“You weren’t home,” Dean continued, “so I figured I’d leave the gear by the garage. But then I bumped into Millie. She was trying to fix her bike outside the servants’ apartment. She said hi. I said hi back. I may have been a little high. I may have told her she was a bitch for kissing you at that party…”

My jaw clenched, and I felt my teeth grinding against each other. Emilia broke up with him before I’d told him we kissed. He’d never confronted her about it because by the time he knew, she’d already dumped him.

Dean flashed me a victorious smile and patted my shoulder, pretending to clean off some grass. I shook him off.

“Dude, I’m a little embarrassed for you. Millie never kissed you back, did she? She broke up with me to pacify you, you giant, pussy baby—”

That was it.

He didn’t get the chance to complete his sentence because I was all over him in a second, throwing fist after fist straight to his face. Fury blinded me, rage consumed me, and my body rippled with fire. I didn’t want to hear the rest.

The next thing I felt was Jaime’s arms as he yanked me from Dean, but it was too late. Dean already had a split lip and forehead, and his nose looked like it needed to be put back in place. I launched at him again, even with Jaime and the second-string quarterback, Matt, trying to pin me down to the grass. I grabbed Dean by his shirt and pressed my nose to his.

“You back with her?” I demanded, seething.

He smiled through the pain, wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and nodded. “Surprisingly, she wasn’t happy about you lying to me, telling me she was the one who kissed you. So here’s the deal, Vicious…” He spat blood on the grass and got up, but didn’t make a move to hit me back. “Millie’s my girlfriend. You better come to terms with that. You had your chance when she first moved here, and all you did was be a fucking dick to her.

“What the hell did you think was going to happen? She’s hot. She’s nice. She’s fucking kind. Of course guys noticed. I noticed too. I knew you were gonna go bat-shit crazy on me, and I let you, because you’re a friend. Hope you got that out of your system.” He winked. “Because my nose will be fine tomorrow, but you’ll be a fucking mess every time you see us making out in the halls.”

I charged at him for the third time on autopilot.

“What the fuck, Dean!” Jaime pried me off of him and dragged me toward the blue bleachers overlooking the field.

This time I didn’t resist. There was no point. Dean had won and I’d lost.

“Get the hell out of here before I finish Vicious’s job,” Jaime roared, and I heard Dean laugh behind us.

That weekend, I had another balls-out party at my house. Dean didn’t dare show his face, and I assumed Help was with him. When I showed up at the pool with my sleeves rolled up, a sophomore guy looking to impress one of Georgia’s cheerleading crew accepted the challenge and met me on the tennis court.

Defy was fair.

Defy was brutal.

But this time, Defy did nothing to dull the pain.

From then on, everything changed between the four of us. Dean and I weren’t on speaking terms. At all.

I toyed with the idea of banning him from my estate altogether—it was completely doable—but decided that I didn’t want to look like a total fucktard in Eli Cole’s eyes. Besides, if Dean didn’t come to Help, Help would go to him, which was just as bad if not worse. The servants’ apartment was a lot smaller than Dean’s mansion, and Emilia’s parents were always around. They had fewer chances to fuck each other if they were here.

But they were steady again, and I saw them every-fucking-where. I saw them at school, parks, at the mall my dad owned, and sometimes even outside the servants’ apartment. To be fair to Help, she never made out with him in public. Not even a kiss. They sometimes held hands, and that alone made me want to go on a killing spree. I didn’t understand the burning hatred that flared every time I saw Dean. How it had transferred from her to him all of a sudden.

Trent and Jaime were desperate to keep us all together. We were the Four HotHoles. We ruled the fucking school. Together, we were invincible. Individually, we were each just another big-headed jock. I saw where they were coming from, I really did, so we still all hung out together. We sat together in the cafeteria. We nodded hello in the hallway. But we didn’t talk to each other much, and the subject of Emilia LeBlanc was tacitly taboo. She was like Voldemort. No one was to mention her name, and Dean pretended like she didn’t exist when he was around me. I tried to pretend she didn’t exist too, but of course I couldn’t.

Because she was fucking everywhere.

I thought about her even when technically I didn’t think about her. I thought about her when I worked out and when I hung out with my non-friends and when I played video games. When I studied and when I fucked girls—Jesus Christ, especially when I fucked girls—until at some point, I stopped fucking girls altogether because it reminded me that one day, one day soon, if it hadn’t already happened, Help was going to fuck that douchebag Dean.

I couldn’t let that happen. It didn’t make sense even to me, but I just couldn’t. She was mine. It sounded irrational, but that didn’t make it any less true. I didn’t have to slap my name on her ass when she walked into class that very first day. The way I teased her, taunted her. I was normally too busy with the shit that was going on in my life to bully people. Everybody knew that the new girl belonged to me.

I never in a million years would have dated her or even taken her out. She wasn’t worth the trouble. No girl was, and especially not her. Still, she was mine to play with. Case in point, from the very first time her eyes landed on me, she looked at me like she was already mine.

Swallow. Blink. Sigh. Blush. Look away. That was her routine every time I passed by her, even now.

But Dean didn’t care.

The fucker just. Didn’t. Care.

Maybe that’s why I did what I did toward the end of the school year. Help was going to celebrate her eighteenth birthday in a week, and even though Douchebag Dean (the name had real ring to it) never talked about her in front of me, I knew he was going to take her to a spa weekend somewhere fancy along the coast. It was all so stupid. Help wasn’t a spa girl. He should’ve known that.

If I were her boyfriend, I would have taken her to watch the cherry trees bloom. Or give her new painting supplies because the girl wanted to be a real artist and open a gallery or some shit. Not that I was her stalker or anything, like Jaime was with Ms. Greene before he started banging her. Emilia wore her weird personality like a billboard, proud and loud. From the way she dressed to how she was always covered in paint and doodled cherry blossoms everywhere.