ONE
GEMMA
When I was a little girl, my friends used to dream of meeting their Prince Charming. I dreamed of meeting the guy who would ruin me. As we grew up, their dreams became less about pumpkins and glass slippers, and more about Lambos and Manolo Blahniks.
Mine never changed.
I knew a love like that couldn’t exist, one not sprung from my dreams, but my nightmares.
Until I met him.
“Gemma.” My friend Blaire waved a freshly manicured hand in my face. “Earth to Gemma. You’ve been zoned out, like, all night. Did you already take something?”
“It’s rude not to share, Gemma,” my other friend Kennedy pointed out.
“Says the girl who kept the year eleven test answers to herself,” I said.
We were at the Underworld, the hottest club on theEast Coast, and also the one place in Crowne Point where no paparazzi could reach us. Our private booth was shaped like a horseshoe and the center of the table was filled with a bucket of ice, more Dom than we’d ever drink, and truffle fries. Beyond us, the dance floor undulated with bodies.
“Yeah! I bombed that test,” Blaire said, indignant through a mouthful of fries she would later purge. “My dad had to buy a new wing so I didn’t fucking fail.”
“Did you sleep with Mr. Larsen?” Kennedy rounded on Blaire. “No? Then shut the fuck up.”
“Dude, what?” I started laughing. “He was, like, seventy.”
Kennedy chucked one of Blaire’s fries at our heads. “He was a very young-looking fifty—oh my God, shut up, shut up! They’rehere.”
“No way,” Blaire said without looking up from her phone. “They’re never here.”
As she spoke, our gazes drifted up to the balcony through confetti falling like glitter. Their backs were to the club, and the magenta light from the dance floor illuminated them like shadows of hell. The four boys who owned this club, who ruled everything criminal in Crowne Point.
The Horsemen.
Blaire coughed on her fries. “Holy shit, allfourof them?”
“What goes on up there?” Kennedy whispered.
“I heard they torture people, that’s why the music is so loud,” Blaire said.
My phone vibrated for the one hundredth time of the night.
“Is it seriously your mom again?” Blaire asked. “Since when does she give a shit?”
“Since our world imploded.” I rolled my eyes. Mymother didn’t used to be so…involved. We had a nice deal going. As long as I was who every girl wanted to be and who every boy wanted to fuck, she left me alone.
But then, in an instant, my brother dissolved a marriage my mother had been planning since I was thirteen. For Tansy Crowne, there was no greater achievement than marrying someone of status. Which meant all her time—and mine—was focused on finding that someone. For all her class and subversion, my mother had all but hired a skywriter:Gemma Crowne Desperately in Need of Dick.
“Do you really think they murder people?” Kennedy asked, drawing our attention back to the four boys lurking above us.
“They’re just a bunch of burn-out druggie losers from the townie school—no offense, Gemma.” Blaire swiped the powder beneath her nose and grimaced at me, the girl whose grandfather made her drop out of our boarding school to go to said townie school. “This whole town is so without culture they have to invent weird cults.”
“I’m starting to come down,” I groaned, rubbing my temples.
“I still have bars!” Blaire said. “And powder!”
“I have crystal?—”
“No one wants yourmeth, Kennedy,” Blaire said, cutting her off. “When your fucking teeth fall out, we’re not gonna be nice about it.”
