The Truth (Charade #3)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

FORD

T he sun was shining down on the verdant, perfectly landscaped quad at Wayland-Blaine Academy.

Birds were chirping, the memorial fountain was splashing, and privileged students with no clue what the real world was like were frolicking around in their freshly dry-cleaned uniforms like the assholes they were.

I was so done with this place.

Two girls walked by with binders clutched to their chests, laughing with each other.

Other kids sprawled under shady oaks in their stupid cliques eating lunch.

Everybody was oblivious, just going about their days as if their lives hadn’t just imploded.

Unlike me.

This never would have happened if I hadn’t left my chemistry textbook at home.

Normally I didn’t lug it back and forth to school—the thing weighed at least five pounds—but we had a test today, and because the price of tuition granted us certain considerations , it was going to be open-book.

Being a fairly average student, my GPA needed all the help it could get.

Hence my mad dash home after third period.

But now all I could think about was how much I wished I’d remembered the fucking book when I had left for school this morning, instead of having to sneak back into my own house and accidentally overhearing my parents having another one of their arguments.

At least, that’s what I’d thought it was.

Until I heard what they were actually saying.

My parents fought plenty, but always about small stuff.

Where to go for dinner.

Who to invite to parties.

To whom they were or were not speaking in their social circle.

The usual.

This argument had been different.

I could tell from the moment I heard the tone of my mother’s voice that it was something serious.

Serious like cancer, or a death in the family, or some kind of catastrophic financial or (God forbid) social ruin.

Which is why I’d decided to eavesdrop.

I should have walked away.

But there’s a reason they say curiosity killed the cat.

“You’re disgusting,” my mother was saying as I crept toward the library doors.

“Stop being so melodramatic,” Dad had replied, sounding bored.

“It’s an open secret. You think I’m the only one doing it?”

“These dalliances aren’t just a stain on our marriage. They’re embarrassing. You promised you’d stop!”

I was shocked to hear the tears in her voice; she wasn’t the emotional type.

In fact, I’d never seen my mother cry.

Usually if she got upset about something, she simply left the room.

Which meant she might come barreling out the door any moment.

I ducked behind the heavy drapes and held my breath.

That was when the rest of it fully sank in.

Dalliances . Plural.

My father had been having an affair—no, multiple affairs.

He’d been stepping out behind my mom’s back, and apparently after he’d made a vow to stop.

Meaning he had a history of cheating.

I’d had no idea.

Sure, I knew my parents didn’t have a warm, cutesy marriage like the kind I saw on TV, but I still thought they had a stable relationship.

One that was solid and built on mutual respect and compatibility, if not affection.

My mother wasn’t done talking.

“Ever since you got mixed up with Konstantin Zoric, it’s been one ‘rumor’ after another,” she hissed.

“And I know they’re not just rumors. Some of those girls are barely eighteen.”

She was definitely crying.

My stomach churned. Dad was screwing Konstantin’s models?

Zoric…the name was familiar.

Not just because Konstantin ran KZ Modeling, which was one of the most famous agencies in the world, but because his kids were classmates of mine at Wayland-Blaine.

Stefan had graduated already, though he was still kind of a legend, but Luka was a senior this year and then the youngest one was Mary, or Maureen…

no, Mara. I never paid much attention to her—she was kind of a quiet, lone wolf type—and even though she was pretty enough, there were plenty of other girls at school to keep me occupied.

“They’re not affairs, dear,” I heard my father say drolly.

“Not technically.”

“Not technically ? What does that mean?” My mother’s voice was shrill and panicked.

“They’re paid,” he said.

“It’s transactional. Not a real relationship. Don’t take it so personally.”

“They’re hookers? And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

I stood there, frozen in shock.

Not only had my father been cheating, long term, but he was doing it with sex workers supplied by my classmate’s father.

Actual prostitutes. No wonder my mother was freaking out.

Talk about adding insult to injury.

Mom had let out another pathetic wail, and that’s when I’d slipped down the hall and out the front door.

I couldn’t listen to any more of that.

They had to be on the brink of divorce.

And I’d seen divorce rip through families before.

My friends with divorced parents had gotten uprooted, their entire lives thrown into disarray.

Everything had changed.

They had shared custody arrangements, different homes, different sets of rules, parents who continued to bicker and snipe at each other from afar.

Some of my friends had even been forced to move away from Chicago to live in the fucking burbs, or even out of state.

Others only saw their mom or dad on the weekend, or during school breaks.

That kind of change to my life, my routine, would be the worst thing on the planet.

Not just disruptive, but humiliating.

And what if the lawyer fees or the divorce settlement or my mom’s alimony messed with my allowance?

What if I had to give up my car?

The whole drive back to campus, I was in a rage.

So here I was, brooding during the remainder of my lunch period, gripping my book so hard my fingers had gone numb.

My life as I knew it was over.

Mainly, I was furious at my father.

Obviously. How hard was it to keep your dick in your pants when you were that old?

But my mom was to blame, too.

The way she nagged and shopped her way through the money in their checking account every month and generally made herself a royal pain to be around, it was no wonder Dad had been driven to seek out other women.

My mother prided herself on being the ideal society wife—going to the right events, always looking perfectly put together no matter what, making sure she was seen with and by the right people—but behind closed doors, it was a whole other story.

I hated to think about it in detail, but it was clear she fucked up whatever her wifely duties to my father were supposed to be.

When a man was getting what he needed from his marriage, he had no reason to wander, be it for emotional or physical reasons.

Regardless of the state of their relationship, though, I didn’t want them to get a divorce.

Why should I have to suffer just because they’d made poor choices?

They said the vows, ‘til death do they part, and as far as I was concerned that meant they should stay married. For my sake, at least. They could separate after I left for college. It was only a few more years.

Gripping my Mountain Dew can had left me with a fist full of crumpled aluminum. As I walked over to the recycling can, I debated just leaving campus. Playing hooky for the rest of the day. Maybe I’d hit up one of the dive bars on Lincoln Ave that wouldn’t look too hard at my fake ID.

Then I saw Mara Zoric walking across the quad.

Konstantin Zoric’s daughter.

He was the person who was really to blame for all of this.

My father would have never gotten involved with a revolving door of barely legal sex workers if it wasn’t for that scumbaggy piece of shit and his so-called “modeling agency,” which was clearly just a front for prostitutes.

And meanwhile I’d have to see Mara at school every day, watching her sashay around without a care in the world, as though her father hadn’t singlehandedly just ruined my life and the lives of countless others.

It didn’t help that she was prettier than I’d realized, which somehow made it all worse.

That long black hair, the heart-shaped face, the kind of tits you just can’t hide.

She was usually the wallflower type, but I could see her laughing with someone at the other end of the quad.

My vision went red.

Suddenly, all I wanted was for her to feel as bad as I did right now.

Like her whole world was falling apart, and couldn’t ever be put back together.

I wondered if she knew what her father really did.

What paid for her nice house, her private school tuition, the black town car that dropped her off every day.

I mean, the girl wasn’t stupid.

She probably knew everything.

I had a Sharpie in my backpack.

Ducking back into the building, I stalked to the main hallway, to the row of lockers that faced the front entrance doors of the school.

Those lockers were the first thing you saw when you walked in every morning, flanked on both sides by gleaming trophy cases, the Wayland-Blaine crest hanging on a banner above.

I glanced down the hall to make sure it was empty.

Everyone was either at lunch or in their afternoon classes.

I knew it didn’t matter which locker I wrote on.

In big, black, capital letters, I wrote Mara’s name.

Her full name: MARA ZORIC.

Then underneath it, IS A WHORE.

The janitor would clean it up soon enough, but that didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that everyone in school would see it first. The rumor mill would do the rest.

Sharpie in hand, I turned toward the gym.

My revenge was far from complete.

Next stop: the boys’ locker room.