The Damaged (The Insiders Trilogy #2) - Tijan by Tijan

Fleur was the spokesperson. “We can see where we’re not welcome.”

“No! Stay!” Melissa tried, a friendly smile there, because bless her, she wasn’t jaded like the rest of us. That made my heart ache.

Melissa shouldn’t be here. Not in this club. Not at this booth. Not with these people.

Torie and Tamara knew the score. They could handle themselves. But Melissa was bright and light and innocent. Fleur turned to her, her gaze locking on, giving Melissa another once-over. “I don’t think so. They just let anyone in here now, don’t they.”

Enough!

A switch was flipped in me, and I’d had it.

“Why do you still come around? If you’re here, you look miserable. Every time. I’ve never seen you smile.”

She flinched as if I’d slapped her.

Cedar waded in. “Maybe it’s because you joined the group.” She sent a scathing look at the guys. “And trust me, we smile plenty when you’re not around.”

I shifted, leaning closer. “Really? Because I could get the security vid. I could look for the past hour or however long you’ve been here, and I’m pretty sure you had the same piss-ass look on your face the whole time. Do you even like these guys? Why are you really here?” I skimmed the guys with a look. “Is it because of their connections?”

Melissa’s eyes were huge this whole time, and at the mention of “connections,” she visibly swallowed. I watched in real time as she realized she was no longer in a safe crowd. I hated seeing it. We weren’t surrounded by our classmates, guys who adored her and secretly would jump at the chance to date her. It wasn’t even how it’d been at the biker bar or the pub before that. Torie and Tamara were good people, but they got where they were by crawling and climbing up by their own nails.

Melissa was a puppy that had somehow found herself in the middle of a pack of rottweilers. Three of them were foaming at their mouths.

I was one of them.

I felt it in my bones then. I smelled it in the air. I could see myself from an outside perspective on our group. I hadn’t been one of them this summer, but now I was.

I’d lost that puppy innocence. Then again, maybe I never actually had it?

“Are you seriously giving us shit because we don’t smile enough?” Fleur snapped at me.

“It’s not the smile. It’s the fact you sit here with the guys and you act like you hate every second of it. You’re leaving with a snide comment that’s a dig at my friend, but mostly me, and I just can’t help wonder why you even care?”

I felt a presence behind me. He was coming in, and fast, and a second later, a body was pressed against my side. An arm was draped over my shoulder, and I heard Melissa suck in her breath on the other side of me.

Matt drawled, his head leaning down to grin at Fleur and Cedar, “Ladies. My sis has a good point. You used to put out, at least. Now you know not one of us is going to marry you, you both act like you got permanent sticks wedged up your asses.”

Cedar hissed, “Matt!”

He looked at her. “We’ve had years of friendship, so I get why you’re sticking around. It’s what you do. What you’ve always done, but winds changed this summer when I learned I have a sister. You still want to remain in the group, get with the program and stop being such a bitch.”

Fleur’s eyes narrowed to slits. Her smile turned acid and she stepped in close to us, her voice lowering, but we were able to still hear. “That’s funny. Kashton asked Victoria for lunch tomorrow.” She focused on me.

Kash and Victoria. Lunch.

Bile rose up in my throat.

It was a slightly intimate setting. Lunch could stand for so many other things. Lunch with a friend. Lunch with an enemy. A business lunch. But those words coming out of Fleur’s mouth, with the malice in her gaze … I knew this lunch wasn’t just nothing.

It meant something.

A wave of sickness washed over me.

“Kashton loved Victoria.” She cocked her head to the side, her smile almost turning pitying.

That was the worst part. Her sympathy.

“Kash used to be almost obsessed with her. They dated, you know. They had a good thing going between the two of them. Vic thought for a while he was going to propose. They were like that. No matter who’s come after her, it’s always been her. Kash knows it. Vic knows it. Everyone in our group knows it. You think we hang around the guys for nothing? No, Bailey. We hang around because no matter how many Discard Girls there are, there’s only us and the guys. That’s how it is with our families. This society. It’s pretty small up here. Sometime down the line, each of us will marry one of them, and if not them, then another like them. Some things don’t change after all.”

She was lying.

Had to be.

I was thinking. I was remembering. Those girls weren’t the same as the others.

But no. Not Kash. Not Victoria.

I wanted to vomit, and my chest felt like it was being ripped open by two bare hands, and every breath I took in was laced with arsenic.

I wasn’t just feeling sick. I was really going to be sick.

She and Cedar strolled down the walkway and I tried to hold it in. I did.

It was going to spew out of me, so clamping a hand over my mouth, I started to take off.

A hand clasped my arm. “This way.” Torie was pulling me from Matt. She saw what was happening, and she was dragging me behind the VIP booth, to a door I never knew was there. She knocked on it, looked up at a corner, and the door opened a second later. We were through into a dark hallway, but there was a restroom right there. A bright red neon sign hanging over it.