Chapter 4
“What you want is already yours. Don’t be afraid to take it.”
My father’s voice rattles in my head like a curse as I force one foot in front of the other. Then the next. Knox’s stare still clings to me, heavy as chains, but I keep moving, pushing until the crowd swallows me whole. The bass punches through my chest, but it doesn’t drown the thought.
As usual, my father’s wrong.
It’s easy to take when you’re the kind of man people bend for on instinct. When doors open before you even touch the handle, but I’m not him.
I don’t want to be him.
Walking away is a gamble. A dangerous one. It’s about letting the silence speak, letting the tension stretch tight instead of snapping. About resisting the scream in my bones telling me to turn back and force him to see me.
Hope is pathetic, but it has me convinced that if I walk away, he’ll follow. That if I don’t hand myself over, he’ll finally want to earn it, but hope’s a bad bet. It lies. It tells you you’re the exception when you’re another story that ends the same way.
Still, I keep moving.
Even though my pulse stutters every time I replay his hand on me. Even though every step feels like I’m tearing something out of myself.
I don’t look back.
If he follows, it has to be because he chooses to. Not because I begged or stayed, and definitely not because I’m easy.
He has to decide I’m worth chasing.
I make it to the middle of the crowd when Joey’s voice cuts through the music like a whip crack.
“Well, that was dramatic.”
I blink, caught mid-brood, and yell back to him. “It was calculated.”
“Sure, Tyler Finley. Everything you do is calculated. Like picking gym shorts for the sex appeal and the mobility.”
I roll my eyes, grinning despite myself. “You gotta leave them wanting.”
“Guess so since that’s what he did to you.”
I flip him off and push toward the house, and he follows until we’re through the doors and into the front room.
Florida’s still pretending it’s summer, and I’m slick with sweat, skin humming from heat and nerves. The blast of air conditioning hits like salvation, cool enough to melt some of the tension out of my shoulders.
Beside me, Joey’s attention snags instantly on two girls in lingerie and cat ears. They wave. He smirks.
“There’s no way in hell,” I tell him.
He opens his mouth probably to defend his odds with the girls or tell me to chill, but we round the corner from the foyer into the front room and stop short.
Tripp’s sprawled across the biggest couch like it’s a throne, one leg dangling over the arm, a red Solo cup balanced carelessly on his knee. His skeleton paint’s even more of a mess now, smeared into something that makes him look half-dead, half-deranged.
A handful of our pledge brothers crowd around him, laughing at whatever joke he cracked. But the second they see us, the sound dies. The music from outside still pounds, but in here, it feels muffled, like the walls themselves are holding their breath.
Tripp tilts his chin up, sneer already carved into place. “Look who finally decided to slum it with the rest of us.”
The others snicker, but no one dares add more. Tripp wants the stage to himself.
“Must be nice, huh?” His voice rises, all mock cheer. “Waltzing in late, dressed like a hooker, knowing your daddy’s checkbook will cover the consequences.”
Tripp pushes himself up, swaggering toward me with the stumble of someone too drunk to feel it.
The sour reek of beer hits first, then the bloodshot eyes, glazed and feral enough to make my chest cinch tight.
He stops close, heat rolling off him, tongue flicking against a canine like he’s savoring the moment before he sinks his teeth in.
“Tell me, Finley… does the money still hit the same when they find out you like dick?”
My body goes rigid. Spine locked, shoulders squared, jaw clenched until my teeth scream. The air thickens as every eye in the room drags across my skin. For half a second I want to vanish and let my name shield me the way it always has.
But I can’t because disappearing means he’s right.
So I root myself, chin tilted high, throat raw with everything I refuse to say.
Silence can cut deeper than words, so I let it.
Let them watch. Let them wait for me to crumble.
Tripp chuckles. “Maybe Daddy can buy you a backbone to match the attitude. Or do you bend over every time someone with real power gets in your face?”
Tripp never sees him coming.
One second he’s smirking, puffed up with his own voice, and the next he’s airborne.
Knox slams him against the wall so hard the crack reverberates through the room.
Skeleton paint streaks across the drywall. Tripp flails, fingers scrabbling uselessly at Knox’s chest, but Knox’s hold doesn’t budge. The hockey mask is gone, abandoned somewhere in the chaos, and Tripp is forced to stare into those dark, merciless eyes.
“Is there a problem, Sanders?” Knox’s voice is ice.
Tripp wheezes, nothing but a rasp. Knox’s forearm grinds harder into his throat, lifting him as his toes scrape uselessly at the floor.
“Use your words, Pledge.”
He eases up only a fraction. Enough to let Tripp drag in one ugly gasp.
“N-no…”
Knox leans closer, heat pouring off him, menace woven into every syllable. “I can’t hear you.”
“No, Sir…” Tripp croaks, voice breaking.
Knox lets it hang there knowing every brother in the room will absorb it. Meanwhile, the moment etches itself into me like it’s carving out space I didn’t offer.
“Because from where I’m standing,” Knox says slowly, “it looks like you’ve got an issue with Finley.” His eyes cut to me and my whole body goes hot. “So let me make this clear.”
He slams Tripp harder against the wall, a thud that rattles the frames.
“Any issue you have with him? You have with me.”
Tripp’s frantic nodding is all but sobs now. Knox releases him without ceremony and he crumples to the floor, coughing, broken, like a puppet cut loose.
I can’t breathe. Not from fear, but from want. He followed me and stood up for me when I didn’t ask him to.
My cock is aching from it, but that doesn’t matter. My pledge brothers already don’t respect me, and if they think the President himself has to fight my battles I’m finished.
Even if we both know that little display wasn’t about politics or pledging or the house. It’s about him and me.
Knox doesn’t even glance at Tripp as he walks off, like what happened cost him nothing.
I meet his stare and force myself to give them a show. My lips curl into a sneer they can all believe.
“Respectfully, Sir…” I drag the word out, dripping it in sugar and venom at the same time. “…I had it handled.”
His brow ticks up, unimpressed. “Didn’t look like it.”
“It’s part of pledging. Part of brotherhood. We handle problems head-on so they don’t rot.” My words are clipped. An armor I don’t actually feel. “So while I appreciate the backup I don’t need you swooping in to fix things.”
“That’s what you want?” His voice is barely a whisper, words only for me.
This isn’t the Knox everyone else gets. Not the President with the steady hands and perfect mask. This is the Knox I’ve tasted. The one who stuck to me like smoke, seeping into places I can’t wash clean.
Always the savior, never the storm. He breaks just enough to keep me whole.
I step closer. “They already think my name buys me special treatment. I don’t need them thinking you hand it out because you fucked me once.”
His eyes drop to my lips and then drift back up my face. I don’t flinch under his gaze. Not with half my pledge brothers burning holes in my back.
“Fair play, Finley?” he asks, tilting his head. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
It shouldn’t affect me, but it does. My name curls off his tongue and sends heat crawling up the back of my neck. The sight of the flush in my cheeks lights a spark behind his eyes, something wicked and knowing that flickers long enough for me to see myself in it.
It’s a challenge, sure, but there’s something else there too. Like he’s trying to pass down a truth I haven’t earned yet.
I force the smirk. I have to. We’ve got an audience.
“Fuck me again,” I whisper, the words catching in my throat. “Maybe I’ll start believing your protective bullshit actually means something.”
He laughs then turns to the rest of the room with a nod that wipes it all clean.
“As you were, Pledges.”
Then he’s gone. Walking off like he didn’t shake the foundation of this house and me along with it.
I’m still staring after him when Joey slips into view and lets out a low, impressed whistle.
“That was hot,” he says. “Even I’m bricked up.”
I shoot him a look and roll my eyes, but my pulse won’t slow.
Behind us, Tripp is still coughing on the floor, his lackeys fluttering around him, the other pledges caught between staring at him and staring at me like they don’t know which side to take.
I’m split down the middle.
Part of me is still stunned, reeling, that the man I’ve been orbiting like a goddamn planet watched me walk away and followed. But the other part, the part rising like a tide, recognizes that what he did might’ve done more harm than good.
Tripp’s already climbing to his feet, brushing off one of our pledge brothers like the contact singed him, trying to patch together whatever’s left of his ego.
I should feel bad, but all I can feel is the throb in my cock and the slow, creeping truth that maybe power isn’t the poison I was taught to fear. Maybe power is only potential. Maybe it only turns dangerous when you start using it for yourself.
“What you want is already yours. Don’t be afraid to take it.”
Something sharp coils inside me, cold and clean and exhilarating, and I don’t hate how it feels.
I’ve been going about this all wrong.
“What you want is already yours.”
I’ve been so busy trying to be palatable. Trying to be the version of myself that someone like Knox Everett might want. Sweet but not too soft. Bold but not threatening.
Looking at the way Tripp’s jaw is clenched, the way his pride crumples around him like an empty can I see it for what it is. It’s a performance, and mine’s not that different.
“Don’t be afraid to take it.”
I am a Finley.
Maybe not in the way my dad intended all brute force, business deals, and social domination, but in the way that matters.
I know how to read a room. I know how to flip a script. I know how to shift the odds without ever breaking a sweat.
That’s not manipulation. That’s survival.
So why pretend to be above it now? Why act like I didn’t bait Knox the second I stepped into this party? Why act like I didn’t want exactly this?
Tripp got put in his place and I got my answer.
Knox bends for me.
I thought I caved to him over summer, but the truth is, he bent for me. He gave in before I ever had to ask, folded beneath a smile, a glance, a whimper he pretended not to hear. He let me take something from him and then ran before it could ruin him. Because that’s what it would’ve done.
If he’d stayed and kept giving, we would’ve burned the whole fucking world down.
That’s why he’s spent the semester pretending it didn’t happen. Knox Everett wasn’t afraid of what I wanted from him. He was terrified of how much of it he wanted to give.
Watching him go after Tripp, I see him clearly for the first time.
Obedient. Desperate. Broken in.
Knox Everett is not a prize I need to earn. He’s a dog itching for a leash, and I’m done pretending I don’t know how to hold it.
Maybe I should feel guilty for what I’ve done in reducing someone like Knox to this version of himself, but I don’t. I feel wanted and powerful.
I feel like the exact kind of spoiled, untouchable brat they all whisper about behind closed doors.
He thought he could keep me soft. Thought he could fuck the fire out of me. But softness is a blade, and I’ve learned how to use mine to cut deep; straight through the heart of him.
The thought sends me turning, heat licking at my spine. I don’t hear Joey calling after me. I don’t clock Tripp’s wounded pride or the whispers curling around the room. All I know is every step I take toward the hall where Knox disappeared feels like permission.
Not to want, but to take what’s already mine.