Page 10 of Wicked Surrender

Not wanting to have a couple of twins?

Feeling old?

This wasn’t me.

I squinted and scowled at the wall, hating that a piece of paper could twist me up like this. Getting caught was something I’d skirted with finesse all my life. Call me spoiled. Call me entitled. Both were fucking true. With unlimited money and parents who didn’t want to bother with parenting, what else was supposed to happen?

It wasn’t so much that I was expected to answer for my misconduct. It was the fact thathewas the one to demand my presence for discipline.

Chen.

As a rebel, I was supposed to hate authority. I resisted those who tried to tell me what to do—and that was both because I was a spoiled ass and because I was a twentysomething who thought he could call the shots. I wasn’t naïve. I knew I had my head up my ass. It was a fact that I didn’t see any reason to change yet.

But Chen? Fucking Dean Chen had to be the one to try to heel me and call me into his office?

That was rubbing goddamn salt in the wound.

After what happened to my brother William, I’d developed an instinct to curl my lip and embrace total fury just at the mention of the name.

Dean Chen can kiss my ass.

Dean Chen can go to hell.

Fuck him. Fuck them all.

He’s not going to destroy my life like he destroyed?—

Before I could think, I punched the wall and growled.

Don’t. Don’t go there. Don’t think about it.

It was too fucking early to be this angry and try to bottle it all in. And it was way too early to drink into oblivion to avoid thinking at all. Forcing all thoughts about William to the back of my mind, for now, I gritted my teeth and massaged the knuckles that stung from the hit on the drywall.

Another hole to fill. Fucking great.

I scoffed as I headed to the bathroom to shower. The hot water almost made me feel human again, but it was the growls from my stomach that prompted me to go downstairs.

Down there, I found Rory and Dennis looking much more alive than they had any right to. Bastards. Then again, I had taken more shots than them last night.

“Dude, you gotta go talk to the dean,” Kevin said as he joined us, yawning but awake enough to look alarmed.

“Wait.” Dennis put his coffee down. “Didn’t you have your meeting yesterday?”

I shrugged and got a mug for coffee, the blacker and bitterer, the better. “I was supposed to.”

“Fuck, man,” Rory said. “We know how much you hate Chen, but you can’t blow this off.”

“Oh, I can’t?” I retorted.

“No. I heard they’re cracking down on the fraternities now. They’re going to disband them all if they keep fucking around this much.” Kevin gestured at the kitchen, empty of the partiers who’d had this place hopping last night. “And that could happen to us, too. If you blow off Chen, that’s more attention we don’t need.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to lose what we’ve got going on here,” Dennis added.

I rolled my eyes. “Since when did you become such fucking whiny drama queens?” I sipped my coffee, counting on the burn and heat to make me wake up more. “I’m going today, all right? They emailed me a rescheduled meeting for this morning.”

I bet they made the meeting so early just to piss me off, too.

Before my frat brothers could worry or bitch and moan any more, I took my coffee with me as I headed toward the dean’s office. I lost track of all the deans. This place had so many departments with different people as the head of them. If anyone were to ask me, the administration was way too top-heavy to be sustainable, but it was only Dean Chen who angered me like no other.

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