I felt his lips on more than just my lips.

I felt them in my fingertips, all the way down to my toes.

I felt them when my skin broke into goosebumps.

He was actually doing it. Kissing me. The minute his mouth locked in on mine, I opened up and clamped my teeth around his lower lip, not stopping until I dug so hard, I could feel my teeth slamming against each other. Warm blood filled my mouth. He didn’t retreat, and I didn’t let go. I dug harder with my teeth as his hand moved between us, his thumb slipping into my lip piercing, tugging at it tauntingly, hurting me back.

He smiled into our kiss. He liked it, I realized. Me hurting him. Making him bleed.

It was only when he was about to yank the ring out of my lip that I finally pulled back. He dropped his hand completely.

So this was the game, I thought. I hurt him, and he hurt me back, but only as much as I could tolerate.

I ran my tongue along my teeth, savoring his warm, salty blood. When I looked at him again, he looked incredibly mortal all of a sudden. Boyish, even. With a red slash of blood smeared over his mouth, waiting for me to say something.

To acknowledge he wasn’t the only screwed-up person in the room.

“You were wrong. I didn’t want you to kiss me.” I licked the corner of my lips, mocking him.

He smirked, leaning down and capturing the tip of my ear with his teeth, whispering. “You wanted it, you enjoyed it, and next time I touch you, Good Girl, I’m not only going to dirty you up. I’m going to make you filthy, like me.”

Three things happened simultaneously from that day onward:

1. Vaughn began to monitor my interactions at school, especially with the lads. Guys stopped acknowledging my presence completely, in all grades and statuses, other than Knight and Hunter, who weren’t scared of their lunatic mate. Everyone else caught word that Lenny Astalis was Vaughn’s unwilling possession, and even though I had no interest in any of them, I still thought they were cowards for listening to Vaughn.

Of course, I was the worst type of property—the neglected kind. Vaughn went even farther out of his way to make sure people knew I was nothing to him. There was a brief rumor about my catching chlamydia from a Brazilian male model I’d allegedly had sex with over the summer, but it died quickly when Vaughn said no one was desperate enough to fuck me.

2. The girls, who all heard different versions of what happened in the janitor’s room (exclusively from Alice and Arabella) and knew now without a shadow of a doubt that Vaughn had taken an unlikely interest in me, went from disliking me to actively despising me. Poppy often had to skip some of her after-school activities just to see me home and make sure no one was following or harassing me. Arabella and Alice continued to call me Vampire Girl because of my attire and fondness for all things black, and they nagged me about Vaughn whenever they came to visit Poppy. Their questions were met with silence.

3. Vaughn began to show up at my house nearly every day to work on his mysterious project with my father.

Papa had taken a liking to Vaughn when he’d first witnessed his artistic greatness at summer session, and now that Vaughn had expressed interest in working closely with him, I guess Papa felt flattered. Even though Vaughn wasn’t aware of the fact that I was too starstruck to talk to my own father about my art, he knew he was hurting me by coming here. Every time I opened the door and he was on the other side with his sculpting equipment, he gave me a lopsided grin that reminded me he’d kissed me not too long ago, that no matter how disgusting I found him, I’d once had his blood in my mouth.

His bottom lip was still bruised from my bite.

“Given up on that internship yet?” he’d ask.

“In your dreams,” I’d answer, and he’d laugh good-naturedly and shake his head, brushing past me.

On the day Knight broke up with Poppy, I sat in her room, stroking her hair.

The boy who’d warned guys off of her because he was so worried for her precious heart ended up stomping all over it like it was a dance floor.

I kept busy trying to keep my sister from flinging herself off our roof.

The rumor that Poppy had been prematurely disposed of for a college girl spread like wildfire in a hayfield at All Saints High. Her locker had been graffitied, and when she’d opened it today, she found a real human turd on top of her books with a Post-it note: Dumped!

Knight had been nowhere in sight today, and Poppy had sworn off going back to school for the remainder of the year. I hugged and consoled her all evening. Poppy rightfully couldn’t trust her so-called best friends, Alice and Arabella, who had been the first to spread the rumor of her breakup down the corridors of the school.