2. Mason
MASON
Ilingered at the curtain, not dropping my hand until Lilah walked back inside.
“For someone who doesn’t want her spying on you, you’re burning a hole through that glass.” Calder didn’t even look away from the screen where his car smashed through a convenience store’s glass window. The thrum of music from the speakers drowned out the noise of his gameplay.
“Fuck you.”
One-handed, he reached for his belt buckle. “If you’re sucking.”
I launched a mini foam puck at him.
It hit his ear with a satisfying snap. He barely flinched, but his car careening off a bridge and into a rushing river took the edge off my annoyance. “Dick.”
During sophomore year, Lilah spent most classes intensely scribbling, typing notes, or folding paper into origami shapes. I could tell what classrooms she’d been in from her creations in the trash. Breadcrumbs in the forest, signaling her path through the school.
She’d been almost easy to ignore—almost.
Lilah’s little additions to her Hawthorne Prep uniform. Small stars near the lapels on her shirt or her blazer, almost unnoticeable—almost.
The way her eyebrows furrowed whenever she intensely focused from her first-row seat in class.
How she ate her KitKats by biting off all the chocolate from the outside and then peeling them apart layer by layer.
The way she always slotted her notebooks into her backpack in the same order. The way her lips—
I knocked the thought from my mind. At Hawthorne Prep, hockey was king and dictated the social hierarchy.
Annoyingly, my eyes always searched for Lilah in any room but never found her at the pep rallies or hockey games. She wasn’t there, vying for a jersey or puck while screaming from the stands with her face painted.
Then, like a vision, two months ago, she appeared outside my window. Wearing dark green shorts, a white tank, and black flip-flops, Lilah Byrd was in my backyard. She disappeared, then reappeared with her dad, lugging a beat-to-hell trunk into the gardener’s cottage.
Lilah’s dad was the new gardener, replacing the most recent of the ones my stepmother, Alena, seemed to fire monthly.
Suburban life with a couple of kids didn’t have the same highs as walking runways and showing up on magazine covers all over the world, and she continued to think life wasn’t worth living if she, the house, and gardens weren’t photo-ready every second of every season.
But it brought Lilah to me.
The first night Lilah found me after one of my dad’s extra practice sessions, I should’ve told her to get the fuck away from me. That decision haunted me, just like every one of her smiles, laughs, and touches were seared into my mind.
I let my guard down over the summer, let myself feel things I’d never allowed in before, all for the girl with the shy smile and stars on her lapels. A gut-punch of realization: we’d never even kissed, but she’d left my insides a bloody, mangled mess.
My weakness risked the whole season.
“Winning is the only thing that matters.” My father, Lukyan Petrov, the four-Cup hockey great, squeezed my shoulder. “Your brother has learned this lesson well.”
Bair stood on the other side of our father, getting congratulated on his national championship win by another three-time Cup winner I’d idolized as a kid.
With his black hair and green eyes, no one ever questioned Bair’s relationship to our father. Only after a DNA test when I was seven had our father finally acknowledged me.
“The pleasure of a woman’s company has its place, but it can never compare to the significance of a legacy.
” Our father gripped both our shoulders then, his fingers stabbing into my muscles.
“But I fear Mason has been weak and doesn’t understand yet,” he said to Bair.
Then he dropped his hand and held out a phone to me, a paused video already cued up.
“He’s still young,” Bair said with an unplaceable tone. Taunting? Gloating? Irritated? Was he half as annoyed by my presence as I was his? Impossible. He’d never had to fight for our father’s attention.
The first time my father came to one of my peewee hockey games, I’d missed a pass, and he’d stared at me as if he’d never experienced a greater disappointment. I didn’t miss another pass that season. I worked harder. Laser-focused, precision on ice, I skated drills until I collapsed.
I gripped the phone to study and dissect whatever flaw he wanted erased. I would live and breathe his lesson.
His words when he drove me and my little sister, Zoe, through the Willowcrest front gates echoed in my head. “I did not have to do this.” He didn’t have to take us in, but he had. And I needed to prove the choice hadn’t been a mistake.
Only after ten long seconds, when the next clip began, did the images on screen register.
This wasn’t gameplay. This was Willowcrest security footage from the discreetly placed cameras Alena hadn’t wanted ruining the aesthetic of the grounds.
Our driveway. Our pool. Our gardener’s house. This was instructional.
Lilah was on the screen. Confusion rocketed through me as she ran to Ryker Ferris in shorts that hugged her every curve.
All Lilah’s chatter about her best friend “Rye” blasted through me.
She never mentioned him playing hockey and nearly breaking Erik’s arm last season.
Never said a word about his school winning the last three state championships over Hawthorne Prep.
Never told me he’d be driving his shitbox car to my house seconds after I left for the weekend.
Ryker picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder. Flames sandblasted the back of my skull. His hands gripped the backs of her legs, practically cupping her ass.
All of that had been enough to make me want to shred the sky, but then they disappeared into the house.
Was he touching her like I’d been dreaming about at night?
I’d never wanted to pressure her, had taken things slowly, and right now she was probably being pounded by the guy who’d fucking stolen the state championship from me three damn times.
They reemerged from the house half an hour later, Lilah in a bikini. In the next clip, they disappeared into the pool house, then came back out, laughing.
Had she pointed out where on the floor she’d found me writhing in pain the first night she’d stayed with me out there? Told him how I’d gritted my teeth, unable to stop shaking like a bitch, avoiding the main house so Zoe didn’t hear me?
He kept grabbing at her. Tossing her in the pool.
Touching her. Each time, bombs of betrayal detonated in my skull.
Then they walked back across the grass to her house, and that was it.
For all I knew, he was still there, between her thighs, her fingers raking through his hair as she called his name.
I barely held it together, wanting to shatter the phone.
Not wanting to believe what played out in front of me in 4K.
It would’ve been crushing to watch this on my own, but in a Vegas hotel suite, beside my father, hockey greats, and my half brother, who never seemed to drop a pass or fuck up…
they all knew I’d been sucked into a honey trap.
The chemical burn of betrayal was so scalding, I expected my skin to blister.
So, no, I wasn’t interested in playing nice with Lilah Byrd.
I’d excused myself from that dinner and locked myself in my suite bedroom with the excuse of gameplay research. Inside, the gnarled, twisting knots of anguish gouged their way through my chest. Her deception swelled inside my skull like truckloads of cement hardening around my brain.
She’d been fucking with me all summer. I replayed all our conversations, examining them from a new angle.
All my confessions.
My doubts about the state championship and how I didn’t want to let everyone down.
Calder favoring his right after an injury last season.
Erik never pressed hard enough when it came to forechecking, and the arm her boyfriend had nearly broken still gave him trouble sometimes.
Galen’s glove-side save struggles.
I’d served my teammates up on the altar of her sweet smile and gentle touches.
I yanked my tablet from my bag and queued up the library of gameplay videos my father had compiled. I’d zero in on Ryker’s weaknesses and brutally attack every. Single. One until I won.
At nearly dawn, another Verona High video played after the final buzzer sounded while I replayed Lilah’s cruel mind game. How long had it taken her to report back everything I said? Hours? Days? Or did she wait for their reunion right in my backyard to spill every detail I’d told her?
In the video, Ryker dropped his stick, shot out of the team box, and made a beeline for the crowd of celebrating fans. I’d been about to turn it off when I caught the curls of her dark brown hair.
I shot up straight in my chair. Ryker completely enveloped her. Lilah disappeared beneath his arms as they were all over each other. Play dissection was impossible now. I dug up every Verona High game for the past three seasons and skipped to the ends for a Lilah sighting.
She only appeared at one game per season since freshman year, even before she transferred, and it was never the Hawthorne Prep game.
She’d been smarter than that. She’d been walking the Hawthorne Prep halls while sleeping with the enemy.
Detonations of anger exploded in my chest. This wasn’t a one-time or short-term thing. They’d been together for years.
She’d been careful not to draw attention to herself, but it felt like something she’d have gloated about.
Her boyfriend, the state champ. It might’ve even gotten her a few party invites.
She could’ve worn his green jersey—a color that had been de facto banned by the entire student body.
But she continued her unassuming, quiet ways.
An enemy with her cute origami, shy peeks and little embroidered stars. Our biggest rival’s spy, and she wandered around our hallways, wearing the Hawthorne Hawks colors while secretly fucking a Verona Viper.