Page 67 of The Oath We Give

Li turns to her mother, rolling her lips together, trying her best to not look annoyed. “I’m going to pack the rest of my stuff. I’m staying with Coraline for the summer. I told you that already, Mom.”

“Honey, Silas and Coraline are going to need their space. Planning a wedding, prenuptial bonding.” Regina lets out a little chuckle. “No man wants to be saddled with baggage.”

“But—”

“She isn’t baggage,” I interject, my stepmother and I making eye contact. “And we want her in our space. She’s staying with me for the summer, Regina. It’ll give you more free time to spend at the country club.”

The thing about the woman in front of me is when met with snark, she’ll always find a way to bite back. It’s almost never in the form of a direct insult. Sometimes it’s a backhanded compliment; other times it’s pure pettiness.

When I was in high school, I’d mouthed off about something I can’t remember now, that’s how small it was, but after? She slept with my history teacher, and two days after, my class grade dropped to a C, which royally fucked up my grade point average.

I had no proof, but I was convinced she’d fucked him just so he’d drop my grade.

Lilac is able to slither away up the steps, avoiding the rest of this conversation.

“No ring?” Regina pushes, heels clicking as she walks toward me, snatching my hand to inspect the naked finger. Her claws scratch the underside of my palms.

“We haven’t picked one out yet,” I snide, jerking my limb back from her hold.

Her lips curl into a subtle smirk, head tilting ever so slightly, as if she’s sizing me up. Her scrutinizing gaze tears apart my simple shorts and T-shirt. I simply lift my chin a little higher.

I don’t ever remember a time when she hasn’t looked at me like this. Even as a child, the weight of her condescending eyes made me uneasy. It was as if I was some threat, that my entire being was an insult to her.

But I’d grown up, got a backbone, and found out there are far scarier beasts in the world than the wicked stepmother.

I step fully inside my old home, noticing the recent remodel to fit Regina’s new style of the year. Once when I was fourteen, she was so obsessed with dark mauve she’d had the pool painted that color.

“Why didn’t you introduce us to him at the gala?”

I move my eyes to my father, standing with his hands in his pockets in the foyer while Regina walks behind me to shut the front door, securing me inside this house till Lilac gets done packing.

“Silas is a private person.” The lie slips out easily, mostly because I think it might be true. “We both are. We didn’t want to say anything until we were ready.”

I’m going to have to pull context clues from what I’ve seen of him so far with this conversation and try to avoid setting things in stone. Regina will report every detail of this to her friends at the country club, and it will spread like wildfire.

I should’ve, at the very least, sat down and talked favorite colors with this dude. We didn’t even work out a relationship timeline. How does he expect me to play this up in public if we don’t even know each other?

“I just can’t believe it. We were afraid you’d be a spinster, but you seemed to have lucked out.” She laughs as she wraps an arm around my father’s waist, leaning into him. “You could’ve picked someone a little more mentally stable, but with that amount of money, it doesn’t really matter.”

She laughs like it’s funny.

As if she knows him and the joke at his expense is free.

A coppery tang fills my mouth, pressure from my teeth sinking into my tongue.

Regina is but one rat in this deceitful town; these self-proclaimed honorable people who cloak their faults and skeletons beneath ego and money drenched in blood.

They walk like royalty atop their ivory towers, shoving people beneath them on their way to the top, building empires on broken bones. For years, I had been told the Hollow Boys were villains. That their reign of terror had tainted this well-respected town known to house the nation’s most prestigious university.

But you can’t corrupt something that is already rotten to begin with.

They were just scapegoats.

It’s the reason the Halo went on so long. Small-minded, dense fucking minions had their eyes trained on boys blowing up churches and pulling mindless pranks, instead of removing the veil from their eyes and seeing the men they worshipped were false idols. They were buying and selling their daughters like scraps of meat. Turned girls into a commodity. Stripped away their humanity and turned them into nothing but cash cows.

“Regina, I put up with you for Lilac’s sake.” I step closer to her, hands tightening into small fists. “I play nice. I listen to your never-ending bitching and whining.”

I watch her shrink a little into my father’s arms, but that doesn’t stop her mouth from trying to run.