Brutal Boy by Selena
three
Royal Dolce
“Dude, she’s not here today,” Duke says, elbowing my arm and making me drop my sandwich, which falls all to pieces on my plate.
“What the fuck,” I say, pushing back from the table.
“Want me to get you another sandwich?” asks the freshman girl who brought my first one.
“Sure, whatever,” I say, barely sparing her a glance before she scurries off to serve me like I’m a fucking king. I don’t even remember her name. I never cared about any of them. Baron chooses the girls. I’m sure my brothers will fuck her if they haven’t already. She’s pretty and blond and wears no makeup, but I wouldn’t care if she was a fucking Kardashian.
I glower at the empty chair at the table where the nosy bitches sit. If she’s out talking to Colt under the bleachers again…
“You hitting that on the DL or what?” Cotton asks.
I turn to him, satisfied by the way he stiffens, even though he pretends he’s not afraid of me. “Who?”
“You’re not exactly being subtle,” Gloria says. “You’ve been glaring at her table like you want to murder the whole lot of them for the entire lunch break.”
Everyone else at the table stops to listen. I’m so fucking sick of them all watching, waiting, like they’re just here to see what I’ll do next. Waiting for me to snap. I’m sick of being the boy who was kidnapped, the boy who might castrate you if you cross him. The boy who killed his sister. Everyone has an opinion. Like Baron says, you can’t stop them from talking. You can only turn the conversation in your favor, if you’re clever.
“Well, where the fuck is she?” I demand of Lo, as if it’s her fault that Harper isn’t here. As if she’s the one who made sure Harper would never feel anything but hate for me again, and not the girl who went to check on her for me when I couldn’t do it without ruining everything.
“The real question is, why does it matter?” Baron asks.
“Yeah,” DeShaun says. “You do you, man, but don’t leave us in the dark.”
Right. They’re all looking to me, waiting for me to put in the final word on Harper. They’ve been waiting all week for their QB1 to call the play. If I say she’s off limits, no one will lay a finger on her. If I say she’s the enemy, they’ll destroy her. If I say she’s cancelled, no one will ever speak to her again.
It’s fucking ridiculous. Sometimes I want to tell them all to jump off the bridge just to see if they’re really a bunch of fucking lemmings.
But they’re my boys, and I’m being an asshole. I need to give them something.
I did what I did, and I can’t be sorry about it. If I didn’t make her hate me, I’d be tempted to do something I can never do, or never undo, I’m not sure which. Maybe both. When she’s in my head, nothing makes sense. All I know is that I had to get her out of there, and if I couldn’t, I had to make her hate me enough to take herself out of the picture.
“She’s done,” I say. “We’re done with her. She’s nothing.”
“Then you won’t care about this,” Lo says, sliding her phone across the table to me.
On the screen is one of the social media accounts of the meddling, Darling-worshipping bitch Dixie Powell. Not her blog, but Rumor Has It, one where she posts little gossipy tidbits throughout the day for vultures like the Waltons to pick up and spread like a disease. If Baron didn’t remind me on a regular basis of her usefulness as an instrument that helps us stay where we are, I would destroy her life with more enjoyment than I would a Darling. I fucking hate Dixie and everything she stands for.
Rumor Has It… a notorious loner boy and a girl who’s gained sudden notoriety this week were seen leaving campus together before school. Have these two lonely souls found a friend in each other, or is it something more?
My blood boils as I read the post. It was posted only two minutes ago, but I see people bent over their phones, eating up her gossip like it’s ice cream and not dog shit. I see her basking in the glow of admiration at her table, eating that shit up as eagerly as everyone around her is eating up her idiotic, uncreative words.
In a few weeks, no one will care what Harper’s doing. But this week, she’s in the spotlight, and Dixie’d be damned before she’d miss out on an opportunity to insert herself in the drama. She’s a master at grabbing the headlines, keeping her finger on the pulse of the school, and using it to her advantage. The only person better at it than Dixie Powell is my brother.
That’s not why I hate her, though. I hate her because she inserted herself into my family’s life, because she used her friendship with Crystal to her advantage. I hate her because she encouraged my sister to pursue things with a Darling, because she helped her sneak around, and then my sister ended up dead while Dixie played the grieving best friend. I hate her because she used the sympathy to build a platform for herself, because she is now popular by association with the tragedy that is my fucking family.
And I hate her because she’d sell out the guy she supposedly loves and the girl whose empty chair is two spots down at her own table just for five minutes of attention.
When she gets up to go to her Friday meeting, I follow. She’s scurrying down the hall when I step out of the café, but my stride is twice as long as hers, and it takes me no time to catch up to her. I grab her shoulder and spin her around, slamming her up against the lockers.
Her eyes widen, darting around as she licks her lips, and for a second, she looks like that freckly little freshman I dismissed as harmless back then. I should have seen her for the snake she is. “Hey, Royal,” she says, a tremor in her voice.
I brace my hands on the locker on either side of her, caging her in. “Where’d you get that bullshit you just posted?”
“It’s not bullshit,” she says. “And I can’t reveal my sources. People would stop coming to me with information if I ratted them out.”
Footsteps echo in the hall behind me. I don’t have to turn to know who followed.
“You are a rat. You’ve built your little empire of shit on it.” I speak slowly, so her little brain can comprehend. “You can cover it with glitter and call yourself a gossip girl, but it’s still shit, and you’re still a rat. So spill it or admit you fabricated the whole thing to get attention.”
“I didn’t make it up,” she insists, her eyes widening when she takes in my posse behind me. They’re not all here, but enough of them followed me to threaten her reputation if I say something in front of them.
I know I’ve got her. I have more power in this school than she does, though I’m a monster partly of her making. But she knows I can destroy her with a single word. I can tell everyone her posts are not authentic, that she’s making shit up, and their trust in her will evaporate overnight. At the end of the day, she’s more worried about her reputation, about me exposing her as a fraud, than she is about protecting her sources.
“You already know you’re going to tell him,” Duke says, leaning on the locker beside her with a bored expression on his face.
“Okay, okay,” she says, lifting a hand to stop us from going on. “I’ll message you his name. I don’t want to say it in front of all these people.”
I lean down until I’m almost nose to nose with the bitch. I can see her pulse racing on the side of her neck. I want to wrap my hands around and squeeze until her eyes pop out of her head. “Cut the pretense and get it over with before this becomes more unpleasant for both of us. You know your face makes me sick.”
“A sophomore coming in late saw them leaving in Colt’s Denali,” she says in a rush.
“When?”
“Like, five minutes into first period. That’s all I know. I swear.”
I push away from her, but Baron leans in to have the last word. “You think you’re high up on the food chain, but you’re a scavenger,” he says to her. “You’re lucky the ecosystem needs scavengers to survive, or the apex predators would eat your ass for breakfast.”
She nods mutely, then scurries off down the hall, glancing back over her shoulder like she thinks we might follow. She should know we don’t chase snakes. If we wanted more, we would have gotten it already.
When she’s gone, I turn to my crew. “Why the fuck is she with Colt?” I demand.
“Maybe because you were an unforgivable asshole to her, and he’s not?” Lo volunteers.
I stare her down until she shrugs and drops her gaze. She’s not wrong. That’s exactly why. Wasn’t that the entire purpose of what we did to her? She needs to know who we are, that she can’t fuck with us, that she needs to stay out of our way. But she also needs to obey, and I told her to stay away from Colt Darling.
“Is it just because she’s with Colt?” Baron asks, narrowing his eyes at me. “Or because she’s with anyone?”
“You just told everyone she was nothing,” Duke points out. “I get why you’re pissed about Colt, but if she’s nothing, you wouldn’t care if I fucked her, right?”
I swing around and glare at him. “Don’t. Touch. Her.”
“Got it,” he says. “But you might want to tell the guys because they’re all back there talking about running a train on her at the next party.”
My fists clench involuntarily, and I glare at my brother. For whatever reason, Harper is my challenge. She fucked with the wrong guy, and now it’s personal. Now, it’s my job to break her. Maybe I finally did, and she won’t come waltzing through the doors on Monday morning like none of it affects her because she’s above it all. Maybe she won’t walk around all day like she doesn’t care that she knelt for me after all that talk about how she never would, like she doesn’t care that the whole school knows she’s trash who sucks off old guys in shitty cars in parking lots.
But I don’t think so. I think she’s with Colt because she knows it pisses me off. Because she’s showing me that despite what we did, we can never control her. That she’ll do whatever the fuck she pleases, no matter what we do to her.
She has no idea what she’s asking for.
I could let my brothers at her. Sometimes, they’re such psychos that they even scare me. But no. She’s not theirs to destroy. Not even my brothers get Harper. They had Mabel. This one is mine. This time, I’ll do the dirty work. I’ll make her suffer, and I’ll savor every moment of it. And when she breaks, when those walls around her shatter like glass, I’ll crawl inside and eat out her soul like it can replace the one I lost two years ago.
