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He blinked, confused. I leaned closer as if I were going to tell him a secret. “Now, when she’s where she belongs, and make no mistake, she will be, you won’t even be an afterthought. She’ll be too busy learning how it feels to be ruined nice and slow by someone who knows exactly where to touch and how to keep her begging.”

He clenched his jaw so hard I heard his teeth grind. For half a second, I thought he might do the smart thing and walk away. I should’ve known better. Ashton had the intelligence of a crackpot goldfish.

He swung.

The throw was sloppy, the kind of punch you toss out when you’re all emotion and no logic. If he was aiming for me, hemissed by a long shot. Before he could recover, my brother’s fist cracked across his jaw with a sound that snapped the air open. The impact sent him staggering sideways into a parked car. He caught himself—barely. His eyes were wild, teeth bared, and he lunged again like a fucking idiot.

The result was a match striking powder.

Students flooded out of The Nest like bloodhounds catching a scent. Phones were up, voices high, chaos spilling faster than anyone could stop it. Ashton’s boys were quick to follow his lead, fists raised, forgetting whose names carried weight here. One of them swung at Nick and caught him in the gut; he retaliated with a gleeful laugh and dropped him.

Two of his hockey teammates joined in without asking questions. Graves tackled a lineman straight to the asphalt like he’d been itching for the excuse. Another guy charged blindly toward our side, but he didn’t make it far. Rook hit him low and hard, grin stretched wide, like he was born for this. I didn’t know where the fuck he came from or how he wound up outside.

The Nest’s neon lights shone above us, casting the whole scene in an almost holy glow as if the universe had decided to spotlight this moment in Crowsfell history. Dougie burst through the diner doors just in time to dodge a flying root beer bottle.

“Jesus Christ, it’s a Wednesday!” he shouted as it shattered against the building.

Inside, the staff barely reacted. One waitress shook her head with a visible sigh, still balancing a tray of milkshakes. They knew better than to get involved. I stayed where I’d been standing since the start of it all, leaning back against the brick wall outside the main doors, pulling my phone out to check the time. I laughed when a text came in right on point.

Uncle B

You have 20 minutes.

As the Chief of Police, when he said twenty, it meant we had eighteen and a half before flashing lights showed up and started asking questions none of us were going to answer.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

SANJANA

Music drifted from the TV, a fitting playlist on my Spotify that matched my mood and gave me some background noise. I was curled up in Ryder’s old hoodie and a pair of long fuzzy socks, comfortable, but not quite settled. I’d kept myself busy with a combination of homework and house chores. Anything to keep my thoughts from drifting back to the night prior and everything that happened before the shitshow at The Nest.

I had done a decent job of putting my focus elsewhere. I even managed to lock in a day with the girls next week to get our nails filled and shop for the last pieces of our costumes before we were stuck scraping the bottom of the barrel to finish our looks. Hunt or no Hunt, we weren’t missing the Soirée Nick was hosting. By the time that party hit, we’d be just hours away from winning, the damn thing. Was that borderline delusional, considering how sideways everything had gone the past few days? Absolutely. But delusion was just a coin toss away from determination in my book.

I smothered a yawn and debated if I wanted to throw pants on for a Hemlock & Bean run, or nourish myself with actual food, like a hot pocket. I had no desire whatsoever to cook anything that required actual effort. The guys had brought my car back at some point, which let me know Ryder carried the extra fob with him at all times. I hadn’t spoken to any of them since, but I did see about four different views of the Nest brawl. Roxxi had dropped one into our group chat, Ari shared a link to another, and the rest were all over social media.

Nick had responded that he looked good from every angle he’d been recorded in, setting off Cade, and then Xander, who had been filmed watching the whole event with Ryder at some point, while eating loaded fries. Cloe muted our chat, and I followed her lead for the day. I wasn’t sure what to make of the brawl, how violent it got, or how little it shocked me. I wasn’t speaking to Ashton either. I checked to make sure he wasn’t concussed or bleeding out after witnessing my boys take turns walking him like a dog, and then I went about my day.

That didn’t stop his apology texts kept coming in waves.

On the one hand, I did understand him being upset. If roles were reversed, I would be too. He had a right to feel and process, but to raise his voice at me the way he did? No. I wasn’t his freaking child. When I stepped back, it wasn’t because I thought he’d hurt me, but because some subconscious part of me didn’t know if he would. That realization said more about my trust in him than it did about the fight we’d had. I didn’t want or need apologies; I simply wanted to be done. The only reason I hadn’t told him right then was to stop us from being an even bigger spectacle than we had started to be.

Stretching, I glanced at the half-finished math assignment spread across the coffee table. My textbook lay open to a chapter on proportional models and compound interest, but the formulas on the page looked more like hieroglyphics than anything I could reason through. I’d only managed to solve two of the twenty problems, and for the past fifteen minutes, I’d just been staring at equation three, wondering how it was even possible for a single problem to include both logarithms and nested parentheses.

Quantitative Reasoning, my ass.

When was I ever going to use this skill in the real world?

I needed a break.

With a quiet sigh, I plugged my phone into the charger and sank back into the couch, curling my legs under me. It wasn’t that late, a little after seven, but the sky outside was already swallowed in darkness. No masked assholes had shown up, though. So that was something. The last text I’d received was from earlier that morning, and the words had etched themselves into the back of my mind like a splinter I couldn’t dig out:

Every friend group has a weak link.

I wonder which one of you will snap first.

I didn’t reply, but I briefly wondered ifIwould be considered our weakest link. Now it felt like a matter of when, not if, the next shoe would drop. This was one of those things I was actively trying not to think about, especially while home alone. Arianna, Roxxi, and Cloe wouldn’t be back for almost another hour or so. They each had something scheduled that had been planned long before this whole Marked thing came about. I’d chosen to stay back. I needed to prove I could be home alone. I couldn’t spend the next few weeks jumping at shadows and screaming at creaking floorboards.

I promised to call the second anything felt off. The house was locked up tight. Every door was double-checked, and all the curtains were drawn. The glass company and whoever was installing our security system were scheduled to come out that weekend. Rational Sanjana said we were fine at the moment and there was nothing to worry about. The other part of me wasn’t so easily convinced. Someone had been inside our house. Someone called out to me at The Nest. When I told the girls what I’d heard and showed the accompanying text, none of them played it cool.

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