“You gonna check those?” he asked, indicating to my palm reader’s flashing lights.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
For lack of any better ideas, I flipped open my shiny new textbook—Econ 302, for fuck’s sake—and started reading. Or I pretended to, anyway. Damn, economics was boring. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d been dumped straight into a third level class with zero understanding of the subject on a basic level.
Ugh. Whatever. I just needed to get through the next hour without giving Alex any reasons to fuck my life up any worse. Then I could meet Jordan in his room and… uh… strategize. Yep. Strategize.
Naked.
“Mattie, just go,” Alex drawled, snapping me out of the decidedly dirty daydream I’d just engaged in. Yet another reason to junk punch the fucker. “I promise I won’t accidentally push Violet down the stairs if you leave us alone.”
Mattie gasped, and even my jaw dropped. The way he so casually referenced Jasmine’s death—sorry, Jasmine’smurder—was legitimately shocking.
“You sick fuck,” Mattie snarled, leaning on the desk to hiss at him over me. “If you think I’d give you even one second alone after a comment like that, you’re more screwed in the head than I gave you credit for.”
Alex just shrugged like her scathing anger meant exactly nothing to him. “Suit yourself.”
Something about the way he said that, then immediately turned to his palm reader to send a message set off alarm bells in my brain.
“Alex,” I snapped. “Don’t.”
He blinked at me with those gorgeous blue eyes, a picture of fucking innocence. It wasn’t hard to see how I’d fallen so hard and so fast for his fake ass.
“Don’t what, sweetheart?”
“Don’t do whatever the fuck you’re doing. Just don’t. You’ve done enough. You’ve changed my whole schedule so that I’m forced intoyourclasses, which totally screws my own degree credits. You’ve forced me into this bullshit study period. You’ve made it abundantly clear that you hold my future and freedom in your slimy grip, so whatever the fuck you just did on your palm reader? Undo it. Mattie sitting here or not doesn’t make any difference to how much I fucking hate you.” My voice remained calm and quiet as I said this, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back for that. Because as much as I despised him now… he’d hurt me. And that wasn’t something that healed overnight.
He grinned, and Mattie’s palm reader lit up with an incoming call.
“Too late,” my psychotic ex said, and Mattie cursed. It only took one look at her pale face to know whatever he’d done was bad news.
She bit her lip, staring at her palm reader before flashing me a distraught look. “It’s my mother,” she told me, her voice edging on panic. “I’m sorry, Vi. I have to—”
“Take it,” I ordered her. “Go. Seriously. I’m a big girl, and Alex knows better than to try and manhandleViolence, right?” I shot a snarky glare in his direction, but he just grinned like the cat who caught the canary.
My bestie scowled, but her hands were shaking as she tossed her things into her bag and hurried out of the library.
“What the fuck was that all about?” I demanded, whirling in my seat to confront Alex. “What the hell did you do, you shady bastard?”
“Me?” He spread his hands out like he had no idea what I was talking about. Damn, I wanted to hurt him. Physically. “I think you’re starting to see monsters in every closet, Violet. Maybe Matisse’s mother just wanted to check in on her daughter.”
I stared at him for a long moment, searching desperately for that devil inside—the devil Iknewto be inside—but he had seriously the best game face I’d ever seen. If I didn’t loathe him so much, I could have learned a thing or two.
“Bullshit,” I spat. I slammed my textbook closed, having not understood a single word, and stuffed it in my own bag. My chair scraped the floor sharply as I pushed back from the table, and Alex’s hand shot out to grab my wrist.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
My eyes narrowed into a poisonous glare. “Anywhere but here. Got a problem? Tell the dean. I’ll be sure to tell him you’ve been sleeping around with Claudette and endangering her betrothal to Rafe. You know, the most powerful heir in the world? Yeah. Let’s see how that goes down.” I forcefully yanked my wrist out of his grip. “Don’t fucking touch me again, Alex. You make me sick.”
I made it all of three steps away from the study desk before his chair crashed to the ground. A shocked gasp was all that left my lips as he grabbed a fistful of my hair and slammed me face first into a bookshelf. It was more a power move than anything intended to injure me, and despite the dull ache in my eyebrow I didn’t think it’d leave a lasting mark.
Fuck, I wanted to make him pay for that cowardly move, though. But I knew it wasn’t that easy. Resorting to physical violence against a prince would not solve my problems. I needed to be smarter than that to win this battle. I needed to think long term, beyond the short satisfaction of beating the shit out of him. For now, that meant letting him manhandle me and allowing him the illusion that I was some helpless, scared little girl.
Alex’s psychotic chuckle rolled over me as he pressed his body to my back, crushing me against the shelves in an attempt to prove who was in charge. Hot tip, it wasn’t me.
Not right now, anyway.
“Silly little Violet,” he murmured, his lips caressing my earlobe even as his grip on my hair tightened to the point of painful. “You seem to have forgotten your place. Maybe someone needs to leave an anonymous tip with the Swiss Guard. It’s quite the crime for a commoner to own a steel bladed weapon, don’t you know? Especially at a college full of royal heirs.” He tsked in the most condescending way that made my blood boil.
