CHAPTER TWO: THE DEAL

The next morning, she found him leaning against her locker.

Not doing anything in particular. Just standing there with his arms folded and his bag slung over one shoulder, watching the corridor with the casual authority of someone who'd never once wondered if he had the right to take up space. The morning crowd parted around him without thinking about it, the way water parts around stone.

Lena stopped walking.

He turned his head. Found her immediately, like he'd known exactly where she'd appear.

"Delete it," she said, walking forward again, because stopping was surrender.

"Morning to you, too."

She reached past him to open her locker. He didn't move entirely, which meant her arm nearly brushed his chest, which meant she had to focus very hard on the combination lock.

"I texted you at eleven-thirty last night," he said. "You didn't answer."

"I was asleep."

"You weren't."

She pulled out her chemistry textbook. "What do you want, Adrian Hale?"

"To return something." He reached into his jacket pocket and produced her crystal pendant – the one she'd missed in the cleanup, the one she'd been quietly upset about losing. He held it out between two fingers. The light caught it. Little rainbows ran across the ceiling. "Found it by the east door."

She took it from him. Their fingers didn't touch, or barely touched, or maybe touched for half a second that she chose not to register.

"Thank you," she said.

"See. Not so hard."

She turned to go.

"About last night."

It was a mistake. Delete the photo."

"I will," he said, "eventually. But first, I need something from you."

She stopped. Turned back around. The warning that had been low-level buzzing in her chest since last night went up a notch. "Excuse me?"

He wasn't smiling anymore. Something had shifted in his face, something more real than the performance she was used to from him. He looked, for a moment, like a person working something out.

"I have a problem," he said.

"Several."

"A specific one. Brielle Stone."

Lena knew the name the way everyone at Durman Academy knew the name — the way you know the weather. Brielle Stone captain of the cheer squad, daughter of one of the school's largest donors, spectacularly beautiful in the precise way that had no warmth in it. She and Adrian Hale had a history that everyone watched like a television series they couldn't stop following, even though the writing had gotten worse.

"She's clingy," Adrian Hale said. "She thinks we're still together. We've been over for a month now  but she hasn't processed it."

"That's not my problem."

"It could solve yours."

She frowned. "I don't have a problem."

He gave her a look. The specific look meant he knew more than he should and was in no hurry to tell her how. "Your crush on my brother."

The bottom dropped out of her stomach.

"I don't"

"You've had it for five years." He said it the way you state a fact about geography. "I've watched you watch him at the hedge. At school. At every single awards ceremony since ninth grade. You brought a cake yesterday."

Her face went hot. "That was for..."

"It had a hockey stick on it."

She closed her eyes for a second. Opened them. "If you tell anyone....."

"I'm not going to tell anyone." And the way he said it, he was quiet and certain, which made her believe him more than she wanted to. "I'm offering you a trade. You be my girlfriend — fake, nobody has to know except us and I use it to get Brielle off my back. In return, I'll put you on Julian's radar. I'll make sure he sees you. I'll create situations where you're actually in the same room and talking."

The corridor buzzed around them. Someone's phone played a pop song three lockers down.

"Why would you do that?" she asked.

He looked at her for a moment. Something moved across his face fast, too fast to name, and then it was gone.

"Because I need the favour," he said. "And you want the introduction. Simple."

"Nothing about this is simple."

"The term ends, so do we. I delete the photo, you go back to your life, I go back to mine. Two months, Lena. Clean deal you have got nothing to loose."

She looked at him for a long time. Thought about five years of watching through windows. Thought about the cake in the tin at home that nobody had eaten. 

"I want that photo deleted by the end of term," she said. "Not eventually. End of term. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"And the texts."

"All of it."

"And I need an end date in writing too, can't take your words for it, Hales"

"Lena, Lena. Deal?"

She made herself breathe slowly.

"Deal," she said.

He pushed off the locker. Picked up his bag and headed down the corridor.He was ten feet away when he turned back.

"For the record," he said, at normal volume, which meant at least four people in the vicinity could hear it, "you look much better in person."

She turned back to her locker so he couldn't see her face. She was going to regret this. She could feel it already, settled in her chest like a stone. But she thought about Julian Hale holding doors open for strangers, and she thought about what two months might get her. She opened her chemistry textbook and got on with her day.

The first time Adrian Hale picked her up for school, she didn't know he was doing it. She was walking to the bus stop, bag over one shoulder, hood up against the October chill, when a car slowed beside her. Not just any car, a matte-black Range Rover that probably cost more than her mother made in a year.

The window came down.

"Get in."

"I have a bus."

"You're going to miss it."

She looked at the time. He was right. She hated that he was right. She got in. The interior smelled like leather and something that might have been cedar, and the heating was the kind that got into your bones. She sat with her bag on her lap and her eyes on the road. Three blocks from school, they stopped at a red light.

A sleek, dark Audi pulled up alongside them. The window came down. Julian Hale looked out, saw the Range Rover, clocked Adrian Hale driving, started to look away and then he looked again, at the passenger seat. At Lena.

"Oh, I gave my dear girlfriend a ride today," Adrian Hale said, loud enough. He gave Julian a two-finger wave that managed to contain an entire message in the casualness of it. Julian's expression shifted. Something precise and unreadable.

"He did it on purpose," Lena said quietly, through her teeth.

"Obviously."

"You know about my—"

"Yes."

"And you just"

"Creating situations, bookworm, just creating situations like I said I would." He pulled forward on the green. "You're welcome."

The school parking lot was full of the usual morning chaos — cars unloading, groups gathering, the cheer squad running through something on the east steps. Lena got out of the Range Rover and became immediately conscious that people were watching, because people always watched when Adrian Hale arrived anywhere.

She walked towards the entrance. He fell into step beside her.

"I need a morning kiss," he said, at a volume designed for the audience.

"I have a test in thirty minutes."

"Thirty seconds of your time."

"You're acting like a child."

"One kiss. Then you can go worry about your test."

She stopped walking. She looked at him. He looked back at her with the grey-green eyes that didn't give anything away, and she thought about Julian's car at the red light, about the way he'd looked at her, and she thought fine, this is what the deal is, and she went up on her toes and pressed her mouth to the corner of his jaw, which was not his mouth and also meant she got a half second with her hand against his chest, his heartbeat under her palm, surprisingly fast.

She pulled back.

"School," she said.

She walked inside.

She did not look back to see his expression, which was probably nothing anyway, which was probably just him running calculations about Brielle, which was definitely not something she was going to spend any time thinking about.

She had a test. She got a ninety-four. She spent the entire exam thinking about his heartbeat.

By noon, the news had moved through Durman Academy with the speed and precision of a wildfire.

By 2 pm, Brielle Stone had posted three things to I*******m and started a group chat.

By 3 pm, Lena's locker had a note taped to it that said simply: You just cut off your own head.

Susie appeared at her side like a small, furious guardian angel. She looked at the note. She looked at the locker. She looked at Lena.

"There's a bounty," she said.

"A what?"

"Brielle put a bounty on you." Susie held up her phone. The group chat was still open. Lena read it once, then looked away.

Five hundred dollars for an embarrassing photo.

Eight hundred for a video.

Ten thousand — ten thousand — for whoever made Lena transfer out.

"She has a lot of disposable income," Lena said.

"This is serious."

"I know it's serious."

"You need to go to Adrian Hale and stop whatever you both have going on before it gets too dangerous."

"I need to not get pushed down a flight of stairs." Lena pulled the note off her locker, folded it, and put it in her bag. "Give me the group chat. I want to see everything."

Susie handed over the phone. Lena read it all, calmly and carefully, the way she read a problem set before working out how to solve it. Then she handed the phone back.

"I need to find Adrian Hale," she said.

"That's what I said."

"I know. I was getting there."

She found him in the east courtyard, sitting on a wall with two members of the football team, all of them eating lunch like they owned the ground they sat on, which in some financial sense they probably did. He saw her coming from fifty feet away, said something to the two beside him, and they took their sandwiches and left.

She sat beside him without waiting to be invited.

"Brielle put a price on my head," she said.

He ate a chip. "I know."

"Ten thousand dollars to make me transfer out."

"That's ambitious."

"Adrian Hale." She waited until he looked at her. "This is what I was talking about. This is the part you said you'd handle."

He was quiet for a moment. Looking at her, not at the school, not at the courtyard. At her specifically, with that expression that was hard to read, that lived somewhere between careful and something else she didn't have a word for.

"I'll handle it," he said.

"How?"

"Leave it with me."

"I would like slightly more detail"

"Lena." And the way he said her name, just the two syllables, not impatient, not dismissive, something more focused than that made her go quiet. "I said I'll handle it. You don't have to fight this one yourself."

She looked at him for a second.

"I know how to fight my own battles," she said.

"I know you do." He looked at the courtyard. Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "That's not why I'm helping."

She opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, and then something in the way he was looking out at the courtyard, very carefully not looking at her, made the question stick.

She ate her lunch.

He didn't say anything else.

But that afternoon, when Brielle and three of the cheer squad cornered Lena by the science block with a bottle of something red and a phone pointed at her face, Adrian Hale was there before the first drop fell.

What happened next, Lena would think about for a long time afterwards. Not the way he stepped between her and Brielle. Not the particular quiet of his voice when he told Brielle to pour it on herself and apologise. Not even Brielle's face going white and then crimson and then crumpling into something genuinely frightened.

What she thought about was what he said after, into the phone in Brielle's hand, clearly, so the camera caught every word:

"Lena is my girlfriend. Anyone who hurts her becomes my enemy."

The school went still in the way that schools go still when something real happens, something that isn't performance..

And Lena stood behind Adrian Hale and thought, for one fractured second, that the wrong brother felt very much like the right one.

She stamped the thought out immediately.

She had a deal. She had a plan. She had five years of something worth protecting.

She looked at the back of Adrian Hale's head and told herself she was grateful, and that was all.