Married to a Bully.

~ 1

~ 1

~ Lynn ~

The graduation cap hit the back of my head before I even heard the laughter.

I didn't turn around. After three years at Ravencrest High School, I'd learned that turning around only gave them the satisfaction of seeing your face.

"Sorry!" a voice sang behind me — too sweet, too deliberate. Vanessa Quinn. I'd know that honeyed poison anywhere.

I kept walking, hugging my books tighter against my chest, chin level, eyes forward. That was the only armor I had in a place like this — the appearance of not caring, even when everything inside me was caving.

Ravencrest wasn't a school. It was a kingdom, and everyone here knew exactly where they stood in it. The children of old money sat at the top — untouchable, golden, and cruel in the effortless way that only the truly privileged could manage. Then there were the new rich, desperate to prove they belonged. And then there was me.

Lynnette Hawthorne. Scholarship student. The principal's pity project. The girl whose grandmother sold fish at the local market.

I had spent three years being invisible when it suited them and a target when it didn't.

Today was supposed to be the last day of all that.

The graduation hall buzzed with the kind of joy I couldn't access — cameras flashing, confetti spinning down like colored snow, parents in expensive perfume pressing their children into hugs. Everyone was crying and laughing at the same time, the way people do when something is ending and they're sad and relieved all at once.

I was just relieved.

I pressed myself toward the edge of the crowd, looking for a quiet wall to hold up until my name was called. That was my entire plan for today. Survive the ceremony. Collect my certificate. Disappear forever.

Then I felt it — that particular prickling at the back of my neck that I had learned to recognize over three years.

I looked up without meaning to.

Ryker Vaughn was standing across the hall.

He wasn't doing anything dramatic. He was just standing there in his graduation gown, one hand in his pocket, laughing at something Zane Carter, his best friend had said. But he was the kind of person whose presence rearranged the air in a room. Tall, effortlessly put together, with that sharp jaw and those dark brown eyes that always looked like they were calculating something.

For exactly two seconds, his gaze drifted across the room and landed on me.

My breath caught.

Then he looked away. Straight through me, like I was part of the wall. Like I was nothing.

I exhaled slowly.

That was Ryker Vaughn in a nutshell — the boy who had spent three years making my life miserable, and still somehow made my stupid heart trip every single time he accidentally looked in my direction. I hated him. I hated myself more for the way my pulse behaved around him.

Get it together, Lynn.

"And now," the principal's voice cut through the noise, sharp and proud, "let's hear from our student body president — Lynnette Hawthorne."

Polite applause. A few soft boos woven in just to remind me where I stood.

I made my way toward the stage, keeping my breathing even. I had written this speech three times. I knew every word. I just had to get through it without falling apart in front of people who would absolutely screenshot it.

I was on the second step when my foot caught something solid.

I pitched forward, arms flying, and hit the stage floor hard on my palms. The laughter was instant — sharp and collective, the kind that has been waiting for exactly this moment.

"Oops." Vanessa's voice floated down from behind me, soft as silk. "Didn't see your foot there."

My palms stung. My cheeks burned hotter. I pushed myself up slowly, refusing to rush, refusing to give them the pleasure of watching me scramble.

When I finally stood and turned to face the crowd, my eyes found Ryker without my permission.

He was leaning back in his chair, arm draped lazily around Vanessa's empty seat, watching me with that cold half-smile. He didn't laugh. He didn't shout anything. He just watched, like I was mildly entertaining. Like I was a small, predictable thing that had done exactly what he expected.

Somehow that was worse than the laughter.

"Come on, Lynn — you've got this!"

Adam. My best friend's voice cut through the noise from the front row, warm and steady, an anchor in the middle of a storm. He was grinning at me, his eyes full of the kind of quiet encouragement that had gotten me through three years of this place.

I straightened. Picked up the microphone.

"My name is Lynnette Hawthorne," I began, my voice shakier than I wanted but loud enough to carry. "And we have all come a very long way to get here."

I didn't look at Ryker again.

I gave the speech. Every word, every pause, exactly as I'd rehearsed. When I stepped back from the podium, my hands were still trembling, but I had done it. Three years of surviving Ravencrest, and I had done it.

I was almost off the stage when a hard shove caught my shoulder.

"Make way, President," Zane muttered, laughing as he pushed past me like I was a door.

I steadied myself against the podium, jaw tight.

Then Ryker stepped up beside him, reaching past me for the microphone like I wasn't standing right there. His arm brushed mine — brief, warm, and completely indifferent.

"Who's ready to party?" he shouted into the mic.

The hall erupted.

Vanessa appeared at his side instantly, sliding her hands around his neck and pulling him into a kiss that the crowd screamed over. I turned away before I could see more of it, pressing through the bodies toward the exit.

Adam found me near the doors, his face bright. "Hey — there's an afterparty tonight. Lakeshore Club. Come with me."

"Absolutely not."

"Lynn."

"Adam, that place will be wall-to-wall people who just watched me eat the stage floor."

He laughed softly. "And you'll walk in tonight looking so good they'll all forget about it. Come on." His voice dropped, quieter now, more honest. "I don't want to go alone. You're my person in this school. You've always been."

That was the part that got me. It always was with Adam.

I sighed. "Fine. One hour."

His grin widened. "That's my girl."

"Don't say it like that."

He was already walking backward toward a group of friends, laughing. "Don't be late!"

I watched him disappear into the crowd and stood there for a moment in the thinning hall, certificate in hand, the noise fading around me.

Three years of this place, and tonight was the last impression I would ever make on any of them.

If I was going out, I was going out like I meant it.

~ 2

~ 2

~ Lynn ~

My bestfriend, Brielle Knox had a gift for arriving exactly when she was needed most.

I was standing in front of the cracked mirror in my bedroom, holding a faded pink dress against my body for the third time as if it would somehow look different, when the front door burst open and she walked in like the answer to a prayer I hadn't finished praying.

"Put that down," she said, not even breaking stride, dropping her bag onto my bed with the confidence of someone who lived here. "I'm not letting you walk into that party looking like you're going to a church picnic."

"Hello to you too, Brielle."

"Hello." She was already unzipping her bag. "Now put it down."

I dropped the dress onto the bed and watched her rummage through what appeared to be half her wardrobe stuffed into one tote. Brielle wasn't rich either — not even close — but she had a talent for looking expensive that I had never been able to reverse-engineer, no matter how many times I studied her.

"I wasn't even sure I was going," I said.

"You're going." She didn't look up. "Adam called me."

"Of course he did."

She pulled out a gold dress and held it up. The fabric shimmered even in the dim light of my bedroom, catching what little the cracked bulb overhead had to offer. It was short. Very short. The kind of short that made a statement before you even opened your mouth.

I stared at it. "Absolutely not."

"Absolutely yes." She pushed it into my hands. "Try it on before you finish that sentence."

I looked at Grandma, who was sitting in the corner chair watching us with that soft, patient smile she wore when she already knew how things were going to end.

"It's a little short," Grandma offered gently.

Brielle winked at her. "That's the point, Ma."

Grandma pressed her lips together, trying not to smile. She failed.

I took the dress to the bathroom.

Ten minutes later I stood in front of the mirror and barely recognized myself. The gold caught my skin tone in a way that the faded pinks and tired blues of my wardrobe never had. It skimmed my figure, hit mid-thigh, and made my legs look longer than I knew they were. Brielle had also produced, from some bottomless corner of her bag, a pair of barely-worn nude heels in exactly my size.

I came out slowly.

Brielle looked up from where she was perched on my bed painting her nails and went completely still for exactly one second.

Then she screamed.

"Lynn!" She launched herself off the bed. "I knew it. I knew it. You've been hiding this whole time!"

"I'm not hiding anything, I just—"

"Hold still." She was already reaching for my hair, gathering it up with practised hands, twisting it into something effortless at the nape of my neck. She slid a small gold clip in and stepped back to look at her work. "Ryker Vaughn is going to swallow his tongue."

"Brielle—"

"I'm just stating facts."

"He doesn't even see me as a person."

She met my eyes in the mirror, and for just a moment, the teasing fell away. Her voice came out quieter, more certain. "Then tonight he will."

I looked at my reflection for a long moment. The girl looking back at me didn't look like the scholarship student. Didn't look like the girl who had eaten the stage floor a few hours ago while Ravencrest laughed. She looked like someone who had decided something.

Maybe that was enough to walk through the door on.

Grandma appeared in the doorway, her eyes moving over me slowly. She was quiet for a moment in the way she got sometimes — the way that meant she was seeing someone else in me, someone I never got to know.

"You look just like your mother," she said softly.

My throat tightened. I crossed the room and hugged her before she could see my face do anything embarrassing. She smelled like the sea and fish and everything that was home, and I held on a beat longer than I meant to.

"I'll be back before midnight," I whispered.

She kissed my cheek. "Be safe, my girl. And hold your head up in there — you hear me? All the way up."

…

The cab ride was quiet except for the radio and the sound of my own pulse.

I had spent my last money on the fare because there was no version of this dress and this night that involved a bus. The driver kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror and I kept my eyes on the window, watching the streets change — gradually, noticeably — from the narrow roads of our neighborhood to the wide, lamp-lit avenues of the part of town where my classmates actually lived.

When the Lakeshore Club came into view, I felt the gap between our worlds like a physical thing.

The building glowed gold under string lights, luxury cars lined the curved driveway, and music pulsed through the walls like a second heartbeat. Beautifully dressed people moved in and out of the tall glass entrance like they had been born knowing how to exist in places like this.

I paid the driver, stepped out, and stood on the pavement for a moment.

‘You could go home,’ said the voice in my head that sounded like three years of being laughed at.

‘Hold your head up,’ said Grandma's voice, quieter but steadier.

I chose Grandma.

I walked in.

The heat hit me first — warm air thick with expensive perfume, alcohol, and the particular energy of a crowd that had been waiting all year to let loose. Gold light poured from chandeliers overhead, music shook the floor beneath my heels, and everywhere I looked there were my classmates, unrecognizable in their best clothes, finally free and celebrating like they knew it.

I moved through the crowd looking for Adam, keeping my expression neutral, my chin level the way Grandma had told me.

I didn't find Adam.

I found Ryker Vaughn instead.

He was standing near the bar, a glass held loosely in one hand, black shirt fitted in a way that should have been illegal. His hair was slightly dishevelled — not messy, just effortlessly undone — and he was half-laughing at something Zane had said, head tilted back, completely at ease in the way that only people who have never had to earn their place anywhere manage to be.

Then he looked up.

Our eyes met across the crowd and something shifted — the noise, the music, the hundred bodies between us — all of it seemed to drop back a register. His gaze moved over me slowly, just once, in a way that was completely different from the way he had looked through me at graduation. Or rather, the way he hadn't looked at me at all.

He looked now.

I felt it everywhere.

Then Zane followed his line of sight, found me, and bit his lower lip in an exaggerated way that made my skin crawl. "Damn! Hot!," he said, loud enough to carry.

Laughter rippled around them.

And just like that the moment was over, punctured and mocking like everything always was at Ravencrest.

Vanessa appeared at Ryker's side a half-second later — radar precise, as always. Her eyes found me, swept over the gold dress, and something flickered behind her perfect face. Not quite insecurity. More like the particular irritation of someone who had decided a thing was beneath her and was now being forced to reconsider.

She slid both hands around Ryker's neck and kissed him slowly, deliberately, with the full awareness of an audience.

I turned away before I had to watch more of it.

I wove through the crowd until I found a quieter corner behind a cluster of chatting students, pressed my back against the wall, and pulled out my phone. The screen was cracked across one corner and it overheated if you used it too long, but it was mine.

I typed quickly: Where are you?

I watched the screen, waiting.

The reply came faster than I expected, but it wasn't what I wanted to read.

I'm so sorry, Lynn. Dad just got into town. We're talking about me studying abroad — Switzerland. I'll call you later, I promise.

I read it twice.

Then I read it a third time, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less final.

He wasn't coming.

I was alone in a room full of people who had spent three years making me feel like I didn't belong here — in a dress that wasn't mine, on borrowed confidence, at a party I never wanted to attend in the first place.

And Adam was talking about Switzerland.

Switzerland.

I was still processing what that meant — for tonight, for after tonight, for the strange future shape of a life without my only friend in it — when Zane Carter climbed onto a table in the centre of the hall and the music dropped.

"Doors are closing!" he roared, arms wide, bottle raised. "It's game time!"

The crowd surged and screamed toward the centre. I craned my neck toward the entrance and my stomach dropped — two large men had positioned themselves at the doors, arms crossed, expressions flat.

I looked back at my phone.

Adam's message was still there.

I'll call you later, I promise.

"We're starting with Truth or Dare!" Zane announced, and the room detonated.

I pressed further into my corner and closed my eyes for exactly three seconds.

I should have never come.

~ 3

~ 3

~ Lynn ~

The Truth or Dare circle formed the way disasters do — quickly, and with everyone's full enthusiasm.

Zane ran it like a ringmaster who had been waiting all year for his moment. He stood on the table at the centre of the hall, bottle in one hand, microphone in the other, conducting the crowd with the particular energy of someone who had never once faced a consequence in his life.

I stayed in my corner.

That was my entire strategy — stay small, stay quiet, stay invisible until the doors opened again and I could slip out into the night and pretend this had never happened. I was good at invisible. I had been practising it for three years.

I kept my eyes on my phone, scrolling through nothing, the cracked screen warm under my thumb. Around me the game churned through its early rounds — harmless confessions, embarrassing dares, the usual theatre of people performing for each other. Someone admitted to a crush on the class nerd. Someone else was dared to chug a full cup in under five seconds. The crowd screamed for all of it.

I watched from the edge and felt nothing except the quiet, persistent ache of Adam's message still sitting in my chest.

Switzerland.

I turned the word over in my mind for the hundredth time. It wasn't just a country. It was a distance that didn't close easily. It was the specific kind of leaving that changed the shape of things permanently, and Adam was the only person in this school who had ever made me feel like I had a right to take up space.

Without him, what exactly had these three years been for?

I was deep enough in my own head that I almost missed it when the energy in the room shifted.

It started as a change in pitch — the crowd's noise sharpening from general excitement into something more focused, more electric. I looked up from my phone.

Ryker Vaughn had leaned forward in his chair.

"Truth," he said, his voice carrying easily across the hall without any effort at all. That was the thing about Ryker — he never had to try. The room just arranged itself around him.

Zane's grin stretched slow and wide. "What do you actually feel for Vanessa?"

The crowd held its breath collectively.

Vanessa was already smiling — a carefully composed smile, the kind that was ready to be seen. She sat perfectly straight, her blonde curls catching the light, performing the role of girlfriend with the ease of long practice. She already knew what he was going to say. She was just waiting to receive it gracefully.

Ryker tilted his head slightly.

"She's got good energy," he said, pausing just long enough to let the room lean in. "And I like her body."

The reaction was immediate and savage — gasps, shouts, someone knocking over a drink. Zane threw his head back laughing. A group near the front started chanting something I couldn't make out over the noise.

Vanessa's smile didn't fall. It cracked — just at the edges, just for a second, the composed surface giving way to something that looked very much like hurt before she smoothed it back over. She laughed along with the crowd because she had no other choice, and I felt something twist in my chest watching it.

I knew exactly what it felt like to keep your face together when something landed wrong.

I looked back down at my phone.

I shouldn't have felt relieved. I knew that. Whatever Ryker Vaughn did or didn't feel for Vanessa Quinn had absolutely nothing to do with me, and the small loosening in my chest at his answer was pathetic and I was fully aware of it.

But there it was anyway.

The game kept moving. More rounds, more noise, more bodies in motion. I stayed in my corner and watched the clock on my phone. Another twenty minutes and surely the doors would open. I could get a cab home, wash off this borrowed gold dress, and fold this entire night away somewhere I didn't have to look at it.

My phone buzzed.

Adam again.

It's official. I leave in three days. I'm sorry I can't tell you in person, Lynn. I'll miss you more than you know.

Three days.

I read the message twice, then put the phone face down on my knee because I didn't trust my expression. My throat had gone tight in the particular way it did when I was not going to cry but my body hadn't quite accepted that decision yet.

Three days and then he was gone, and I was standing alone in this room full of people who had never once looked at me the way Adam always did — like I was someone worth knowing.

I needed air.

I stood up carefully, smoothing the gold dress, and started moving toward the wall that ran along the side of the hall, angling for the far exit. If I moved slowly enough, close enough to the edges, I could get out without cutting through the circle and drawing anyone's—

The crack of a slap split the room.

I froze.

The music didn't stop but the crowd did, turning as one organism toward the source of the sound. I turned too.

Vanessa was on her feet, her chest heaving, her palm still suspended in the air. The red bloom on Ryker's cheek was visible even from where I stood. The composed smile was completely gone now. In its place was something raw and trembling that I almost didn't recognise on her — genuine hurt, stripped of its performance.

"You're disgusting," she said, her voice shaking with the effort of holding itself together.

Ryker said nothing. He just sat very still, the way he had gone still at graduation when Vanessa tripped me — that particular quality of stillness that wasn't shock or shame but something else entirely, something harder to read.

Then he turned his head.

And looked directly at me.

My heart stopped.

Not a glance. Not the casual sweep he had given me at the entrance. He looked at me the way you look at something you have been aware of for a long time but have been pretending otherwise — deliberate, unhurried, and with a weight behind it that made the air between us feel suddenly different.

I didn't move. I couldn't.

Zane's voice cut through the noise before I could make sense of any of it. "Alright, alright — settle down, settle down." He spread his arms wide, already grinning in the direction of my corner. "Let's not ruin the fun."

He found me in the crowd like he already knew exactly where I was standing.

"Lynnette Hawthorne."

He said my name the way you say something you've been saving — slow, deliberate, letting each syllable land.

The heads that hadn't already turned now did.

I felt the attention like a physical thing, like heat, like the specific horrible exposure of being singled out in a room of people who had always found you funny for the wrong reasons.

"I wasn't playing," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt.

Zane shrugged, unbothered. "Everyone in this room is playing. Those are the rules."

"I didn't agree to any rules."

"Didn't have to." His smile widened. He looked across the circle at Ryker, then back at me, drawing the moment out for maximum effect. "Ryker's been dared."

The crowd stirred.

"And you," Zane continued, his voice lifting over the noise with the ease of someone delivering the punchline he had been building toward all night, "are the dare."

Laughter rippled outward from the circle like a stone dropped in water, reaching every corner of the room. Someone whistled. Someone else shouted Ryker's name.

My fingers tightened around my phone until the cracked edge bit into my palm.

"What does that mean?" I said, though something cold and certain in my stomach already knew.

Zane looked straight at me, still grinning.

"Ryker Vaughn," he announced to the room, "has been dared to sleep with you."

The sound that came from the crowd was something between a gasp and a roar. It swelled and peaked and kept going, feeding on itself the way crowd energy does when it smells blood.

I stood completely still in the middle of it.

My first instinct was to laugh — the short, defensive kind that meant this isn't real and none of you can touch me. My second instinct was to look at the door, at the large men still standing there, arms crossed, immovable.

My third instinct was to look at Ryker.

He was already looking at me.

He hadn't moved from his chair. Hadn't laughed with the crowd, hadn't played to the room the way Zane was doing. He was just watching me with that same unreadable steadiness, his cheek still faintly marked from Vanessa's palm, and something in his expression was harder to dismiss than I wanted it to be.

Like he was waiting to see what I would do.

Like, out of everyone in this screaming room, I was the only one whose answer actually mattered to him.

Don't, said every sensible part of me.

But Ryker Vaughn was already rising from his chair.

~ 4

~ 4

~ Lynn ~

He moved through the crowd — unhurried, inevitable, every person between us stepping aside without being asked.

I watched him come and did not move, I didn’t know what to fucking do.

That was the thing I couldn't explain afterward, in the long quiet hours when I replayed it — I had options. The doors were large but not impassable. I was small and quick and I had spent three years navigating spaces where I wasn't wanted. I could have pushed through.

Instead I stood there with my cracked phone in my hand and watched Ryker Vaughn walk toward me like I had been waiting for this specific moment since the first day I stepped into Ravencrest and didn't know his name yet.

He stopped in front of me — closer than he had ever voluntarily stood before. Close enough that I could smell him, he had a chocolate musk perfume on. I wanted to pull him closer and eat him.

He was close enough that I had to tip my chin up slightly to hold his gaze, which I did, because I had spent three years of looking at the floor, it is my last day, I might as well hold this gaze and admire his brown eyes.

For a moment he just looked at me.

Then, without breaking eye contact, he reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head.

The crowd behind him erupted.

I forgot how to breathe.

I had seen his photograph in the school magazine. I had seen him at swim practice through the window of the library where I studied alone. None of it had prepared me for this — the lean, defined reality of him, the tattooed geography of his chest mapped out in bold black ink. Wings spread from his collarbones, each feather rendered with the kind of precision that took hours to achieve, curling toward the edges of his shoulders. Between them, centred over his heart, a dagger wound with a snake — clean lines, dark shadows, the image of something beautiful and dangerous existing together.

I became aware that my mouth was open.

I closed it.

"Well," he said quietly. Just that one word, and the corner of his mouth moved — not quite a smirk, something more private than that. Like I had confirmed something for him.

I straightened. "This is not a game I agreed to play."

"You're in the room," he said. "That's agreement enough tonight."

"That's… that’s… not how consent works." I couldn’t help myself from stuttering.

He leaned down slowly, and I held my ground even as every nerve in my body screamed at me to step back, until his mouth was level with my ear and I could feel the warmth of his breath against my skin.

"Here's how this works," he murmured, his voice pitched low enough that only I could hear it beneath the noise of the crowd. "You say yes, or you pay the price. Those are the only two options on the table tonight."

"What price?" I said. My voice was impressively steady. I was proud of it.

He pulled back just enough to look at me. "Five thousand dollars"

I laughed before I could stop myself — a short, involuntary sound. "You know I don't have that."

"I know." His eyes held mine. "I also know you're the only person in this room who actually showed up tonight dressed like you want to be fucked." He paused. "That gold dress wasn't for them."

My breath caught, how could he be so vulgar? How could he not have just an atom of filter. Jesus Christ!

It was such a small thing. Such a quiet, specific observation buried inside what was supposed to be a humiliation. He had no business noticing what the dress was for. He had no business saying it out loud like that, low and even, like a fact rather than a weapon.

I hated him for it.

"I… I… I just wore what I have," I stuttered.

He studied me for a moment. Behind him, the crowd was getting restless — someone shouted his name, someone else made a sound that was supposed to be encouraging. He didn't look away from me.

“I want to go” I managed to say, though I didn’t mean it

He laughed wryly. "The men at the door will let you go actually." He said it simply, without hesitation, and it surprised me enough that I believed him. "But you won't go."

The arrogance of it should have been enough. It should have snapped whatever spell the low voice and the tattoos and the quiet observation about the dress had briefly cast. It should have sent me straight toward those doors with my head high and my middle finger raised.

I looked at him standing there — shirt gone, completely unbothered by the noise of a hundred people watching him, eyes fixed on mine like the crowd didn't exist — and I thought about three years. Three years of being the punchline, the charity case, the girl who ate the stage floor. Three years of watching him from a careful distance and hating myself for the watching.

I thought about Adam's message sitting on my phone.

I'll miss you more than you know.

Everyone was leaving or had already left or had never really been there to begin with.

And Ryker Vaughn was standing in front of me asking me a question that no one in three years had bothered to ask.

Before I could finish the thought, his hand came up and brushed a strand of hair back from my face. His fingers grazed my cheekbone — barely, just the lightest drag of warmth across my skin — and I felt it in my spine.

I had never let myself be this close to him. Not once in three years.

"Last chance," he said quietly.

Then in the snap of a finger, his mouth found mine, kissing me softly.

It was nothing like I had imagined in the careless privacy of my own head — and I had imagined it, more times than I would ever admit to anyone, including myself. I had imagined something clumsy or cold or deliberately cruel. Something that would finally cure me of the wanting.

It wasn't any of those things.

It was warm and certain and devastatingly unhurried for the first two seconds — like he had all the time in the world and had decided to spend it here. Then his hand sliding to the nape of my neck, fingers pressing gently into my hair, and the kiss deepened into something that wiped every coherent thought I had clean off the surface of my mind.

I kissed him back with three years of carefully suppressed longing that I had been so disciplined about and was apparently not disciplined about at all when it came down to it.

When he finally pulled back, the crowd was a blur of noise I couldn't parse.

His eyes searched mine — dark, intent, still with that quality of arriving at a conclusion.

"So," he said, his voice rough at the edges now in a way it hadn't been before. "Yes?"

I knew what I was doing. I was fully aware that this was Ryker Vaughn and I was Lynn Hawthorne and tomorrow the world would look exactly as it always had. I was not confused about any of that.

I nodded anyway.

"Condoms, please!" Zane's voice shattered the moment like a brick through glass, and the hall collapsed into laughter and chaos.

Ryker didn't react to any of it. He just looked at me for one more second, then reached down and took my hand.

His grip was warm and steady and certain — the hand of someone who had made a decision and wasn't questioning it.

He didn't look back as he walked. I followed him through the thinning crowd, through the corridor that smelled of alcohol and bass and other people's perfume, toward the door at the far end of the hall.

My heart was so loud I could feel it in my fingertips.

The bathroom door opened. He held it. I stepped inside.

The mirror above the sink showed me a girl in a gold dress with her hair slightly undone and her eyes too bright — a girl who had walked into this party invisible and was somehow here, in this moment, with this boy.

I barely recognised her.

The door clicked shut behind us.

Ryker's eyes met mine in the mirror. The noise of the party fell away to almost nothing, just the distant thud of bass through the walls and the sound of both of us breathing.

He moved slowly, deliberately — none of the performance of the crowd left in him now, just something quieter and more direct. His hands settled at my waist, drawing me back against him, and his mouth found the side of my neck with a patience that made my knees uncertain.

"Still want to run?" he murmured against my skin.

"No," I said.

And I meant it.

~ 5

~ 5

~ Lynn ~

His hand snaked around my waist, yanking me against the hard length of his body; the other swept my hair aside, baring my neck. His mouth found the pulse hammering there, devouring me with soothing kisses, while I gripped the edge of the sink to stay upright.

“Turn around,” he muttered against my skin.

I obeyed, breath hitching as he spun me to face the mirror. The glass was cool under my palms when he pressed me forward, bending me over the sink. He lifted my gold dress up with the motion; and for a moment I thought of what Brielle is going to do if she found out I did this.

She must never know!

His hands found my panties with the speed of light, making me certain he must have done this a million times with Vanessa, the thought distracted me for a second. His fingers hooked the into lace of my panties and tearing it down my thighs in one impatient tug.

I watched him in the reflection wondering if I was dreaming or this is actually reality and I am making a costly mistake.

He unbuckled his belt and it dawned on me that I was actually about to have sex with Ryker Vaughn in a club restroom.

I felt heat flooding between my legs, I was dripping from moisture of desire for Ryker. This is my dream.

He freed his d*ck and I almost gasped at how thick and heavy it was in his hand, and the first brush of him against my p*ssy drew a broken moan from my throat.

“Eyes on me, kitten,” he ordered, voice low and lethal when my eyes fluttered shut. I forced them open, meeting his stare in the mirror.

His thrust drove slowly at first, letting me feel every inch stretch me open, until I was trembling. Then he snapped his hips forward, burying himself to the hilt in one brutal thrust that tore a cry from my lips. My back arched; his hand splayed across my stomach, holding me pinned as he pulled out and slammed back in, setting a punishing rhythm that had the mirror rattling against the wall.

Every thrust drove deeper, harder, until pleasure coiled so tight I thought I’d shatter.

Minutes later a guttural sound ripping from his chest as forehead pressed between my shoulder blades. For a moment, the only sounds were our ragged breathing and the distant thump of bass through the walls.

Then he straightened, hands gentle now as he turned me to face him. His thumb brushed my swollen lower lip, eyes searching mine.

Then he took a deep breath, adjusted my dress and pulled away, adjusting his trousers.

The world came back in pieces.

The distant thud of bass through the walls. The hum of the bathroom light overhead. The sound of my own breathing, still unsteady, trying to find its normal rhythm and not quite getting there.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

The gold dress was back in place. My hair had come loose from Brielle's clip, which now sat on the edge of the sink, and a few strands fell across my face. My lips were swollen and my eyes were too bright and I looked — I looked like someone something had happened to. Not badly. Just significantly. The kind of look that doesn't wash off immediately.

I reached for the clip.

Behind me, Ryker was quiet in the particular way he was quiet. I watched him in the mirror without turning around, he started almost like he was going to say something. His jaw moved slightly. His brows drew together a fraction.

Then the door burst open.

Zane practically fell into the room, catching himself on the door frame with the gracelessness of someone who had been leaning against it for an indeterminate amount of time. He straightened, looked between us, and produced a slow, wide grin that made my skin crawl.

He held up a small foil packet (condoms) between two fingers.

"Little problem," he said.

The unguarded thing in Ryker's expression vanished instantly. His eyes dropped to the condom in Zane's hand and went flat.

"You forgot something," Zane added, tilting his head at me with a smirk that was doing its best to be charming and landing somewhere closer to repulsive. He pitched his voice low, a mocking echo: "Eyes on me, Kitten."

The laughter that came from the hallway told me there were more people listening than just Zane.

Ryker was silent for exactly two seconds.

Then he moved.

His hand closed around my arm and he pushed me back against the wall — not gently, the tile cold and hard through the thin fabric of the dress, the impact sharp enough to pull a sound from my throat.

"Ryker…"

"Are you clean?" he said.

His voice was flat. Clipped. The voice he used in class when he was bored, or in the hallway when he was dismissing someone. I had heard it aimed at other people for three years.

Receiving it felt exactly as bad as I would have predicted.

I looked at him and saw nothing of the person who had brushed hair from my face twenty minutes ago, nothing of the quiet certainty in his eyes when he took my hand. His gaze was distant and cooling and I was apparently already somewhere in his rearview mirror.

The humiliation moved through me like cold water.

"I should be asking you that," I said.

It came out steadier than I felt. I was grateful for that.

He made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh — dismissive, barely there — and released my arm. He turned toward Zane and said nothing else. Just slung an arm around Zane's shoulders and walked out into the hallway like I was a room he had finished being in.

Zane glanced back at me over his shoulder, still grinning.

The door swung shut behind them.

I stood against the wall for a long moment and breathed.

So. There it was. The part I had known was coming and had chosen to walk into anyway, with my eyes open and Grandma's voice in my ear and a borrowed gold dress and three years of wanting someone who had never once seen me as a person. I had no right to be surprised. I had no right to feel anything except what I felt, which was the specific, deserved sting of a thing you walked into knowingly.

I picked up Brielle's clip from the edge of the sink.

I fixed my hair.

I waited until I was certain Ryker and Zane were back in the main hall before I opened the door and left the club, ensuring no one saw me leave.

I was ashamed of myself.

…

Two months out of Ravencrest and sex with Ryker Vaughn and my life looked exactly like it had before I ever set foot in that school — early mornings, fish baskets, Grandma humming beside me in the salt air.

No college. Not without money. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I had stopped letting myself finish that thought.

But my body was not cooperating with the business of moving on. It started as a wave — low and rolling, building before I could identify it — and then my stomach turned over completely and I bent forward and was sick on the ground before I could do anything about it.

"Lynn!"

Brielle's voice, sharp with alarm. She had come to help with the morning baskets, as she sometimes did, and was at my side before I had finished wiping my mouth.

I straightened slowly, one hand braced on my knee. My throat burned. The morning light felt too bright.

I heard Grandma go still behind me.

I didn't turn around immediately. I wasn't ready for her face yet.

"I'm fine," I said, to both of them, to neither of them. "It's just — the smell this morning is strong, I think…"

"Lynnette."

Grandma's voice.

I turned around.

She was standing with a basket half-packed in her hands, and she was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before — a complicated collapse of emotions moving across her features in quick succession. Fear first, then grief, then something that looked very much like a door closing.

Her eyes went to my stomach.

Just for a second and I felt the bottom fall out of everything.

"Come inside," she said quietly. The basket went down. Her voice was controlled in the way that voices are controlled when the alternative is falling apart in public. "Right now, Lynnette. Come inside."

Brielle looked between us, her brow furrowed. "Grandma, what's wrong? She just felt sick, it's probably…"

"Brielle." Grandma's voice was gentle but final. "Give us a moment."

Brielle went quiet.

I followed Grandma into the house on legs that didn't feel entirely like mine. The door closed behind us. She stood in the small kitchen with her back to me for a moment, her hands flat on the counter, her shoulders doing the thing they did when she was gathering herself.

Then she turned around.

Her eyes were wet. She pressed her lips together, and when she spoke her voice broke cleanly down the middle.

"How could you, Lynnette?" she whispered. "How could you do this?"

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

Because I already knew what she was asking.

I had known for two weeks — known with the quiet, cold certainty of someone who has been ignoring a truth because naming it makes it real. The nausea that hit in waves. The exhaustion that sat differently from regular tired. The way certain smells had been turning my stomach since — since…

Oh God.

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach without meaning to.

Grandma saw the gesture. Her face crumpled.

"I'm going to get a test," she said, already moving toward her bag. Her voice was very quiet now. Very steady in the way that costs something. "And then we are going to figure out what comes next."

I stood in the kitchen of our small home, in the morning light, with the smell of fish and salt coming through the window and Brielle's muffled voice outside asking if everything was okay.

I'm pregnant.

The words formed in my mind slowly, the way you say something out loud for the first time even when you're only saying it to yourself — testing the shape of it, the weight.

I'm pregnant.

And the father is Ryker Vaughn.