Chapter 4
Seventeen years ago
Aubrey hated English class.
She always sat at the back, as far from Mrs. Hayes’s attentive eyes as possible, and passed the time with a book of logic
puzzles she kept tucked on her lap. Why waste time studying a language she’d grasped at the age of three, anyway?
She crossed out a box on her puzzle chart, the classroom melting to a blur of light and chatter. She never tired of the mathematics
behind the deduction work, how the puzzle’s facts layered in her mind like crystal lattice. Not to mention the incomparable
sense of completion at the end, that jewel box click when the last tick mark found its place.
Up front, Mrs. Hayes started droning. Probably about Wuthering Heights, which Aubrey had skimmed the CliffsNotes for.
Since her cheerleading uniform did little to hide her contraband puzzles, she fluffed up the pillowy parka she’d donned to ward off the January chill.
Let Mrs. Hayes think she was cold. At this point, Aubrey was only marking time until graduation, anyway.
Four months. Exactly five thousand, five hundred and eighty more minutes of English class.
Then, at summer’s end, she’d be bound for New York.
She’d already applied to NYU early decision and gotten her acceptance letter.
Life was waiting. Math was waiting.
“. . . new student today. Let’s make him welcome.”
Okay, so maybe they weren’t being tortured with books just yet. Aubrey lifted her head just as a stranger slid into the empty
desk beside hers.
Her classmates twisted in their seats. The newcomer clearly wanted no part of the attention, because he hunched over his notebook,
his pencil poised above a fresh page, as if begging Mrs. Hayes to move on.
Aubrey drummed her fingers against her desk. Huh. Henderson rarely got new students, and never so close to year’s end. This
one was doing his best to meld with his seat, but his slouch couldn’t disguise his ranginess.
A thicket of black curls obscured his face, so her focus strayed to his wrists. The frayed cuffs of his olive green sweatshirt
fell short, the garment at least two sizes too small, and his wristbones jutted as if trying to lance through his skin. His
hands were similarly devoid of fat, long-fingered and knobby-knuckled.
She frowned. Either he went hungry at home, or he had the metabolism of a nuclear reactor.
Her gaze slid upward again. A flash of glistening black eyes met hers before the boy retreated behind his hair.
“Hi,” she whispered. “I’m Aubrey. It’s nice to meet you.”
He gave no indication of having heard. Up front, Mrs. Hayes launched into a diatribe about Emily Bronte’s commentary on passion
and obsession, and eventually, Aubrey shrugged and returned to her puzzle book. Clearly, the new kid wasn’t the friendly type.
Which suited her fine. By summer’s end, Henderson would be in her rearview mirror, and this silent boy and his bony hands
with it.
After class, Gallant caught up to Aubrey in the hallway.
He walked backward in front of her, matching her pace. “Hey, MacLean, looking good. That uniform does you all kinds of favors.
You should wear it more often.”
She rolled her eyes. “I wear it every Wednesday, Gallant. Just like every other cheerleader in school.”
“Which officially makes Wednesday my favorite day of the week.” He snapped his gum and grinned. “Hey, so you wanna skip next
period? We could head out to the quarry, maybe—”
“I’ve got calculus.” She tried to step around him, but he adjusted his trajectory to move with her. “Which I never skip. Not
even for someone as charming as you.”
If he picked up on her sarcasm, he gave no indication, and she suspected her insult had gone entirely unappreciated. Pity.
With his bronze hair and luminous blue eyes, Gallant pretty much did whatever he wanted and had long ago gotten used to hearing
yes.
But Aubrey had always found something . . . empty about him. As if no amount of lavished attention could ever satisfy. Gallant
Nobel was like a hole in the ground—no matter how much water you poured in, you could never fill it up.
“C’mon. Who cares about math when—” Gallant stumbled, then righted himself with a huff. He’d backed into someone who stood
unmoving in the middle of the hallway.
It was the new kid, scribbling in a notebook. He turned slowly, as if annoyed by the fact that his failure to move had almost
bowled someone over.
A thread of curiosity tugged at Aubrey’s insides.
Despite the curls falling into his eyes, he couldn’t hide from her here, and she seized the opportunity to scan his face.
Like his hands, his features were prominent, his cheeks hollowed beneath their bladed arches almost to the point of gauntness.
That, along with his squared chin and flinty dark eyes, gave him an austere beauty, a stark sort of allure that reminded her of a doomed hero in a postapocalyptic tragedy.
Gallant brushed off his letterman jacket with contrived concern. “Yo, new guy. Watch where you’re going.”
The boy said nothing.
“Hey.” Gallant waved a hand in front of the kid’s face. “You hearing me?”
The boy stared, flat, and a thought occurred. Maybe he hadn’t actually meant to ignore her in English. Maybe he hadn’t answered
her because he couldn’t. Maybe he was writing things down in the middle of the hallway because that was his only method of communication.
She tugged at Gallant’s sleeve. “Hey, don’t be rude. I’m not sure he actually speaks.”
That got a reaction. The boy’s attention slid to her, his expression withering.
“I speak,” he said, each word weighted with condescension. Then, to Gallant, “And you walked into me.”
Gallant’s expression darkened. He stood eye to eye with the kid, but had a forty-pound advantage, at least. “Hey, man. You
were in my way. Just say sorry. That’s all I ask.”
The boy’s lips thinned. His entire being seemed to compress inward.
Aubrey’s heart ground out a sympathetic beat. Gallant Nobel—captain of the football team, homecoming king, Mister Popularity—could
probably break this twiggy newcomer in half with hardly any effort. No wonder the guy looked scared.
“Hey.” She pulled at Gallant’s arm. She had no desire to watch the new kid get beaten up in the hallway. Or at all. “Do you still wanna skip?” Words motored from her mouth. Anything to wrench his attention away. “I don’t know about the quarry, but if you wanted to see a movie . . .”
Thankfully, Gallant let himself be dragged away. When Aubrey glanced back, the new kid stared down at his hands, as if wondering
which finger Gallant would have broken first.
“What a freak.” Gallant’s voice was hard. “What the hell was his problem, anyway?”
Before she could respond, he shook off her grip and stalked away, the offer to skip class forgotten.
Hours later, when the last bell rang, Aubrey headed to cheerleading practice. She was cutting through the frosty brick alley
between the cafeteria and the gymnasium when she ran straight into a wall of people. Which only ever meant one thing, here.
A fight.
She groaned and delved into the throng. She was at least mildly interested in finding out which hotheaded jock had caught
another guy eyeing his girlfriend, but mostly she just wanted to get to practice on time. Then she glimpsed two heads at the
crowd’s epicenter—one bronze, the other dark and shaggy-curled—and stopped as abruptly as if she’d face-planted into a wall.
Oh, god. The new kid. Why hadn’t he stayed out of Gallant’s way? Why hadn’t Gallant just let it go?
She flung out elbows, forcing her way to the front. The students had formed a ragged ring, and Gallant swaggered within, fists
up. The new kid stood uncannily still, assessing his opponent with hard black eyes. He wore a threadbare bomber jacket he’d
clearly acquired secondhand. His backpack lay discarded on the asphalt.
“Gallant!” Aubrey shrieked. “Stop! Don’t hurt him!”
Gallant didn’t hear or, more likely, didn’t care. He darted forward, his letterman jacket flapping open on the icy air.
But the new kid turned to look straight at her. The touch of his eyes harpooned her to the spot.
She flung up her hands in a stop gesture just as Gallant’s fist connected.
The boy’s head snapped sideways. His curls straightened and sprang back like stretched rubber bands. He stood there, hunched,
his hair shielding his face, while Aubrey wondered wildly whether she could catch him before he toppled.
But he didn’t go down. A hush blanketed the crowd.
Gallant retreated, glancing from his clenched fist to his opponent and back again, as if he couldn’t figure out what had just
happened. After a long moment, the new kid straightened, then hauled his hair back with one hand.
And smiled.
It wasn’t much—just a thin, hard flash on a mouth that was split and bleeding—but it did something funny to Aubrey’s stomach.
A tiny sound snuck from her throat as the boy raised his fists. The gesture looked so . . . fluid. As if he’d done this a
thousand times. As if he’d come into the world already knowing how to curl his fingers in that particular way.
Gallant blanched and edged backward. The new kid moved with him, surefooted, then pounced.
Aubrey’s breath hung suspended, her need for air receding. She’d seen fights before, lots of them. Inevitably, they involved
more grunting and huffing than anything else, and usually ended with a few panicked, graceless swings that rarely found their
targets.
This was . . . not that. This was something else entirely. Because this kid was ferocious. And beautiful. And he knew exactly
what he was doing.
He spiraled around Gallant, his fists flicking out with bruising precision. He delivered a strike to the jaw. One, two to the torso. He melted from Gallant’s answering bludgeon like so much air parted by a blown breath, then slid back in and drove a knee into Gallant’s stomach.
The whole time, his face never changed. He looked . . . calm. Certain. The hardness from just moments ago gave way to a resolve