“How long are we to keep up this charade?” Trinity asks as I watch my boys pile duffel bags onto their shoulders and boxes in their arms. I pick up and hold nothing. I’m not dating five muscular men to move shit around. I flip my hair and follow after Trinity, noticing that the few students out at this early hour keep their eyes averted and their chins down.

Good for them. Smart choice. I light a cigarette even as Trinity seethes and her skin ripples with hatred.

“Smoking is a filthy habit,” she tells me, as if she thinks I give a flying fuck.

“Some people might say fucking your half-brother is a filthy habit, but I try not to judge.” I shrug my shoulders as her perfect jaw tenses with rage and she leads us down a narrow path between the student dorms and the staff apartments, taking a door on the left instead of the one on the right. Close enough though. The old buildings are practically within arm’s length of one another.

It takes a keycard to get into the apartment which I appreciate. Also, it looks like said keycard system is newly installed—probably thanks to us and our breach of the student dorms after Donald Asher. My turn to shiver with hatred as I smoke my cigarette like I own this damn place, following Trinity through a posh lounge area that’s blissfully empty at this time. The smoking thing won’t work in front of the regular staff; they won’t know about Havoc’s little arrangement with the schoolboard.

I’m going to have to, like, actually pretend to study and shit while I’m here.

“As for your previous question, we’ll keep up this ‘charade’ until Victor and I have been married a full year and he gets his inheritance. You’ve only got nine months left to wait, lucky you.”

“And how am I supposed to find assurance in that? Once you’ve gotten what you want, what stops you from spilling my secret?” Trinity glances over her shoulder as we pause in front of an elevator. Wow. A building with an elevator. Most definitely not something you find in south Prescott or, if you do, you wouldn’t get on it if you were smart. “What stops Ophelia? If she finds out that I’m … helping you …” Trinity pauses for a moment to let out a sharp, angry exhale. “Then she could very well talk to my father. What then?”

“God, you’re annoying,” I murmur as the elevator doors ding open and we squeeze inside together, the boys forming a wall of muscle and ink across the front. Trinity instructs Cal to hit the button for the eleventh floor and up we go. “Look, we have plans for Ophelia. Does that help? I wouldn’t worry about her.”

“It’s you that I’m worried about,” Trinity tells me as I glance over and find her creepy pale brown eyes studying me. They’re the color of a brown recluse or a puddle of mud diluted with water. At least, that’s how I perceive them. Maybe when James Barrasso gazed into his sister/fuckbuddy’s brown eyes, he saw something entirely different. Too bad I had to gouge his eyes out with my thumbs. Does Trinity know exactly how he met his end? I’m guessing not.

“Once we have our money, we won’t give a fuck what happens to you, princess,” I drawl, stabbing my cigarette out on the front of her book bag and watching as her teeth grind together in a rare show of frustration. Trinity schools her expression again with a monumental amount of effort.

“Why don’t you keep asking prying questions?” Oscar suggests, and then I notice in the mirrored walls as he puts his revolver up against the side of Trinity’s skull. She returns his stare in the very same mirror, body going completely still. There are cameras all over this fucking school but, incidentally, there are none inside the elevator.

A dark zone.

Good to know.

Trinity says nothing and Oscar puts his weapon away just in time for the doors to slide open with a pleasant ding. We file out into the posh hallway and my skin crawls with the wrongness of it. The marble floors, the textured wallpaper, the light fixtures with the stained glass. This isn’t where I belong, where any of us belongs.

But, if anything, Prescott kids are masters of adaptation.

That’s what we have to do now, adapt.

I keep my inuring social commentary to myself for the time being as Trinity shoulders her way between the boys and leads us down the hall to the first door on the right. She unlocks the door with a keycard that Oscar immediately whips out of her fingers.

“How do we know you don’t have other copies of this?” he inquires, hitting the corner of the plastic card against the door of the apartment as Trinity pushes it open, her brown eyes blazing. Looks like there really is a limit to what she’ll take.

“You don’t know, and there’s no way for me to make that assurance—in the same manner that you can’t convince me you won’t turn like rabid dogs after collecting on the inheritance.” Trinity walks into the middle of the apartment and pauses, turning to face us with a frown etched onto what she probably hopes people think are nude lips. But I know better. I know all about Oak Valley Prep girls and their obsession with caking makeup on their faces in just such a way that it looks like they’re wearing nothing at all.

Oscar flicks the card onto a stone countertop as the boys dump boxes and bags in the middle of the room and Hael, Cal, and Aaron move into adjoining bedrooms for a quick sweep. This is a ‘family apartment’ meant for on-site staff who have children or spouses or other relatives living with them. It’s about size of Aaron’s house except it’s all on one level and furnished with beige and gray and linen and leather. A wall of windows opposite the door looks out onto the Oak Valley campus. To my left, there’s a kitchenette with appliances that look too fancy to be used. Beside that, a short hallway that Aaron’s currently disappeared down, and two doors—one of which looks to be a bathroom, the other a bedroom.

“You have an hour to get accommodated and changed into your uniforms.” Trinity points a slender finger at a pile of garment bags on the smaller of the two sofas. “If anything needs to be adjusted, the on-campus tailor—”

I let out a snort and her wicked eyes trail over to mine as Vic leans a muscular shoulder against the panes of floor-to-ceiling glass.

“On-campus tailor,” I repeat with a harsh, mocking laugh as Oscar moves over to the pile of uniforms and checks the sizes on each bag before separating them into piles. “Of course. Do go on.”

“You’re crass and uncultured,” Trinity spits back at me, flipping her golden hair over her shoulder and closing her eyes like she desperately needs a moment to gather herself together. “You will never fit in here.”

I touch a hand to my chest and make a sweet moue of feigned disappointment.

“Aw, you think so?” I query back, resisting the violent and unyielding urge to grab that fine, gold hair of hers in a fist and throw her against the wall until it’s streaked with blood. “That’s so sweet of you.”

With another huff of frustration, Trinity spins and heads for the door of the apartment.

“I’ll meet you in the downstairs lobby in an hour,” she sneers, wrenching the door open and disappearing into the hallway. It slams shut on its own behind her and Oscar moves over to examine the locks.

“Keycards are too easily manipulated,” he says, testing the deadbolt. “We’ll get our own locks, ones that can’t be hacked. A combination that can’t be picked.”