Page 39 of The Pawn

I feel Georgia leave the hallway behind me. She stomps off to join Piper in the corner. Already, there are pairs of boys on either side of them leering. It's no coincidence that their shorts are as short as they can go, or that they've picked the easy bouldering wall that can be climbed without a harness. They plan to pose on the walls and artfully fall to the mats in front of the boys, letting them "rescue" the girls and pick them up off the ground. I heard them chat all about it on the bus.

Tanner deserves better than a girl who's constantly thirsty for other guys' attention.

I shake that thought out of my head as I walk to the equipment table and check out what I'll need for the harder walls. What am I thinking? Georgia may be terrible, but she's what Tanner deserves. I'll take him from her, sure, but when I've chewed him up and spit him back out again she can have whatever remains.

With the help of one of the instructors, I strap on my harness, double-check the safety straps, and put a helmet on my head. Once I'm done, I ask the instructor if he's going to be my belayer.

"No, you'll be paired up with the last unpaired student... ah, here he is. Lukas, meet your partner."

Mouth dry, I stare up into the blue eyes of an impossibly handsome rich European boy.

"Hey Brenna," he says, a little smile playing on his lips. "Fancy seeing you here. Care to join me over on the far wall?"

He points to the highest, hardest wall in the room.

One glance over at Cole reveals what I suspected: he's watching us and smirking, because he folded Lukas into whatever it is he's planning today.

And if I try to stop it, he'll expose me in front of the whole school, quite possibly even get me expelled for enrolling under a false identity.

So I grit my teeth, grimace back at Lukas—a smile is impossible right now—and meet him for what he's worth.

"Sounds great to me. Whoever makes it to the top first wins."

Chapter 20

Despite my bravado, I'm sweating bullets as the instructor guides Lukas through the basic steps of taking my weight in case I fall from a high point of the wall. The whole system is mostly automatic—he doesn't have to do much but stand there with his end of the belay—but my mind is telling me all the awful things he could do to sabotage me if he wanted to.

Cut the rope. Let me fall. Claim it was an accident.

But the Elites won't really go that far to hurt me—will they? After all, everything they did to Silas was purely online. They never actually crossed the line into hurting him.

As far as I know.

"Alright, you're good to go. I'll be over there if you need anything."

The instructor paces away to a folding chair at one end of the room and settles in, staring down at his phone screen. He looks completely relaxed and uncaring—as if nothing bad has ever happened here before.

It's just the indoor warm-up. How hard can it be?

"So, Brenna." Lukas pulls up on the slack until the rope is gently taut against me. "Do you trust me?"

"Not as far as I can throw you.CanI try throwing you though, just to see? Off the edge of the quarry, maybe."

He laughs, the sound cordial and genteel, his blue blood shining through. "C'mon now, we're just having a bit of fun."

"It doesn't feel like fun to me," I mutter.

"Wanna raise the stakes, then?"

No. But I can't resist the challenge in his eyes. Whatever he sees me as, however much he looks down on me, I want to prove him wrong. I want to prove all of them wrong. It's like a sickness—and it's going to get me killed.

But there's one thing I can't do. "If you want to bet money, I don't have that. So you can forget about it."

"Oh, I don't need money," he says casually, because of course he doesn't. "But there is something I want from you."

I swallow, heart in my throat, as he leans in so close that I can smell his hair: coconut and vanilla, some kind of conditioner that must keep it soft, because it looks like you could sink into it and fall asleep.

It's a moment before I regain the brain cells to say, "What's that?"

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