PROLOGUE

TEN YEARS AGO

SIENNA

I'm going to tell you about the day I died.

Not literally, my body kept breathing, kept walking around for another ten years. But the girl I was? She died in the cafeteria of Saint Catherine's Academy for Girls on a Tuesday in March, while a hundred privileged teenagers laughed and the love of my life destroyed me for sport.

I was sixteen years old.

I wore the same three outfits in rotation because they were all my mother and I could afford. My shoes had holes in the soles that I covered with duct tape. I smelled like lemon-scented cleaning solution because I went to school straight from helping my mother scrub toilets in mansions I'd never been invited to enter through the front door.

And I was hopelessly, devastatingly, pathetically in love with Cassy Beaumont.

God, even her name felt like honey on my tongue.

She was everything I wasn't, effortlessly beautiful, casually cruel, born into the kind of wealth that made her blind to how the rest of the world bled. Long dark hair that caught the light like spilled ink. Eyes the color of a winter storm. A smile that could make you feel like the most important person in the world, right up until she decided you were nothing.

I knew I didn't have a chance. I knew it the way you know the sun will rise; absolute, inevitable, crushing.

But my father was dying.

Stage four heart disease. The medical bills were drowning us. My mother worked sixteen-hour daily, cleaning houses, including the Beaumonts' sprawling estate, and it still wasn't enough. I was working too, after school, on weekends, coding freelance gigs in internet cafés because we couldn't afford a computer at home.

I was so tired, scared and desperate for something beautiful to hold onto while my world crumbled.

So I wrote her a letter.

I poured everything into it. every stolen glance in the hallways, every time she laughed and I felt it in my chest like a gunshot, every fantasy I had of her seeing me as something more than the scholarship charity case. I wrote it in the margins of my coding notebook during lunch period, while she sat three tables away with her perfect friends, golden and untouchable.

I was going to throw it away. I swear I was.

But I left my notebook on the table when I went to fill my water bottle. Just for two minutes. One hundred and twenty seconds that changed my entire life.

When I came back, Madison Montclair was reading it. Her eyes went wide, then gleeful, and before I could snatch it back, she was running toward Cassy's table, waving the notebook like a trophy.

"Oh my God, you guys have to see this!"

The cafeteria was loud, it was always loud during lunch, hundreds of girls talking and laughing and living their easy, privileged lives. But when Madison reached Cassy's table, when she thrust my notebook into those elegant hands, the noise started to die.

Whispers spread like wildfire.

The scholarship girl has a crush.

On Cassy Beaumont.

This is going to be good.

I stood frozen. My legs wouldn't move. My lungs forgot how to work.

Cassy took the notebook. She looked at it, then at Madison, then she stood up. Stepped onto the bench of the table. Then onto the table itself.

She was wearing her uniform, the same one we all wore, but somehow on her it looked like haute couture. Her hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail. She looked like a queen about to address her subjects.

She looked at me.

Our eyes met across the cafeteria, and for one heartbeat, one stupid hopeful heartbeat, I thought maybe she'd be kind. Maybe she'd give the notebook back, and she'd pretend she never saw it.

Then she smiled.

"Attention, everyone!" Her voice carried effortlessly. The cafeteria went silent. "I just received the most fascinating love letter."

No…. Oh God, no.

"From Sienna Vale."

Every head turned toward me. A hundred pairs of eyes, and smirks. A hundred privileged girls who'd never known what it felt like to have nothing, watching me have the last thing I owned, my dignity, ripped away.

Cassy opened the notebook, and started reading.

"Dear Cassy," she began, her voice dripping with fake sympathy. "I know I shouldn't feel this way. I know you're so far above me that I should just admire you from afar. But I can't help it. When you walk into a room, it's like the sun came out. When you smile, even when it's not at me, I feel it in my chest like…"

She paused. Looked up. Her eyes found mine again.

"Like a gunshot."

Laughter erupted. Not just giggles; roaring, cruel, delighted laughter.

My face burned. Tears blurred my vision. I wanted to run, but my legs still wouldn't move.

Cassy kept reading. Every word. Every pathetic, desperate, hopeful word I'd written.

"I know you'd never look at someone like me. I'm just a scholarship student. The girl whose mom cleans your bathrooms. But sometimes I let myself imagine what it would be like if you saw me. Really saw me. If you knew that I think about you before I fall asleep. That I…"

She stopped again. This time her smile was razor-sharp.

"That I imagine what it would be like to kiss you."

The laughter got louder. Someone started a slow clap. Someone else yelled, "Lesbian much?"

I was going to be sick.

Cassy closed the notebook, and held it up like evidence at a trial.

"Sienna," she said, her voice carrying over the chaos. "Come here."

I couldn't. I couldn't move.

"Come. Here."

My legs obeyed her when they wouldn't obey me. I walked toward her table like a prisoner walking to the gallows. The crowd parted. Everyone was recording on their phones. This would be on social media within minutes, and the whole world would see.

I stopped in front of her table. I had to tilt my head back to look at her, standing above me like a goddess pronouncing judgment.

"Did you really write this?" she asked. Her tone was sweet. Concerned, almost.

I nodded. I couldn't speak.

"And you really think..." She hopped down from the table, landing gracefully in front of me. We were the same height, but somehow she still loomed. "You really think someone like me would ever want someone like you?"

The cafeteria held its breath.

"I..." My voice cracked. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean…"

"You didn't mean for me to find out that you're obsessed with me?" She cocked her head. "That you think about me before you fall asleep? That you want to kiss me?"

She said it like it was the most disgusting thing she'd ever heard.

"You're the maid's daughter, Sienna. You wear the same shoes with holes in them every single day. You smell like the cleaning supplies your mother uses to scrub my toilets. Your clothes are from Goodwill. Your scholarship is the only reason you're even allowed to breathe the same air as us."

Each word was like a knife which found its mark on my already broken heart.

"And you thought…" She laughed. It was a beautiful sound. I'd always loved her laugh. "You actually thought I'd want to touch you?"

Someone in the crowd yelled, "Charity case!"

Someone else: "Delusional!"

Cassy leaned in close. So close I could smell her perfume, something expensive and floral. So close her lips almost brushed my ear.

"Did you really think," she whispered, just for me, "that I'd ever want to kiss someone like you?"

Then she pulled back, held up my notebook, and ripped out the pages with my letter. She tore them to pieces, and let them fall like confetti at my feet.

"Know your place," she said.

Then she walked away.

The crowd swallowed her up, girls congratulating her on the show, already pulling out their phones to post videos and screenshots. The sound of their laughter followed her down the hall.

I stood there in a circle of torn paper and watched my world end.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

Before I looked at it, somehow, I just knew.

MOM: Baby, I'm so sorry. Come to the hospital. It's your father.

I made it to the hospital in twenty-three minutes. I ran the whole way because we couldn't afford an Uber and the bus would take too long.

I was too late.

The machines were off. My mother was sobbing in a chair by the bed. My father..my brilliant, kind, broken father was still. So still.

"He was asking for you," my mother said through her tears. "He wanted to say goodbye."

But he was already gone.

His last words weren't for me. They were spoken an hour before I arrived, when he knew maybe, that I might not make it in time.

"Take care of your mother," the nurse told me he'd said. "And tell Sienna to be better than me. Tell her to be strong."

I sat by his body and cried until I had nothing left.

And somewhere, on social media, a video of my humiliation was going viral at Saint Catherine's Academy. Hundreds and thousands of views. Everyone was laughing at the poor charity case girl.

Sienna Vale thought Cassy Beaumont would kiss her.

The scholarship lesbian. The audacity!!

The maid's daughter. You reek of poverty!

Know your place b*tch!!!

My mother and I moved away three weeks later. She couldn't work for the Beaumonts anymore. She couldn't look at them, or breathe in that house where they'd smiled and accepted her service while her husband died from stress-induced heart disease caused by the debt they'd buried him in.

Because I learned the truth eventually.

My father wasn't just a scientist. He was a partner with Cassy's father, Marcus Beaumont. They were developing revolutionary AI technology together. Equal partners. Equal shares.

Until Marcus decided he wanted it all.

He forged documents, faked a theft and framed my father for stealing company assets. He buried him in legal fees and debt that broke his health and killed him slowly.

The Beaumonts built their empire on my father's grave.

And Cassy… beautiful, cruel Cassy had walked past my mother in the hallways of her mansion like she was furniture. She had humiliated me while my father was dying. She had never once questioned where her wealth came from or what it cost.

I was sixteen years old when I made a promise over my father's hospital bed.

Someday, Cassy Beaumont would know exactly what she took from me.

Someday, she would beg.

And I would make sure she understood that no amount of begging would ever be enough.