CHAPTER 1
DESTINY
The first timesomeone at Desert Saints Prep called me a stripper name, I laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because if I didn’t laugh, I was going to put her face through the mirror in the girls’ bathroom, and Regan had spent too much money on my tuition for me to get expelled before graduation.
“Destiny,” Brielle Carson said, dragging my name out like it had glitter stuck to it. “Really? That’s what your mother named you?”
She leaned against the marble sink with her arms folded over her crisp white blouse, her plaid skirt hemmed two inches shorter than dress code allowed because girls like Brielle didn’t get detention. Girls like Brielle got warnings. Smiles. College recommendation letters from administrators who played golf with their fathers.
I got watched.
There was a difference.
I dried my hands slowly under the fancy automatic dryer and looked at her through the mirror. “You already know my name.”
Her friends giggled behind her.
Three of them. Perfect hair. Perfect nails. Perfect little silver cross necklaces resting against perfect spray-tanned throats. They looked like the kind of girls who posted Bible verses under bikini pictures and cried if the wrong boy left them on opened.
Brielle smiled wider.
“Yeah, but I didn’t know your mother named you like she expected you to dance for dollar bills.”
Something hot and ugly flashed behind my ribs.
Not pain.
I was past pain.
Pain had been freshman year, when I’d walked into Desert Saints Prep in a navy uniform skirt and white knee socks, thinking maybe this place would be different. Thinking maybe a school with adobe archways, iron gates, chapel every Wednesday, and girls who smelled like vanilla perfume instead of cigarette smoke might be safe.
Regan had wanted that for me.
A clean school.
A school where nobody wore cuts, nobody kept guns in locked desk drawers, nobody flinched when a bike rolled too slow past the gate. A school where the name Royal Bastards didn’t mean anything because the tuition cost enough to keep real life outside.
She had filled out the paperwork herself.
No club last names.
No mention of Edge.
No mention of Tarak.
No mention of Mandy.
I even had a clean cut driver deliver me to school in a Lincoln. A fake home address that was a stash house barricaded beyond iron gates and cactus… so no one doing a drive by could tell it was more warehouse than mansion.
I was enrolled under my Arizona name, the one tied to the family who’d raised me before Santa Fe decided it had a claim on my blood. For almost two years, it worked.
Harper Destiny Aquinnah
At first, I was interesting.
