“I’d ride that horse.” Lucy chewed on the end of her pencil.
I focused on the equation Mr. Severson put on the board, determined to be the one to solve it first. Algebra II wasn’t as hard as I expected, but I desperately wanted to advance to Precalc for next year instead of the remedial math course.
“God bless the Legacy Club and their scholarships,” June whispered. As if her mother wasn’t on that committee. “The offensive line is going to look ggoooddd this year!”
“I heard he’ll play basketball when football is over, too,” Ivy eagerly added.
A touch too loudly.
Mr. Severson rapped his knuckles on the podium. “Silence. You can all welcome our newest student on your own time. Mr. Messina, take a seat—there.”
My head snapped up. Tendrils of excitement shivered down my spine, and I found my head turning before I could stop myself. My gaze clashed with a pair of onyx eyes.
It’s him.
How the hell did he—
No. That wasn’t important.
I dropped my focus to the scratch paper and furiously divided the numbers. When they didn’t match, I dashed an angry mark through them and started from the middle of the problem.
He can’t be here.
If my dad found out, if he bothered to attend any of the parent meetings, if someone said something—
He won’t.
Dad wasspending more and more of his time in New York City. Nicole and I lived in the big brownstone with a chaperon—because the word nanny was inappropriate for our age—and the servants. I scrambled to fit the numbers into their proper places, solving for the letters on the edge.
“Sir, for the equation, √(2x + 3) = 7. The answer’s twenty-three.” His voice had changed. It was lower by an octave, husky with a breathy quality. It sounded like the taste of smoke from the cigarettes we’d snuck years ago.
The ones that made me puke in the back alley.
“Correct,” Mr. Severson clipped.
I slapped my pencil on the desk and pursed my lips. I almost had the damn thing. What was I thinking, dividing that? My head wasn’t in the game.
As the lesson on Radical Equations continued, my gaze wandered to the side. Messina was sitting one row back. One chair over.
He grew.
Those extra inches didn’t help fill out the suit jacket on his shoulders. But he looked older than the other sixteen to seventeen-year-old boys. And damn…the school uniform looked good on him. Navy tie straight, white shirt crisp, but there was an aura about him that none of these polished rich boys had.
It’d been months since I’d seen him. Time spent without contact. My father used to be the personal lawyer for his dad—and his dad’s boss. But Dad didn’t work for criminals anymore. He turned straight. Cut ties. Cleaned his image.
Which meant his daughters were forbidden from seeing their old friends.
“The answer is forty-nine, sir,” Vincenzo called out, before Mr. Severson was finished scrawling another equation on the smartboard.
The teacher gave him a flat look. “Since you seem to be so adept at these, why don’t you come solve one for the class?”
My heart skipped a beat. The offer wasn’t friendly. Severson only said it to embarrass the newcomer. But what he didn’t know was that the sons of the criminal underworld didn’t back down from a challenge.
Vincenzo rose in one smooth motion. He wove through the chairs with effortless ease. Stopping before the tablet on the podium, he arched a brow.
Severson handed him a stylus and pointed to the smartboard.
“Damn, you could crack a walnut in that ass,” Lucy moaned.
