Dirty Trick
Chapter 20
SOPHIA
My phone won't stop ringing.
I groan and drag myself out of sleep, blindly shoving my hand under pillow after pillow until I finally find the vibrating plastic. Prince, who had been curled up warm against my side, meows in protest and leaps off the mattress. I don't blame him.
The screen light hits like a flashbang. I squeeze my eyes shut, then force them open.
2:00 AM.
Twenty-three unread messages from Maria.
My stomach drops. I sit up fast, the last remnants of sleep instantly evaporating. I open the chat and start scrolling, my thumb fly across the glass.
What?
I keep scrolling, faster now, skimming past enthusiastic, half-slurred updates about the DJ and the boat, about a guy named Alex she thinks is good-looking? and something about a dance floor. Then, my eyes snag on a line near the bottom. My breath hitches.
Below it are four more texts, a chaotic mess of messy typing, random emojis, and zero punctuation.
I throw the duvet off before I've even finished reading.
I shove a hand through my hair, staring at the glowing screen. I press her name and call. It rings all the way out to voicemail. I redial immediately. Nothing.
I slap the lamp switch on, flooding the room with harsh light.
The apartment is dead quiet. Clara's door is shut tight. I creep down the hallway, shoes clutched in my hand, testing every inch of the floor before committing my weight. I hold my breath past the creaky floorboard by the kitchen, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I pull up Google Maps by the front door.
Walking takes twenty-seven minutes. The bus isn't an option at 2:00 AM. Driving takes ten.
My gaze drifts from the garage door to Clara's keys on the hook.
Technically, she told me two weeks ago that I could borrow the Beetle whenever I needed it. Whenever you need it, Shopi. Her exact words.
Of course, she meant for grocery runs. She meant during the day. She absolutely did not mean a 2:00 AM stealth mission to a party I had explicitly sworn off.
But Maria needs me. I grab the keys.
This is fine, I text myself mentally, easing the garage door open millimeter by millimeter. Find her. Get her. Come straight home. In and out.
The door glides open in absolute silence.
I'm taking that as a sign from the universe.
Five minutes later, I turn onto the harbor road.
I hear the party before I see it, a low, rhythmic bass that comes through the car door rather than the speakers, the kind that settles in your chest before your brain even registers it as sound.
Then come the lights.
The yacht sits in the marina, blazing against the dark water. It is lit from every angle, music rolling off the decks in heavy waves.
I park slightly outside the main lot, cut the engine, and sit there for a moment looking at it through the windshield.
Okay, Sophia. I take a deep breath. You go in, you find Maria, you leave. That is the whole plan. That's it.
I say nothing to myself about Lorenzo.
I get out of the car
There are at least fifty people on the pier who aren't getting in.
I piece this together quickly from the general atmosphere of frustrated energy—people clustered in tight groups, some of them annoyed, some resigned. The boat has apparently hit capacity a while ago. I push through the crowd with my head down, my purpose entirely clear.
The man at the entrance puts his arm up the second I get close.
"End of the line for you, Princess."
"I'm not here for the party," I say quickly. "I'm just picking up a friend."
I realize the second the words leave my mouth, judging by the dead look in his eyes, that he has probably heard that exact sentence a thousand times over the last few hours.
He shakes his head, completely unmoved.
I stare at him. Seriously.
I am still trying to work out what lie to tell next when a second man appears at his shoulder. He leans in, murmuring something I can't quite hear over the thumping bass. The bouncer glances at me—a brief, assessing look—and then his arm comes down.
I don't ask any questions. And take my chance and go in.
Behind me, a group of girls says something sharp in my direction. I catch the venomous tone, if not the exact words. I keep walking.
The deck hits me all at once.
Bass through the floor. Heat of bodies. The sharp tang of expensive alcohol, salt water, and smoke all pressed together. The sheer volume of the noise.
I have never been to anything like this in my life.
The deck is enormous. The DJ booth sits center stage, elevated and lit from below in blinding neon colors.
People are packed everywhere—dancing, screaming over the music, or leaning against the glass railings with drinks in hand.
At the edges of everything, the dark water moves on both sides, the city lights scattered like broken glass across its surface.
How did they even fit all of this onto a yacht?
I spot a group of students from my year near the railing and head straight for them, hoping for an easy out.
"Hey!" I raise my voice, shouting over the thudding bass. "Have you seen Maria? She..."
"What?" one of the guys yells back, squinting at me.
"Maria!" I make a useless gesture with my hands. "Has anyone seen her?"
A girl in the group looks me up and down. "Who are you?"
Alright then.
I don't bother answering. I turn on my heel and keep moving.
The crowd thickens toward the middle of the deck, turning into a solid wall of moving bodies.
Someone nearly walks straight into me, a dark drink sloshing over the rim of their cup.
I dodge it by a fraction of an inch, keeping my head down as I weave through the chaos,past loud conversations spilling into walkways, ducking under an extended arm, and navigating around a group that has collectively decided to stop moving in the worst possible bottleneck.
What am I even doing here?
I found the staircase.
At the bottom of the steps, a couple had decided this was a perfectly reasonable place to treat like a private bedroom. I edged past them, tossing a quick, dry excuse me that neither of them registered, and forced my way up to the secondary tier.
The air on the upper deck was instantly cooler, biting through the thin fabric of my clothes.
There was more breathing room here. While the bass still rattled up through the floorboards like an erratic heartbeat, the open sky stretched out above us.
I could actually see more than a few feet in front of my own face—a sudden, genuine luxury after the suffocating claustrophobia of the main deck.
I pulled out my phone, the screen casting a harsh white glow over my knuckles, and tried Maria's number again.
Still nothing. No ring. No voicemail. Just a dead line.
I stood frozen, staring down at the glass screen, desperately debating my next move.
Should I dive back down into the meat-grinder of the main deck?
Try the lower cabins?
Was it possible Maria had somehow materialized in a corner I'd already checked?
Before I could decide, a voice cut through the hum of the crowd.
"No way."
I looked up, my guard instantly rising.
Two guys were navigating the sparse crowd on the upper deck, heading in a straight line toward me. They were both wearing identical varsity jackets, and something about the heavy, predatory symmetry of their stride made me take a small, instinctive step backward.
I recognized them. Vaguely. From the university's football roster.
The taller one—the one who had spoken—was already stretching his lips into a wide, ugly grin. "She actually came," he said, directing the comment to his friend as though I were invisible. As though I were a prop. The punchline to a joke whose setup he'd been anticipating all night.
I looked between them, my phone gripped tightly in my palm. "...Sorry?"
"We didn't think you'd actually show," the other ne said. He was wearing the tight, strained expression of someone trying and failing to keep a straight face. "Like...props, honestly. Bold move."
I stared at them, a cold knot forming in my stomach. "What? I'm not here for the party. I'm here because of my friend."
"Right." The taller one nodded, a slow, exaggerated motion. It was the patronizing nod of someone pretending to agree with something they found excruciatingly funny. "About that."
The shift in his tone made the hairs on my arms stand up. "What about it?"
They exchanged a look. It was the kind of look that contained an entire silent conversation. The kind that made a sharp spike of dread prickle the back of my neck.
"Maria's fine," the shorter one offered, shrugging a shoulder.
I blinked, momentarily thrown off balance. "What? How do you even know I was talking about her?"
"Because she's fine." He tilted his head, watching me like a scientist observing a rat in a maze. "She's been fine all night. She's downstairs dancing with some people from your year. Has been for the last hour. Honestly, she looks like she's having a great time."
"Then why did she..."
The words died in my throat.
The pieces began to fall into place, arriving one by one with the slow, agonizing precision of an execution. The puzzle was rearranging itself into a picture I absolutely did not want to see.
The weirdly enthusiastic messages. The sudden, desperate shift in tone. The fact that she hadn't answered her phone a single time after begging for help. Not once.
I looked at the two athletes, the cold air suddenly feeling very thin.
"Those messages," I whispered, the realization tasting like ash. "They weren't from Maria."
Neither of them said a word.
The silence hung between us, heavy and incriminating. It was, in itself, the only confirmation I needed.
A terrible, suffocating beat passed.
"Guilty as charged," the blond one finally admitted, offering a loose, unbothered smirk. "We sort of... borrowed it. Earlier. And we may have sent a few texts to see if we could get a rise out of you."
My fingers tightened around my own phone until the plastic casing creaked. "You stole her phone."
"Borrowed"
"You stole her phone," I said again, forcing the words out with razor-sharp clarity. "And you sent me fake messages at two in the morning just to get me to come here."
The shorter one opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off.
"And I drove here," I continued, the momentum of my own voice carrying me forward because I couldn't seem to stop it. "In my aunt's car, in the dead of night, because I genuinely thought my friend was..."
I bit down on the rest of the sentence.
Take a breath.
I forced air into my lungs and looked at them, letting the silence weigh heavily between us. "Whose sick idea was this?"
Another look passed between them. Faster this time. Considerably more cautious.
And somehow without either of them uttering a single syllable, I already knew. The realization settled deep in my chest, arriving the way you feel a sudden drop in temperature before you can name it. It was cold, certain, and not even slightly surprising.
Lorenzo ass Calloway
I was already moving before my brain fully mapped out the trajectory.
I cut through the sparse crowd, throwing myself down the stairs and back into the sweltering meat-grinder of the main deck.
Down here, the music was deafening, the strobe lights blinding.
Two hundred people danced like nothing else in the universe existed outside the confines of this hull, caught up in a relentless bassline that vibrated all the way into my back teeth.
I pushed through the wall of sweating bodies.
The truth was an anchor in my chest; I didn't need their verbal confirmation. I didn't need a confession. I knew.
I dodged a guy sloshing a drink over the rim of his cup, stepped around a cluster of people who had stopped dead in the middle of the walkway for no apparent reason, and kept charging forward.
The anger felt incredibly clean. Focused.
I was intensely grateful for the specific clarity of it, the way it cut right through the sensory chaos of the boat and handed me a simple, linear path to follow.
Find him.
And then, I saw him.
Lorenzo was standing in the far corner near the outdoor bar, a glass in his hand, casually speaking to someone I didn't recognize.
I closed the distance between us like a weapon seeking a target. Reaching him, I locked my fingers around his forearm and yanked.
He spun around fast, his eyes flashing.
He looked down at me.
I opened my mouth, fully armed. I had the words.
They were right there, every single one of them arranged, loaded, and ready to fire, beginning with you stole Maria's phone and ending somewhere considerably less polite.
I had been building that exact paragraph the entire way down the stairs, and it was a brilliant, devastating argument. I was going to give it to him.
Then, the neon light from the bar caught the right side of his face.
And I froze.
It wasn't a conscious decision. It wasn't a choice. It was just a complete, jarring halt, the way your brain short-circuits when something lands in front of you that requires processing time before you can move again.
His cheekbone.
The bruising was dark, purple-black, and already fully settled into the skin. The split at the corner of his lip was slightly swollen, raw against the sharp line of his jaw.
His eyes locked onto mine.
He didn't say a word. He was simply waiting. I could see it in the intense, absolute quality of his stillness. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't performing. He was just... waiting.
Around us, the party raged on. The crowd shifted, the lights pulsed, and somewhere nearby, someone let out a loud, drunken laugh. The night continued being exactly what it was—relentless, bright, and completely indifferent to the two of us standing frozen in the eye of the storm.
I stared at the dark mark on his cheek. Then, I forced my eyes back to his.
"You had them use Maria's phone," I said.
My voice came out much quieter than I had intended.
It wasn't soft but the rage was still burning right beneath the surface, changing nothing but it was quiet.
The jagged edge of my anger had suddenly morphed into a shape I didn't have a name for. "To get me here?"
He didn't deny it. He didn't even blink. He just kept looking at me.
"Why?" I asked forcing my voice to stay steady and calm as possible.
Not how could you. Not the explosive, rehearsed confrontation I had spent the last three minutes scripting. Just a singular, breathless question.
Why?
Something subtle moved across his expression. It was quick, entirely unguarded, and vanished back into the dark before I could fully categorize it.
Lorenzo opened his mouth. Closed it.
He stared down at me for a single, heavy second that stretched out far longer than a second ever should.