Page 49 of The Pawn

He frowns at me, his pale eyebrows drawing together. "Georgia messed with your harness?" I just scoff at him; he must think I'm stupid. "I didn't... I barelyknowGeorgia. She's just that redhead who hangs around Tanner all the time. As far as whatever you think was going on, I wouldneverput someone's life in jeopardy like that. Neither would Cole."

I study him. He seems so outraged, disturbed even. His leg is bouncing in the chair, his long, perfect fingers tapping on the desk. And he sounds genuinely troubled by my revelation.

"Are you so sure about Cole?" I ask him, probing at his respectable surface to see what lurks beneath. "He has a sadistic streak. Holly even told me that she thinks about breaking up with him sometimes. He got Reggie kicked out of school."

"Reggie was a low-life drug dealer," Lukas says. "He offered to sell roofies to a friend of ours who was only looking for a little Molly. He's bad news."

I chew on this information, remembering the boy sitting next to Hector at lunch so many days in a row. "What about Hector? He didn't deserve to get suspended. Or to have Cole torment him all the time. He even threatened his dad's job at the school of Hector defended himself."

Pausing, Lukas concedes, "Cole has an outsized hate for Hector. But they have a history. It's personal."

I want to know more. "Oh? How?"

He shakes his head. "That's for him to tell you." Fingers suddenly pausing on the desk, Lukas says, "Cole has done a lot of things. He starts shit on social media. Messes with people's stuff. I've even seen him do things that I don't know how to defend. But henevergets physical." Lukas is very firm on this. "I don't believe for one second that he would enjoy hurting you."

"He smiled when I fell."

"Well." Lukas runs a hand through his hair. "You falling meant that you lost our bet, although I told him I wasn't going to count it since you almost got seriously injured. Cole was pretty incensed at the thought that I'd even offer myself up to be on your side. So I guess seeing you lose made him happy. Besides, I caught you. You didn't break a single bone—didn't even bruise as far as I could see."

He's right, I have to admit. It wasn't pleasant to fall—it was fucking frightening, in fact—but I didn't hurt a single hair on my head.

And his words have made me curious about something. "Whydidyou offer to be on my side in that bet?"

"I don't know." I stare at him, frowning; his answer isn't good enough. "Oh, alright. I guess I just thought it seemed like Cole blew his lid for no reason. All you did was help that Lakewood girl out. Sure, she's loathsome, but it's not like you were going against him. But everything is about loyalty to Cole. It's all black and white—who crosses whom, who is on whose side. I wanted to show him that I couldn't be counted on to play his petty little games, that I'm not at his beck and call like the Queen's foot soldiers."

"Why is Chrissy so terrible?" It's been bothering me since that very first day, this question. "Sure, she's shallow and she likes to gossip, but that's it."

"That's another question you'll have to ask Cole," he says, turning back into the tight-lipped son of a British diplomat. "I can't share his business. All I can tell you is, you should watch your back around that girl. She's not who she pretends to be."

Neither am I, so we have that in common.

I'm about to say something more when the teacher gets up to walk up and down the aisles of our desk, forcing us to the project at hand.

But my mind churns with questions. I want answers to what lurks in Cole's past—and I want to expose those answers, publicly, for everyone to see.

One down.

Three to go.

Chapter 25

I'm sitting in my room one evening, scrolling through the Legacies social media account after a long day of studying to try to catch up on all the classes I'm behind, when a particular news-related tweet catches my attention.

@TODAYshow:In an emotional round table interview, Jake Garrison and his son talk about Blake's anger issues—and how he's working through them, with the help of therapy.

I blink at the tweet. To go with it is a picture-perfect photo of Jake Garrison, Hollywood actor turned director, and Blake Lee Garrison, my personal nightmare first thing every morning. He wasn't in our shared calculus class today, which I chocked up to him skipping after a week full of whispers about his anger and receiving a lower position in the school's totem pole—not a flight to New York City to be interviewed by Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb.

Because I can't resist myself, I play the video. The first thing I notice is how different Blake looks. Instead of stuffy button downs and impeccably pressed slacks, he's wearing casual clothes, complete with a vintage white motorcycle jacket that looks like something his father would wear in his movies—and in fact, his father is dressed similarly.

There's no sign of the fashionable black-framed glasses he normally wears; they must've been replaced by contacts. Without them, you can really see the honey in his brown eyes. His hair is styled differently too, soft and gentle, a little stray piece of long black hair curling down towards his forehead in the front.

But it's not just what he's wearing that makes him look different. His body language is relaxed: shoulders rounded, legs spread on the armchair he's lounging on, and his fingers loosely splayed. More than that his face is open, his eyes missing that coldness I usually see every morning.

I can't tell if the face I'm seeing in this video right now is a mask, or if the one I see every day is the lie. They feel like they belong to two different people, both of them completely separate from the feral, despairing boy in the Seoul night club.

In the interview, Savannah and Hoda give him lowball questions. His father Jake talks a lot about the things he's been through; he mentions multiple hospitalizations when Blake was a child dealing with reoccurring health issues like infections and asthma.

The bombshell comes when Jake tells the interviewers, and the audience, about his son's leukemia, and the efforts they went through to get him cured.

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