Hope was a slippery slope.
Seductive and wrapped in a tight little dress, it manifested slowly and killed you even slower. Every being with rational thought clung to it. Religions peddled it like crack.
I was six the first time I had a taste of that lie. It was the day my father, the man I called Dad, had a new son by his real wife.
I hadn’t understood what a mistress was. I hadn't known my mother was one. I simply thought he’d found a new and better family and put us aside for them.
What I didn’t realize was that the real son was never me. I had been the spare, until a better, legitimate one came along.
Then it was time for me to get scarce.
I was sent to a boarding school in another country, an ocean away from him and his real family where I couldn’t tarnish his name. I had to give up my last name and leave the only life I’d ever known.
The Barclay Private School for Boys had been entirely foreign to me, a place where a last name was as precious as tangible currency. Since I had mine taken from me, it meant I was as good as bankrupt. Poorer than a whore on meth.
I was now Theo Valentine. No longer a Kline. I had no right to that name now, simply because the man who fathered me decreed it was so.
I was to spend the next ten years in that school, not that I knew that then. The most laughable part of it was that I had waited.
I waited for my father to change his mind, to tell me it was a punishment for running away from my lessons. I waited for my mother to show up after she returned from that all-important trip she had to go on.
No one ever came to retrieve me.
Over time I learned better than to hope. Hope only served to remind one exactly how lacking one was. It was intangible as a dream and just as dangerous, and it didn’t take me long to find its replacement.
In a school like Barclay where pedigreed sons of elites governed the student body and the masters turned a blind eye for the sake of coin, power was everything.
The only way to the top was with your fists, because pain? Pain was universal. That remained the same whether you were in a max-security prison or the most prestigious school in England.
Pain spoke volumes, and so did fear. Both were my loudspeakers, and they were the first things I brought to the unsuspecting town of San Juan. I fought whenever the situation arose, and when I ran out of those, I simply created them. God help whoever was on the receiving end of it.
Right now it was some poor bastard from Dunford High who had been peddling roofies to the freshmen in our side of town.
The fight was arranged at a secluded portion of beach below the cliffs. People rarely ventured this way, and it was a good spot to carry out shit you didn’t want anyone interrupting.
In this case, beating a rapist shithead to a pulp.
A group of seniors from our school and a handful from Dunford had already gathered at the private beach. Once we’d informed them of their friend’s after school activities, the Dunford boys had been amenable to a fight to “sort things out.”
The fight wasn’t going to be a fair one. The guy facing off with me, Lincoln, was already unsteady on his feet when he got here, evidently high on the crap he was peddling.
I stretched my arm muscles to loosen them. “I’ll let you go first. You wouldn’t last past two seconds otherwise, which, granted, would still be a damned sight better than your performance in bed.”
Lincoln didn’t seem pleased by my offer of a handicap. “I’ll put your face in the ground, pretty boy.” He threw a swing without warning, and I sidestepped it easily. The idiot stumbled from his own momentum.
I sucked my tongue and gave him a look of pity meant to enrage. “That was dismal. Do I look like your girlfriend to you, Lincoln? Is that why you’re trying to disappoint me as well?”
“Fuck you!”
Another swing from him, another sidestep from me. Utterly predictable. I could be doing this in my sleep.
I drew back my arm for a blow when suddenly, I caught an unmistakable flash of color at the cliffs above. I glanced up to see Karin’s pale face peering from over the cliff edge, the locks of her fiery hair trailing in the wind like a flag.
What in bloody hell was she doing here?
Karin’s lips suddenly parted in a soundless cry. I swerved as Lincoln’s fist launched towards me, but I couldn’t avoid the hit to my stomach.
My attention swung back to the fight, and I let instinct take over as I focused on taking the guy down. He was a huge fucker, but I had spent my whole life in pits like these. Fighting hadn’t been a damned hobby for me. It had been survival.
It was all too easy for me to let my rage take over. I felt no pain from his frantic punches, only a burning intent that took hold of my limbs and made me slam my fist into his ribs again and again, hard enough to split my knuckles and crack his bones.
Through another person’s eyes, I saw myself pummelling Lincoln repeatedly, not stopping even when he fell into the sand and crumpled into himself, shielding his arms over his head. He wasn’t even fighting back now, just trying to get away from me.
Arms grabbed my limbs and hooked around my neck suddenly, yanking me backward.
“Bro, stop,” Gabriel grunted at my ear. “It’s over, let go.”
Cam and Ryland held my neck and waist, lurching forward with every effort I made to free myself.
“Fuck man, it’s over.” Cam tightened his hold so hard he might have snapped an average guy’s neck.
I finally released Lincoln.
He fell back, coughing blood into the sand. Aside from a busted lip and a black eye, his face was unmarred, as per our fight rules. His body, however, had been thoroughly fucked up, and he clutched his already bruising side as his friends helped him away.
My breathing came heavy as I shook off the guys and turned to look up at Karin. She was still watching from her hiding spot on the cliffs, her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide and horrified.
She’d finally seen exactly the kind of person I was, and now she’d stop trying to smile at me, stop trying to talk to me like we were friends.
That knowledge made me feel like absolute shite for some reason.
I retreated to my room after the fight. There were no cheerful pop tunes drifting out from Karin’s window below mine today, only silence.
Just as well. A girl like her should never associate with someone like me.
But apparently, I had underestimated her stubbornness.
A soft rapping came at my bedroom door. My hand froze with an iced towel midway to my ribs as the door cracked open.
Karin’s face popped in. “Knock knock.”
My chest squeezed tight. “Back for seconds, are you? The bullshit I gave you at the tower wasn’t enough?”
Karin slid into my room and shut the door behind her with her hip. She carried a first-aid kit in her hands with a frozen ice pack stacked on the top.
“If my eyes didn’t fail me,” she said cheerfully, “you got punched in the mouth. So maybe don’t talk so much, hmm?”
I made the mistake of shifting and was instantly greeted by a sharp ache in my side. I cursed, slumping back down on the floor. That split-second distraction earlier had cost me.
Karin was instantly concerned. “You probably shouldn’t move for a while.”
“Not going anywhere,” I muttered.
I had won this round, but the injuries from other fights were beginning to stack up. I felt like I had been run over by a fleet of tanks.
Karin took the towel of ice cubes from me and went to the window to shake the ice out. Then she wrapped the towel around the ice pack and returned to me, kneeling on the floor between my legs.
“May I?” she murmured, holding her hands out to my face.
I raised a brow. “Now you’re asking?”
She bit her lip. “I thought about what happened back in the secret hideout,” she admitted. “You got mad because I touched your face, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t something I made obvious, and I was surprised that she had read me so easily.
“I guess I owe you an apology too,” she sighed. “I won’t touch your face anymore unless you allow it.”
I frowned. It was damned near impossible to say no to Karin when she was doing her best to look so contrite.
“You don’t have to ask,” I muttered. “Just do it and stop looking like a bloody puppy dog.”
Karin rewarded me with a bright smile that made my heart lurch suddenly, as if I’d been kicked in the chest.
Jesus fucking Christ. What the hell was that?
“I’m moving in now,” she said cheerfully, as if I couldn’t see for myself.
I held still as she captured my face gently between her hands to cradle the ice pack against the side of my face that had taken a stray blow.
A breath hissed through my teeth at the contact. I never realized how soft her hand would feel. It seemed like it was made to touch me, her palm curving delicately over my face.
Karin seemed to understand that I was allowing her touch, and she dared to run her thumb over my cheek.
“Is the ice too cold? Does it hurt?”
It did, but I didn’t want her to withdraw her hand just yet. “No. Keep going.”
Karin made another sympathetic sound, tending to me with the patience of a nurse.
“Just so you know, I’ve started putting carrots in the forest instead of the garden,” she murmured. “There’s been a huge improvement in O’Kleeson’s flowerbeds, and I’ve spotted more bunnies hanging out in the forest too.”
“Congratulations, I’m sure they appreciate their new rodent utopia.” I winced again when I shifted wrong. “And when the forest becomes overrun in a few weeks, it’ll be harvest time. I recall seeing some rabbit traps lying about in the garage.”
Karin’s eyes went wide, the role of a gentle nurse all but forgotten.
“What did they ever do to you?” she demanded.
“Well, they taste fucking delicious, for one.”
“You jerk! They’re cute, and you don’t eat cute things!”
“Don’t I?” I suddenly thought that I might eat her.
I resumed my silence as Karin tended to me, her eyes narrowed in exasperation. While she was preoccupied, I took the chance to study her.
She was frowning slightly as she held the pack to my cheek, with that slight wrinkle on her nose that seemed to appear whenever she was deep in concentration. She tended to me with a grave expression, like I was fatally wounded instead of merely bruised. Her demeanor was too forthright to ever be flirtatious, and she was utterly artless and unaware of herself.
In short, she was a complete opposite of the girls I was used to. I found I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with her.
“There’s no need to look like that,” I stated. “I’m not dead yet.”
“You could have been,” she said quietly. “The other boy was hurt too, Theo.”
I didn’t like her concerned tone, even though I knew that Karin cared for others on instinct.
“That’s quite the point of a fight. Wouldn’t mean anything if I fought gently, would it?”
“But why were you fighting in the first place?”
I lifted a shoulder in a lazy shrug. “We were sorting out a disagreement. We found him selling roofies to the freshmen in our school.”
“Roofies? Oh my god, was anyone hurt?”
“Not as far as we know.”
Karin sagged in relief for the strangers she didn’t even know. “Why didn’t you go to the cops instead?”
“The police here are corrupt,” I said simply. “Not only that, but Lincoln’s a star footballer in Dunford. The school would do anything to cover for him, and so would his parents. He’d walk free with just a slap on the wrist.”
“That’s horrible.” Karin looked troubled, but her touch was soft as she began to rub ointment onto my cheek with a finger. “But there has to be another way to handle this.”
“Possibly,” I allowed, “but sometimes pain is the only language we speak.”
“Then learn another language,” Karin countered.
“Like what, love and patience?”
Karin returned my mocking smile with complete seriousness. “Yes.”
My smile faded.
I searched her face, trying to find even an ounce of doubt, but there seemed to be no way to corrupt her no matter how hard I tried.
For some reason, Karin Beckett thought that I was capable of more. This girl who was at once beautiful and wild, strong and fragile… She baffled the hell out of me.
I reached out to capture a strand of her fiery hair, winding it around my finger. Her breath caught, and I was struck by the way her eyes shone like pools of silver as they gazed up at me.
“I’ll leave the loving to you, princess,” I murmured, unable to look away from her. “You seem to do it very well.”