Page 92 of The Pawn

He pulls me towards him. I tilt my face up to look into his, and realize belatedly that I've curled my fingers around his shoulders, a mirror to his grip on my arms.

"Tell me what you want from me." His voice is ragged. "Tell me what will get you to leave this cursed place and go back home where you belong."

I answer the only way I know how, rain dripping down my cheeks and across my lips.

With my mouth against his in a searing kiss.

Chapter 48

It's a storm cloud brewing overhead. The smell of ozone in the air, a promise of something yet to come. Every hair on your body raising on end.

Kissing Cole Masterson is dangerous. It feels like jumping out of a plane. He kisses like the last moment before the truck hits you.

It's like living.

Because you know that he's how it ends. He's how itallends.

He tastes like storm water and toothpaste, smells like a warm kitchen, and feels like a living god beneath my fingers. His mouth takes mine and consumes me. I push against him, nails digging into his skin, teeth trying to find ways to hurt him like he hurt me.

His lips take the breath from me and give it back again.

His hands dig into my waist, feeding the part of me desperate to be touched, to be wanted, to be wild and reckless.

The darkness in him, the desire for messy revenge, feels like an echo to the girl I see in the mirror. The one who took him down, for a while. The one who wants to bury him.

This, then, is what it feels like to sin. I'm betraying the dead, and I'm ruining myself doing it.

I pull back from the kiss like ripping off a bandage, stumbling away from him, my bare feet sliding on the storm-slick ground.

Thunder booms. Lightning descends from the sky. About a hundred yards away from us, one of Coleridge's ancient live oak trees gets split right in half like a banana being peeled. It must feel the way I do right now: empty in the middle and utterly destroyed.

I can't look at him. I don't want to see what I've done. My purse slipped out of my hand sometime between facing him and breaking away from his touch. Getting down on my knees—because why not ruin this dress completely—I find it with searching fingers, soaked and cold to the touch. My phone slides out onto the ground, and I frantically grab it, pulling it out of the rain.

Panting, Cole says, "You need to know something."

I put the code into my phone's lock screen to make sure it's still working despite the torrent all around us. It opens up to the latest thing I was looking at: photos of Cole's journal, illicitly taken, proving nothing and barely sating my curiosity.

Maybe itisan obsession.

"Brenna. Brenna, goddamnit, look at me."

I can't.

Because I'm figuring something out.

Something I don't understand.

The handwriting in the journal. It seemed so familiar. Heart racing, I flip through my photos, back in time: to before I pointed at the wrong boy using the blog, before Holly found out what I'd done, before I took down Cole, before it all went sideways.

"Just stop this, goddamnit. You don't know what you're doing." His voice is frantic, pleading even. "Let's go somewhere and talk. Maybe if I tell you everything... I know I shouldn't, but you might understand... There's so much you don't know."

There are other footsteps coming down the stairs. Other boys joining us in the rain, fitted suits getting ruined. I don't have to look up to know who they are.

There are four wolves at Coleridge Academy.

I took a photo of the envelope that was slid beneath my door. I've studied it so many times, but there was something about it I didn't see. With a strange knot in my chest, I compare it directly to the handwriting in Cole's journal.

It shouldn't be.

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