don’t you turn around?” he asks quietly. “Look at him. I’m not gonna save you.”

A chill slides down my spine.

I see the edges of a tattoo up his neck, and I don’t know what it is. I never saw them completely naked that night, even though they saw too much of me.

Cortland laughs, a low, husky sound. “Turn back around, Remi.”

I swallow down my terror, slowly turn to look at Cortland.

But I can’t face him.

Instead, I’m staring at his clean white T-shirt. At my fingers, pale even set against the starkness of the material. I don’t spend much time in the sun. Only my runs, when there’s plenty of daylight. I see my chewed-up nails, picked black polish.

The girl I’m trying so fucking hard to be. He’s ruining it.

“Can’t look me in the eye?” he whispers.

Because I don’t know what else to do, I tip my head back to meet his gaze.

Cortland Adler was always tall. When he first moved to Aben from West Virginia, it’s the first thing everyone noticed.

I didn’t bother trying to get his attention. Maya, the cheerleading captain, snatched that up all on her own. She was a fucking piranha, and she got her teeth into him and his dick into her the first weekend after he moved.

Besides, people gravitated toward him. And even before he came around, I preferred my own company over anyone else’s.

When I wasn’t with Sloane, I was home, watching horror movies under my covers and writing in my fucking journal.

Silas was rarely there, and when he was, I tried my damnedest to avoid him at all costs.

I was good at it.

When I wasn’t, I paid for it.

I wonder, if he knew this, if he knew Cortland was here, would he have warned me?

“What are you doing here?” I ask quietly, amazed at the calm in my own voice. My nostrils flare and I smell him. He smells like the woods, and some kind of dark cologne that I remember so well, even being pressed against that forest floor.

I smelled fresh earth then.

Dirt, and his cologne.

Then… theirs.

My stomach churns and I think I’m going to puke. I try to step back, but he tightens his hold on my wrist, then I feel Storm’s chest against my shoulders.

Bile burns up my throat. Leave me the fuck alone.

You’ve done enough. Those words are in my head, but I don’t say them.

If I get this over with, let them intimidate me in this moment, it’ll pass.

Maybe they’re here for football or Cortland is visiting his parents and stopped by for who the fuck knows.

Just leave me alone.

His dark gray eyes spark as he keeps staring down at me. I remember seeing him on the news. His girlfriend—Maya, the ex he’d ran back to—standing up for him. Women batting their eyes his way. Him, Brinklin, Chase, and Storm.

They fawned over Cortland. Of all of them, he looked the least like a monster. He didn’t talk like a monster. Didn’t act like one. He was a golden boy.

But that night, he was… something else. Something the courts tossed out, but we both know what he did. What they did.

Something like a scream bubbles up from my lips, but I try to bite it back as his eyes narrow.

“Go ahead,” he coaxes me. “Scream as loud as you fucking want.” His words are hushed and my skin crawls as he glances around us, watching a car pass by. “But I’ll tell you something, Remi.” His eyes come back to mine. “You can’t cry wolf twice.”

I physically recoil with those words, but his hand on my wrist doesn’t let me get far even as I shove at his chest again.

And I can still sense Storm behind me. I see Cortland glance at his friend just before I feel Storm’s breath against my skin. “And you can’t run from wolves either, Remi. I thought you’d have figured that out by now.”

A full-body shudder runs through me as I shake my head, blinking, trying to think, to block out Storm’s threat.

“Why are you…” I’m stammering. Losing my words.

Just like I did in the months after it happened.

It’s like I couldn’t speak. Words didn’t come naturally, just like they aren’t now.

Silas asked if I lost my voice when I lost my virginity.

I push all of that aside, take a deep breath even as my heart races.

“Why the fuck are you here?” I snarl, thinking of Sloane, late for move-in today because she was meeting a boy for coffee that she’d started seeing over the summer.

Don’t you know boys are shit, Sloane.

Cortland’s hand comes to my back, slipping under the edges of my hoodie.

My entire body trembles.

I try to jerk away from him, hitting at his chest with the heel of my hand, but his gaze hardens.

“Since when did you get your tongue pierced, Remi? Not so scared of pain now?” He rakes in my entire body, from my white Chucks to my oversized hoodie, to my mouth, which drops open as my knees shake, my stomach hurting. But I freeze with his words.

That’s what he wants to fucking ask me?

I hear Storm laugh, still feeling him right at my back. “Little Remi is all grown up. Maybe now she knows how to handle big girl decisions.”

My stomach convulses.

Cortland slides his hand down, over my ribs. I shiver, biting my lip as his palm comes just under my breast, his thumb grazing the slight swell of my flesh.

“Get your fucking hands off of me,” I growl under my breath, trying to breathe through my nose. To stay upright. I feel dizzy, panic exploding through me.