Chained to the Villainess

I came back to myself holding a bloody whip. That was how I learned I'd been written into a novel as the villainess.

Not just any villainess. The one whose entire job is to break the male lead. Cage him. Ruin him. Take him apart piece by piece.

He was at my feet when I came to. Chained. Shaking. Teeth set against the pain I'd put there.

My hands wouldn't stop shaking as I unlocked the cuffs.

"Weren't you going to kill me?" His voice came out raw. "Miss Sinclair."

I already knew how the story ended for a girl like me. He has me committed. Not long after, the villainess is gone. Erased, disgraced, exactly the way it was written.

I started to cry.

I dug a scrap of paper out of my pocket, soft and furred from years of folding, and held it out to him.

He'd made it for me when we were seven.

One coupon. Good for forgiving Lia, no matter what she does.

Chapter 1

Blood, still wet on the whip in my hand. That was the first thing.

Then the basement filled in around it: the smell of rust, the cold concrete. I stared at the whip.

Villainess. The word landed in my head with the weight of a verdict.

Me?

I pointed at my own chest, fingers unsteady. Me. I was the villainess.

A low groan pulled my eyes up.

There was a boy on his knees in front of me. Black hair, wrecked. A jaw I'd have called beautiful if it weren't half-swallowed by the damp dark. His arms were strung up by chains, hands hanging slack, and his breathing had a thin, scraped-raw sound to it.

Atlas.

The male lead of the redemption novel I'd apparently been living inside.

Also the boy I grew up next door to.

The story came to me in pieces, the way a nightmare does. I'd been in love with him for ten years. Started out as the pretty, harmless girl trailing a step behind him. Then the real heroine showed up, and something in me curdled.

I framed her. More than once.

And then there was what I did to him. I took him. Chained him down here. Did the rest of what was still hanging off the end of that whip.

In the script, he stops being able to stand the sight of me. He has me committed. Not long after, the girl loses her mind, and the story closes the book on her for good.

That girl was me.

And the boy bleeding at my feet, the one who hadn't grown into the powerhouse he was going to become yet, was looking at me like he'd already watched it happen.

His shirt was torn open at the collar. The welts across his chest were a livid, screaming red. Sweat sheeted his face, gray as paper, and his lips wouldn't quite hold still.

He lifted his eyes to mine.

That was the moment I understood I was a dead woman.

His stare didn't waver. It was the look of something caged that had stopped hoping for the door and started planning for your throat. And under that, fast enough that I almost missed it, something that had been hurt very badly.

I wanted to cry.

Here is the thing about me. I, Aurelia Sinclair, have spent my whole life being gentle, rule-following, and afraid of basically everything.

Villainess was not a part I knew how to play.

Okay, Aurelia. Survival rule number one. When you wake up cast as the girl the story was built to destroy, you do not stand around admiring the lighting. You fix what you can.

I started working the cuffs loose, hands trembling, and my eyes snagged on the raw red rings around his wrists.

A scene flashed up behind my eyes, uninvited.

Me, locking those cuffs. Dragging a fingernail down his bloodless face slow enough to leave a mark. Touching him like he was something I owned.

I'll keep you locked to me forever, that other voice had said, in my mouth, in my body. You only get to look at me.

I shuddered hard enough to rattle my teeth.

Our families went back generations. Old friends, old money, houses close enough to share a hedge. Somewhere in there the two sets of parents had even joked us into a promise. Betrothed before we'd lost our baby teeth.

He was a year older. In every memory I had, I was a step behind him, calling his name in a sugar-soft voice, sweet on him before I knew the word for it.

He was a cold kid. He looked after me anyway, indulgent, like I was his to spoil.

Then I grew up, and wanting him stopped being something I could keep on a leash.

The closer he and the heroine got, the more of me went rotten. Until I reached out and took him, and called it love.

The cuffs sprang open.

The chains hit the floor and rang through the empty dark, almost musical.

I dredged up a smile. It came out closer to a flinch.

"Atlas. Atlas, listen."

I kept my voice light. Coaxing.

"If I told you something got into me. That I wasn't myself. Would you believe it?"

He laughed.

It was a small, cracked sound, and there was nothing in it.

"Weren't you going to kill me?" Slow. Mocking. Each word costing his raw throat something. "Miss Sinclair."

I went still.

He really did hate me now.

He used to call me Lia.

His eyes narrowed, and the danger in them sharpened to a point. He leaned in, and his shadow came with him, and the whole room seemed to lower its ceiling onto my shoulders.

"Aurelia." A pause, precise as a blade laid flat. "What are we playing this time?"

Chapter 2

Three days ago, I'd tapped that whip against his cheek, light as a kiss, and told him I wanted to play a game.

This was the game.

I'd unlocked his chains and tossed him a key. Told him the basement was a maze. Seven sealed rooms, one way out, a single door to the outside. Find it, and he was free.

He searched. Every corridor, every door, until his legs gave out and he went down on the concrete, wrung dry.

That was when I let him see me.

Eyes red. Something feral in my voice.

You want out that badly? Is staying with me forever really so unbearable?

Are you going back to her? Why is she the only thing you see now?

You're mine. You only get to look at me. Run again, and I'll make sure you never can.

Her. Ingrid. The actual heroine of this book.

After Atlas had it out with his family and walked out, he got into a university here, and by his third year he'd started a company with the one girl sharp enough to match him. Same lab, same competitions, same long nights. Two brilliant people building something and falling for each other in the margins of it.

A happy ending, once they cleared every obstacle in their way.

I was the biggest obstacle in their way.

I didn't just trip the heroine at every turn. I waited until Atlas was about to lead his team into the one competition that mattered, and then I took him and brought him down here.

I shut my eyes. There weren't even tears left, just the dry ache where they should have been.

Aurelia. You absolute disaster.

You looked at the male lead of a romance novel and decided to keep him in a basement. Do you have any idea what happens to girls who pull that in this genre? There's a body count. It's mostly them.

Atlas ran out of patience watching me drift.

His hand clamped down on my shoulder, hard enough that I swore I heard something in the joint give.

"Aurelia. I'm talking to you."

His face had gone somewhere terrible and quiet.

"What do you want from me. When are you letting me go."

I had no tears and no plan, so I did the only thing left in the kit.

I took a breath, aimed my whole face at his chest, and threw myself into the performance of my life.

"Atlas, please" The sob came out enormous. "I was wrong. I was so far past wrong. Something got into me, I swear, I wasn't"

Sincerity. The undefeated champion.

And if you drop to your knees fast enough, maybe the villainess ending can't catch up to you.

I sniffled and lifted streaming eyes to his and pulled out the saddest card in the deck.

"Atlas. I'm twenty years old. You have to let me get a few things catastrophically wrong."

The air seemed to stop moving.

His body locked for half a second.

Then I shifted, and I must have caught the open welt on his chest, because the breath hissed out of him and he shoved me off hard.

"You think one apology cancels this."

His eyes were red-rimmed, and the look in them wanted to take me apart slowly.

"Who the hell do you think you are."

That was it. He was still going to kill me.

The tears came for real this time, fast and humiliating. I scrambled at the inside pocket of my dress and dug out a folded scrap of paper, worn soft as cloth, and smoothed it open with shaking hands.

He'd made it for me the year we were seven, back when forgiving me cost him nothing.

The pencil had faded almost to nothing. The words were still there.

It was the last card I had. A child's promise, held out by the one person on earth who had every right to tear it to pieces.

Chapter 3

Good for forgiving Lia, no matter what she does.

It had been the smallest thing.

He'd knocked over my glass of milk. I was spoiled enough that I cried about it for an unreasonable length of time, and Atlas, who at seven already carried himself like a tiny, put-upon adult, completely lost his nerve.

So he made me the coupon. To get me to stop.

I'd pulled it out once before, in the life before this one. Right before he had me committed. By then I'd done too much, and it was far too late to matter.

For the record, I never blamed him for how that ended. In the original story, what I did wasn't the work of a person.

Now it was the only thing standing between me and the same fate.

Atlas stared at the worn scrap of paper, and something in him stopped.

He hadn't expected me to keep it.

A silly little promise, suddenly being held to.

His mouth pressed into a flat, hard line. My tears kept falling.

It took a long time. Then the cold in his eyes finally cracked.

He let go of my shoulder. Stood without hesitating. Walked to the door.

He stopped there and gave me one last long look.

"Aurelia. Stop doing things that make me sick."

Sick.

Right. This warped, airless thing I'd done in the name of love.

It was sickening. He wasn't wrong.

I sank to the floor, wrung out, like someone handed back her own life at the last possible second.

Tears still drying at the corners of my eyes, I yanked out my phone.

And hit a register only dogs were meant to hear.

"Mom!"

"You need to get me out of the country. School. Abroad."

"Germany. I want Germany."

Atlas belonged to the heroine. The two of them were a foregone conclusion, and I'd have to have completely lost my mind to throw myself back into that ring and claw at what was theirs.

That's how a girl like me ends up dead.

I had faith. Three years of undergrad in Berlin would be the most unforgettable five, seven, however many years of my life. I'd lost count. That was sort of the point. By the time I surfaced, the leads would be long settled, the story over, and I would not be running a single one of the plays that got that other version of me erased.

Atlas's return put a shot of adrenaline straight into his leaderless team.

The competition mattered. Money was watching it, a lot of money, and every rising name in the field had sharpened its elbows for a shot at funding.

The first day back, the news pushed itself onto my screen.

I looked.

He stood in a sharp, well-cut suit, tall, features cut clean, rimless glasses over a cool, unmistakable intelligence. Nothing like the wreck in the basement.

In the shot, he found the heroine through the churn of the crowd and held her eyes.

Not the way he looked at me, loaded with hate. With her, his gaze was always level. Certain. Like a promise he didn't have to say out loud. I've got this.

Unstoppable. Built for it.

I killed the screen.

In the novel, the basement was only the appetizer. Later, I take a proud, golden boy and grind him down into something dark and unhinged. I break the spine out of him one vertebra at a time, strip him of everything until all he can do is look up at me from the gutter and cling.

By the end, love rots into hate, and I try to run him and everyone he loves off the road.

I rubbed at my aching temple.

That isn't love. That's using a person for target practice and calling it devotion.

No wonder he hated me.

I tightened my grip on the stack of transfer papers I needed stamped at the dean's office, and walked faster.

Atlas.

Berlin was thirty-eight hundred miles from Boston. Six hours ahead.

It was the farthest I could get from you and still have my feet on the same earth.

Chapter 4

Head down, thumbing out a reply to the department head between errands for my transfer paperwork, I walked straight into someone.

I rubbed my forehead and started to apologize.

A soft laugh landed in front of me.

"Well, if it isn't Vale's little childhood sweetheart." A beat. "What are the odds. Running into our boy Vale again."

I looked up, straight into Atlas's eyes. Cold. On guard.

His brow was tight. The hand at his side had closed into a fist. He studied me a long moment, and under the resistance and the disgust there was something else, something I couldn't name.

"Why are you here." Flat. Hard.

Something in my chest dropped. I opened my mouth and still couldn't push his name out of it.

The guy beside him hadn't caught on yet.

"Coincidence? Come on. The way she used to stick to Vale, she practically had a chip on him. Wherever we went, there she was."

They all took it as ribbing.

It went through me like a splinter.

The phone in my hand turned to a live coal. I nearly flung it.

Because there really was a tracker inside it. Live. Tied to Atlas's phone.

Back when the heroine first turned up at his side, the two of them became a matched set, with a whole language I could never break into, a wall built to keep me out. The unease in me grew teeth. And the girl I used to be, the one with the sick, grasping need to own him, had put a tracker on his phone and called every act of spying on him a happy accident. Posted herself at his side. Caged him inside her line of sight. Enjoyed the teasing, even, and staged little moments of fake intimacy in front of the heroine to turn the knife.

The old me would have savored this.

I opened the phone instead.

Found the app. Deleted it right there on the sidewalk, thumb not quite steady, and felt one rotten thread go slack and drop away.

There. One less thing for the villainess to be.

"So why'd you skip our competition this time?" the guy pressed, oblivious. "Don't tell me you two had a fight. You holding overnight grudges now?"

A fight. Sure. Let's call attempted ruin a fight.

The crowd's eyes kept drifting between Atlas and me, reading something romantic into it with truly heroic cluelessness.

Atlas's face went darker by the second.

I let my gaze slide sideways to the heroine.

Ingrid lived up to her face, cool and clean and lovely. The teasing didn't move her an inch. If anything, she watched me back with a flicker of interest.

Of course she did. A real heroine. Unshakable. Miles above scrapping with a villainess.

Strip away the script, though, and I, Aurelia Sinclair, am just a coward.

I was wringing my hands raw, hunting for an exit, when a voice cut in carrying enough swagger for three people.

"Where's Ingrid Holt?"

I turned toward it and nearly went blind off a head of peroxide blond.

The guy had a wild, reckless face and a mean set to his mouth, veins standing out on the hand wrapped around an iron bar. With that bleach job, he was a walking poster for street thug.

Shame.

I shook my head. Pick a fight with the leads, and all you walk away with is a body bag.

Still. Why did he look familiar?

Atlas moved in front of the heroine without a word, eyes cooling.

"What do you want with her."

The thug arched a sharp brow, squared up, and didn't give an inch.

"Got asked to pass her a message."

He bounced the iron bar once in his grip, meaningful, mouth curling.

"Miss Holt. When you're out walking by yourself, you'll want to be careful. Wouldn't want anything to"

Chapter 5

He didn't get to finish.

I came off the ground like a cat with its tail underfoot.

It's him. Of all people.

I went up on my toes, looped an arm around the thug's neck, and clamped a hand over his mouth.

"Sorry, sorry, this is a friend of mine, he's got the wrong person." I smiled, and it felt as guilty as it looked. "We're just going to go catch up."

I turned to bolt.

Atlas caught my wrist.

His gaze stopped for a second on the arm I had wrapped around the thug, then came back to my face. His expression had gone wrong somewhere.

"I didn't know you had a friend like this."

What was his problem?

After the basement, he should hate the air I breathed. Since when did he care who I spent time with?

I lied through my teeth.

"He's new. Met him while you were all off at the competition." I kept going, because stopping felt more dangerous. "I haven't been shadowing you lately, so. You wouldn't know."

"Atlas. You always used to say I should make some friends."

"Well. I made a friend. Aren't you happy?"

I watched him, careful.

Even Atlas had a limit. When my clinging finally wore through his patience, he'd pinch the bridge of his nose, swallow the irritation, and talk me down gently.

Lia. Don't you think you should have a few people in your life who aren't me.

I was leaving. With whatever was left of our time, I wanted, stupidly, for him to look a little less unhappy.

He didn't look happy. He didn't look angry either.

He just took his hand back from my wrist, let it hang at his side, knuckles gone white. His eyes stayed on me, black and bottomless.

Then, without a word, he watched me walk away.

We'd gone a good distance before the thug shook off my grip.

He raked a hand through his wrecked hair.

"Hey. The hell was that about?"

I went for composed.

"Atlas was standing right there. I didn't want you blowing your cover."

Because that was the thing. The thug threatening the heroine was named Dax, and I'd hired him. I paid, he worked.

He listened, and his eyes went half-lidded, dripping contempt.

"Relax. I've got professional standards. You paid, I'm not going to rat on the client."

He bent down, narrowed those sharp eyes, and looked me over like I was something stuck to his shoe.

"What. Miss Sinclair scared?"

He was needling me. The crease between his brows gave him away, all that restlessness underneath.

He needed the money.

Dax lost his parents young, grew up poor, raised by a grandmother who was in a hospital bed now, the kind of bills behind her that back a person into a corner with no doors left.

In the original story, the old me used exactly that. Made him the handiest blade I owned.

And a blade like that doesn't get a soft ending.

He died on a rainy night, cornered and out of road, used up and thrown away, the heroine dragged down into the wreckage with him. For all the soul he sold me, the old me never did lift a finger to save his grandmother.

My chest seized.

I came up out of it like surfacing from a nightmare, weak all over, afraid of that other version of me.

I pulled a card out of my bag.

"This is a million."

Something shifted in his face, a flicker of a sneer, and then his eyes went flat and dark, a struggling, warped kind of thing pressed down beneath them.

His voice dropped, rough.

"A million. That's enough to buy her life."

Chapter 6

I frowned and held up two fingers, very serious.

"No. Two lives."

His brows knit harder.

"I want you to protect Ingrid Holt from here on out. Nothing touches her. Not a scratch."

Ingrid came with the heroine's standard-issue origin kit. A father drowning in gambling debt, a family that had always put the son first and her last, a sick younger brother, and all the breakage that makes.

Think of it as buying her a bodyguard. Call it a down payment on everything the old me put her through.

I pushed the card into the breast pocket of his shirt, fixed him with a glare, and laid down the law.

"As for you. You're going to be a good person now. Out loud, three times a day: I am going to be a decent human being."

"Otherwise."

"I tell your grandmother how her sweet boy used to burn holes in kids' backpacks with a cigarette behind the gym."

"Let's see the choirboy act survive that one."

I watched Dax's face, all that swagger and threat, cycle from red to white and back.

Felt good.

Honestly, being the good guy felt better.

I rubbed at my chest, which still ached, my eyes hot at the rims.

How had I ever done this much harm.

The afternoon hung on hot and gold.

I picked my way down a run-down stretch of dive bars in a thin white dress. The sidewalk tables were half-full, mostly men nursing beers and talking too loud, the jokes turning uglier the later it got.

I could feel eyes on me that I didn't like.

I picked up my pace.

A few turns put me in an alley, and by then the sun was gone and the alley had gone with it, swallowed into the dark. Heavy footsteps started up behind me, closing.

I sped up without meaning to.

A rough hand landed on my shoulder. An oily, slurred laugh crawled into my ear.

"Hey, little thing. Come have a drink with me."

I turned.

A drunk, scar-split face swung into view.

I kept my voice level. "Sir. Assault's a crime."

His grin folded the dark-red flesh of his face into pleats.

"Why put it so ugly. There's no cameras down here."

I let the corner of my mouth lift.

"No cameras? Even better."

"Get him."

For half a second the oily certainty was still on his face. Then a sack dropped out of nowhere over his head, and I watched the predator in him understand, far too late, that he'd walked into the wrong alley. Dax hauled him off balance and put him on the ground, fast and clean, and pinned him there with a knee.

This was Ingrid's father.

A man who'd beaten his wife and daughter for as long as they'd known him, who couldn't stay off the tables, who liked to corner schoolgirls in exactly this kind of alley. Pure human garbage. Lately the gambling debts had climbed high enough that he'd come sniffing after his own daughter, the rising star, trying to force her to sell herself to clear what he owed.

The angrier I got, the harder I drove a kick into his ribs.

"Garbage."

When he finally stopped moving, I dusted off my hands.

"Let's go," I told Dax.

He looked down at the man, eyes gone cold and still.

The recording was already saved. The grab, his face, every word he'd said about the cameras. That clip, stacked on top of the loan sharks he owed and the people he'd been squeezing, was going to be more than enough. Once it reached the right desk at the precinct, Earl Holt's good days were finished.

By the time Dax dropped me back at my dorm, it was deep into the night.

The evening air moved soft and slow.

Atlas was standing under the tree in front of the building.

Chapter 7

He must have been waiting a while. A few stray flower petals had settled on his shoulder.

I caught myself glancing toward where Dax had gone, and something in me went guilty for no reason I wanted to name.

Maybe I imagined it. But there was a grudge sitting in the way Atlas looked at me.

"We're going up to Mount Greylock tomorrow."

Half his face was in the shadow of his own brow when he said it.

I looked up, reading him as carefully as I could. I had no idea how to be around this cold new Atlas.

They say some things, once they break, don't go back together. However good he and I had once been, there was a fault line between us now that would never fully close. If someone had caged and hurt me the way I'd done to him, I wouldn't forgive it either.

It still left a small ache. Fifteen years of history will do that.

I made myself speak.

"Atlas. I know you're still angry with me." I aimed for light. "Don't worry. I'm not going to keep clinging to you anymore"

"Didn't we already make up?"

Under the cold wash of moonlight, his good-looking brows drew together. Like the question honestly confused him.

Made up?

Had we?

Before I could find my footing, he went on.

"We're driving up tomorrow. Camping overnight. You're coming."

Something crossed his face that pulled the frown tighter.

"I set something up for you, too. Someone to talk to."

A specialist?

Did Atlas actually think I'd lost my mind? This was a man who didn't believe in anything he couldn't measure twice, and he'd apparently decided I was malfunctioning and needed a professional to debug me.

I had no answer for him. The script wouldn't let me hand him the truth even if I tried.

In the original, I cried and threw a fit until he agreed to bring me along on that mountain trip. Then I got the heroine lost on the trail and had Dax send her down a slope.

A cold sweat came up the length of my spine. I couldn't stop shaking.

Hurting people is a crime. Hurting people is a crime.

"I'll come get you in the morning."

I shook my head hard enough to blur the world. "I'm not going. I really can't. I've got something."

"What something."

Sweat prickled at my hairline.

"Plans. With a friend."

His steady eyes fixed on mine.

"With Dax."

I was stuck halfway up the horse with no clean way down. Outside of Atlas I barely had friends, and I couldn't conjure another name fast enough, so I gritted my teeth and nodded.

The night wind moved. Tree shadows slid across his face, light and dark and light again.

His voice dropped very low, like he was holding something back by force.

"How do you know Dax."

A beat.

"Miss Sinclair."

The cold in it could have frosted glass.

"What did you have to pay him to get him in your corner like this."

It was the dead heat of summer, and I'd just been dropped into a freezer.

My hands and feet went cold, my blood stiff and slow.

So that was why Atlas had come looking for me. To warn me off. Stay away from Ingrid Holt.

Except I was never going to touch her again.

The face I remembered as warm and easy was a stranger's now, all cold angles, looking down at me without a trace of feeling in it. Every defense I might have made jammed in my throat.

I lost my voice entirely.

"You had Dax follow Ingrid. Wreck the place she works until she lost the job. And now he's threatening her to my face."

"Aurelia. What is it you're actually trying to do."

Chapter 8

The calm he'd been holding finally tore, and it tore over her.

I took a step back without thinking.

He caught my wrist before I got the second one.

"Dax is not a good person. Did he put these ideas in your head?"

I looked into his furious eyes and everything in me went still and wrong. I stared back, lost.

"Atlas. What if I'm just this bad?"

There were moments I couldn't tell anymore. Whether the me in the script and the me standing here were the same person. That was the whole reason I was so desperate to run. Worse than hurting Atlas, worse than hurting Ingrid, was becoming the thing I never wanted to be. Someone with no conscience left.

I breathed out.

"Atlas. Stop worrying about me."

The streetlight threw a yellow wash over his face. I could see the bruised tiredness under his eyes now.

His voice came down heavier.

"What are you doing this for."

"Tomorrow. You're coming with me to apologize to Ingrid. Leave the rest alone. I'll deal with it."

He pressed at the crease between his brows, patience burning down to the wick.

"Lia. Be good."

"I can't keep cleaning up after you forever."

Forever stepping out of your life, I thought, is the actual answer. Not an apology.

I shook his hand off my wrist and lifted a hard, stubborn face to his.

"You know I can't stand Ingrid. Why would you drag me there to apologize?"

"If you don't want to get hurt, then both of you, stay out of my sight for good."

Something in his expression stalled.

"Aurelia. Thirteen days, we haven't seen each other, and this is how you talk to me."

He'd counted them. I held his eyes and made myself mean it.

"Atlas. I don't want to see you again."

The moon sank low. Warm gusts crossed the balcony in waves, carrying the green smell of growing things.

I watched the line of his back get smaller, and sent a voice note while I did it.

"Dad. Don't forget to put money into Atlas's team."

"They're the real thing. Trust me on this."

In the original, I didn't just refuse to back his project. I used every connection the family had to choke it off, and with the Vale family already on the outs with him, his startup clawed forward through one wall after another.

This time I wanted to hand him a clear road.

After that, his road was his and mine was mine.

Pale early light. The leaves stirred and let through the occasional cool breath of air.

Atlas sent a few messages. I didn't answer.

Then the call came.

"Lia. Enough."

That worn-down note in his voice, like I'd been downgraded in his eyes to nothing but a tantrum with legs.

My hand tightened on the phone.

"Atlas. I was very clear yesterday."

He gentled, a fraction.

"You used to fight to come to these. Loudly. If I didn't bring you along, you'd sulk for days."

I had nothing.

The me in the script ran with her possessiveness set too high. The thought of Atlas and Ingrid somewhere I couldn't see, easy and laughing together, used to send me into a spiral, crying, screaming, wanting to level everything. Nobody on his team ever actually liked me. I couldn't blame him for how it wore on him. I hated that version of me too.

"Atlas. I've got things to do today. I'm really not coming."

"It's Saturday. What could you possibly have."

The cold edge came back into it.

Not far off, right on cue, Dax's voice rose.

"Aurelia. Bagel or breakfast sandwich?"

Chapter 9

The air froze for a second or two.

The line went dead in my ear.

I put the phone away and calmly took the breakfast Dax was holding out.

I hadn't lied to Atlas. I really was busy. Busy withdrawing from school. Busy with applications. Busy leaving his world for good.

He was waiting at the dorm, leaning against a black sedan.

Black shirt. The air around him gone cold and sharp.

He took my wrist without asking and folded me into the passenger seat.

The belt tore out of its track with a snap.

His cold hand started at my collarbone, dragged down the center of my chest, and clicked the buckle into place, clean and unhurried. Then it closed hard around the side of my waist and pressed me back into the seat, holding me there like a sentence being carried out.

A shiver went through me before I could stop it. I could still feel the cold track his fingers had left down the center of me, and my breath wouldn't come even, my pulse loud enough that I was sure he could feel it under his palm.

His face was an inch from mine. Black eyes locked onto mine, close enough that I could read the anger he kept leashed under that heavy brow. His throat moved once.

"Aurelia. Behave."

The door shut.

My heart was still slamming when the car pulled away.

Mount Greylock.

I trailed at the back of the group, well behind everyone, and picked a wildflower to tear the petals off of, sulking.

A bottle of water appeared in front of my face.

I looked up. Atlas, fair skin, a faint shine of sweat at his hairline catching the light in little broken pieces. His face was cold, and it still couldn't quite cover the worry underneath.

"What is it."

I softened my voice and begged.

"Atlas. I can't walk anymore." I went for pitiful. "Can I just rest at that pavilion up there and wait for you all to come back down?"

Greylock barely counts as a climb. I had the decency to feel a little caught out.

Atlas paused. We'd been fighting nonstop lately, and it had been a long time since we'd said anything kind to each other. When my edges softened, so did his.

He crouched down in front of me.

"Get on." Clipped. Simple.

I startled back a step.

When I didn't move, he turned his head, frowning.

"You always used to let me carry you up when you got tired."

I had nothing to say to that.

Atlas had been so good to me. From the time we were small, anything I wanted, I only had to say it and he'd put it in my hands. When I messed up, he was the one who stepped in front of me to take it. He'd spoiled me past the point of sense, which was exactly how I grew a possessive grip on being loved like that, like it was mine and no one else's.

At the clearing on the summit, everyone got busy with tents and the grill.

I drifted away from the group, meaning to walk by myself.

I was deep into a dense stand of tall trees, the undergrowth thick around me, before I realized Ingrid had followed.

She didn't have much of a face for me, but she held out a bottle of bug spray anyway.

"Wandering off alone just makes trouble for everyone."

I took it, a little stunned by the kindness. "Thank you."

"Atlas couldn't get away from the tent. He sent me to keep an eye on you." She turned to go, then stopped. "We already talked it through, him and me. After graduation, we go our separate ways. You don't have to keep treating me like a threat."

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

It was like a current ripped down every nerve I had. The pain of it was unbearable, the agitation climbing, and somewhere under it her words started to sound like something she was showing off.

Like something else had taken the wheel.

My hand lifted toward the hem of her shirt.

Trees walled us in on every side, blotting out the sky. The ground fell away into a steep slope at her feet.

One push, and she'd go over.

By the time Atlas found her, she might already be cold.

Chapter 10