Chapter 4

I sat in the dark of my bedroom, a silent ghost in my own home. This was the reality beneath my paper crown. This was the truth Kellan Brooks and his wealthy friends could never, ever see. If my secret got out, the school board would investigate our residency. The scholarship would be revoked. My mother would completely break. My entire life, and everything my parents sacrificed to get me back, would turn to ash. I once lived in a wealthy home; they fed me, gave me shelter and gave me whatever I needed. Before my parents even took me back, they promised to fully fund my academics.

 I can't lose. No, ,I can't… I couldn't let that happen. I would lie, cheat, and manipulate every single person in Crestwood before I let my family lose the one thing they had left: my future.

I wiped my face with the back of my sleeve, taking a deep, shuddering breath to steady my racing heart. I needed to focus. I needed to find out exactly what the new neighbor wanted, and how much it would cost to buy his silence.

Tap. Tap.

My blood ran cold.

The sound didn't come from the front door. It came from right behind me.

I turned my head slowly. The shadows of the fire escape stretched across my bedroom floor. The streetlamp flickered, casting a dim, yellow glow against the warped glass of my window.

Standing on the rusted iron grating, completely silent, was the boy. Adam.

He wasn't smiling anymore. The cynical amusement was gone, replaced by a quiet, intense observation. He didn't look like a blackmailer preparing to gloat. He looked like someone who had just listened to every single word of my family’s destruction through the thin brick walls.

I scrambled to my feet, my heart hammering an agitated rhythm against my ribs. I took a step toward the window, ready to pull the blinds, ready to shut him out and pretend he wasn't there.

But then he raised his hand and pressed something flat against the glass.

I stopped dead in my tracks. The air left my lungs in a violent rush.

Pressed against the dirty pane was a worn, braided bracelet. The threads were faded, the cheap plastic beads scratched and dull. It was worthless. Garbage to anyone else in the world.

But not to me.

It was the bracelet I had made in the group home when I was six years old. The bracelet I had lost the day my adopted parents came to adopt me.

He didn't just know I lived in the harbor. He hadn't just followed me from school.

Adam’s slate-gray eyes locked onto mine through the glass, stripping away every lie, every defense, and every fake Prada bag I owned. He knew exactly who I was. Because ten years ago, he had been trapped in that same orphanage with me.

 

The morning after a fight always felt like breathing in ash.

I stood in front of the cracked bathroom mirror, meticulously applying a second layer of waterproof mascara. My hands were finally steady, locked down by the sheer force of muscle memory. Outside the thin bathroom door, the apartment was tomb-silent. My father hadn't come back from the docks. My mother was asleep on the lumpy brown sofa, fully clothed, a cold washcloth draped over her eyes to fend off a migraine.

I grabbed my flat iron, smoothing out the natural wave of my auburn hair until it hung in a sleek, perfectly tamed sheet down my back. I was putting on armor. 

Every stroke of the brush, every dab of concealer over the dark circles under my eyes, was a brick in the wall I built between myself and the world.

A loud, hydraulic hiss shattered the morning quiet, followed by the heavy, rhythmic grinding of a diesel engine.

I paused, setting the hot iron on the chipped laminate counter. The sound was coming from the narrow alleyway directly below my bedroom window. I crept down the short hallway, careful to avoid the floorboard that always shrieked, and slipped into my room.

I pressed my back against the wall, inching toward the warped windowpane. I peeled back the edge of the faded curtain just enough to look down without being seen.

A massive, beat-up rental moving truck was backed into the narrow gap between our building and the next, its exhaust pipe coughing dark gray smoke into the freezing morning air. The engine cut off with a violent shudder.

The driver’s side door groaned open. A pair of heavy, scuffed combat boots hit the cracked pavement.

It was the boy from last night. Adam.

In the harsh, unforgiving light of a Crestwood morning, he looked even more out of place. He wasn't wearing the standard-issue pastel polos or pristine designer jackets of the boys I went to school with. He wore a faded, vintage leather jacket over a plain white T-shirt and dark, worn-in denim. His espresso-dark hair was a messy, unruly mop, falling into his eyes as he walked to the back of the truck and unlatched the heavy metal door.

I held my breath, watching him. There were no parents climbing out of the passenger side. No friends showing up to help him carry boxes. He was completely, utterly alone.

With a sharp yank, he pulled the rolling metal door up. He didn't hesitate. He grabbed a massive, taped-up cardboard box, his shoulders rolling with a fluid, tightly coiled strength, and carried it toward the stairwell of the adjacent building.

For the next twenty minutes, I couldn't look away. It was like watching a machine. He moved with a quiet, ruthless efficiency, carrying heavy wooden crates, duffel bags, and finally, wheeling out a matte-black motorcycle that looked just as dangerous and battered as he did.

There was a raw, grounded gravity to him that made my chest tighten. At Beverly High, everything was curated. The boys I knew, Kellan included, moved through the world expecting it to part for them. They threw money at inconveniences. They hired people to lift their boxes.

Adam looked like a guy who had never expected the world to give him a single thing he didn't pry from its hands himself.

When he finally finished emptying the truck, he stood in the center of the alley, wiping a smudge of dirt from his jaw with the back of his hand. The chill in the air was biting, but he didn't shiver. He just stood there, staring at the peeling gray paint of his new building.

I let the curtain drop a fraction of an inch, a strange, creeping sense of dread mixing with the heat in my chest. He was too observant. Too quiet. A guy like that moving in next door was a massive liability. If he was hanging around the complex, it was only a matter of time before he realized I didn't take a limo to school, or overheard my parents screaming about bankruptcy.

I needed to avoid him at all costs. I would change my route to the bus stop. I would leave ten minutes earlier. I wouldn't even look in his direction.