Chapter 4

Kaleena

Raiden Blackwood has made me cry in public nine times. I keep count the way other girls keep diaries.

Water drips from the frayed hem of my jeans onto the white marble of his foyer, pooling around my soaked sneakers. Raiden stands two feet away, his broad shoulders blocking the warm glow of the penthouse while the front door clicks shut behind me.

"I'm not taking another step," I say, my voice trembling with cold and rage as I hold up the silver USB drive between two stiff fingers. "Take your midterm slides and let me out. Unless you want to explain how the hell you knew I was coming here twenty minutes after I got kicked out of my apartment."

Raiden doesn't reach for the flash drive. His storm--gray eyes stay locked on my face, his jaw clenching beneath the faded bruise on his cheekbone. He says nothing.

"Right," I mutter, my chest constricting at his suffocating silence. "Why waste breath on the charity case when you don't have an audience to laugh on cue?"

"You're dripping on my floor, Donovan," he says, his tone flat and unreadable.

"Then take the drive so I can leave!" I snap, thrusting the small piece of metal closer to his chest. "I only came here because you threatened to tank our presentation grade tomorrow morning, and I can't afford a zero on my scholarship. Take it!"

He doesn't move a muscle. His gaze drops to my shivering hands. "We aren't done talking about the slides."

"We haven't said a single word about the slides!" My hands curl into tight fists at my sides. "All you ever do is wait until a crowd is watching to make my life hell, so what do you want from me when the door is closed?"

"You think I need an audience to deal with you?" Raiden asks quietly, taking half a step closer until the heat radiating off his skin brushes my cold cheeks.

"I don't think it----I know it!" I fire back, standing my ground even as my teeth chatter. "Nine times in two years, Blackwood. You never miss a chance to put me in my place when the whole campus is looking."

That is always how his cruelty works. It never happens in the dark.

The first time----number one on my list----happens during sophomore fall. I am running late for life drawing, cutting through the lower concourse of the campus hockey arena to beat the October sleet. Someone leaves the heavy door to the main ice pad propped open, and a puddle of melted water coats the rubber mat outside the threshold. My sneaker hits the slick patch at a dead run. My feet fly out from under me, my spine slams against the floor, and my spiral sketchbook skids twenty feet across the open ice, pages flapping wide.

The varsity roster is warming up near the blue line. Skates scrape to a halt.

Raiden glides over first, wearing the black practice jersey with the captain's C stitched over his chest. He stops inches from my splayed pages, lowers the blade of his stick onto my sketchbook, and stares down at me with my elbows scraped raw. For one long beat, his dark eyes pin me to the threshold.

"Watch the ice, art girl," Raiden says, his voice carrying clearly across the silent rink.

Eight boys in helmets burst out laughing, slapping their sticks against the boards. The nickname follows me for two straight years. I can't walk past an athlete on the quad without hearing art girl whispered behind a smirk.

"Take off your soaked shoes, Donovan," Raiden says now, snapping me back into his marble foyer. His deep voice is rough, commanding, and devoid of apology. "You're shaking so hard you're going to drop my drive, and you're ruining the stone."

"Screw your floor," I snap, tossing the USB drive onto the entry table beside his keys. "And screw your presentation. Go find someone else to torment tonight."

I spin on my heel and lunge for the heavy brass handle of the front door.

I don't even get my fingers around the metal. Raiden moves with terrifying speed, his large hand shooting out to clamp around my wet wrist.

"Let go of me!" I wrench my arm back, twisting hard to break his grip.

"Calm down, Donovan----"

"Don't tell me to calm down! Get your hands off me!"

My soaked heel catches the strap of the massive black hockey bag sitting beside the wall. My ankle rolls. I gasp as my balance gives out completely, dragging Raiden down with me as we pitch toward the hard marble floor.

With a sharp curse, Raiden hooks his free arm around my waist. In mid--air, he twists his massive frame violently beneath mine, taking the full, brutal impact of the stone across his own broad back and shoulders.

I land squarely on top of his hard chest, my backpack tumbling off my arm as the breath rushes out of my lungs.

"Get off me!" I pant, shoving my palms against his black t--shirt to push myself up, only to freeze when my fingers splay directly over his ribs.

Beneath the thin cotton, Raiden's heart is hammering against my palm like a trapped wild thing. It isn't the steady pulse of an athlete who just tripped over a bag. It is racing harder and faster than mine----frantic, violent, and completely out of control.

I stare down into his face, my wet hair curtaining his cheeks. His pupils are blown wide, swallowing the gray irises, and his chest heaves beneath my weight. It makes zero sense that the guy who despises me has a pulse tripping like a live wire under my hands, so my analytical brain immediately files it under things I cannot explain.

"Why the hell is your heart beating like that?" I whisper, my breath catching. "And why did you just take the fall for me? You hate me, Blackwood."

"Stay still before you hurt yourself, Donovan," he grits out, his large hands flexing against my waist before he forces his fingers to open and drop to the marble.

"Hurt myself? Since when do you care about hurting me?" My laugh comes out ragged and bitter. "What was the fine--arts hall in December, Raiden? A favor?"

"Get off my chest if you're going to lecture me," he mutters, though he makes no move to push me away, his jaw clenching as my knees press against his hips.

"I want an answer!" I demand, glaring down into his storm--gray eyes. "You went out of your way to walk through the art building just to destroy my work!"

His jaw locks tight at the memory of winter finals. Number five on my list----the worst one of all.

It is the open--critique wall in the fine--arts hallway. Every junior has to pin their most personal piece to the corkboard for public grading. Mine is a charcoal drawing of the wooden porch of my childhood home----the only thing I have ever drawn of the house where my parents died, right down to the cracked steps and the corner streetlamp with the old street sign visible at the edge of the yard.

Forty students are crowded into the hall when Raiden walks through with Miller, Henderson, and half the team after weights. Raiden stops dead in front of my board. His eyes scan the porch steps, lock on the tiny lettering of the street sign in the corner of my sketch, and drop to my name card.

Without hesitation, he reaches up, rips the charcoal paper off the pins, and tears my drawing cleanly in half. He drops both pieces at my boots.

"Depressing," Raiden says, his cold voice cutting through forty gasps. "Some of us have to walk through here every day. Draw something people actually want to look at."

I cried in a locked bathroom stall until my ribs ached that afternoon. Then I crept back after dark and rescued both torn halves from the floor. They are pressed inside the cardboard folder in my wet backpack right now.

"That was the only drawing I ever made of the house where my parents died," I whisper, staring down at him on his foyer floor while my chest burns. "You tore it in half in front of forty people. Just like you humiliated me at the Sigma house in the spring."

A dark shadow crosses his eyes. Number eight on my list.

April, upstairs at the Sigma fraternity house. A drunk senior pins me against the hallway wall outside the bathroom, slamming his palm beside my head and crowding into my space while my throat locks up in panic.

Then Raiden appears at the top of the stairs. He doesn't say a word----just takes the guy by the collar with one fist and walks him all the way down the stairs. For five seconds, I think Raiden Blackwood saved me. Then he turns back around at the landing where the whole party can hear and glares up at me.

"Donovan, you're blocking the hallway," he barks across the hushed room. "Move."

Thirty people laughed while my face burned. By the end of spring break, that senior had left school completely, though I never once connected the two.

"Every time you see me, you turn me into a joke," I breathe, shoving off Raiden's chest and scrambling back onto my knees on the marble. "So tell me right now how you knew I would be here tonight, or I walk out that door and take my zero!"

Raiden sits up slowly, leaning his broad shoulders against the foyer wall. His chest rises and falls in heavy breaths as he pulls his black phone from his sweatpants pocket, unlocks it, and shoves the glowing screen six inches from my face.

"You want the truth?" Raiden commands softly, his eyes cold as steel. "Read."

My eyes focus on the text thread. The contact name at the top makes the blood drain from my head.

Elijah.

Elijah: I'll give you her schedule, her contact info, everything. You'll know the second she needs a place.

Raiden: And you get the rink. 5 a.m. access, all season.

Elijah: Deal.

The screen blurs in front of my eyes. A crushing weight presses down on my lungs until I can't breathe. My hand flies to my trembling lips as I read the words twice, three times, while fifteen years of devotion shatter all over again.

"He traded me for ice time," I whisper, the words barely surviving the ache in my throat. "My best friend sold me to you for five a.m. practice."

Raiden slips the phone back into his pocket. Every trace of heat vanishes behind a wall of pure ice.

"Don't make it sentimental, Donovan," Raiden says, his voice cold, smooth, and ruthless. "He wanted private ice before the scouts come next month. I wanted leverage over him on the roster and an A on my midterm slides so the dean stays off my back. Everybody uses everybody. You're just a chess piece on the board. Nothing personal."

The numbness in my veins snaps into white--hot fury.

"A chess piece?" I scramble to my feet, glaring down at him with every shred of hatred in my body. "I was homeless in the rain with eleven dollars in my pocket, and you two made a bet on when I would crawl to your door? You're a soulless piece of shit, Blackwood! Both of you!"

Across the outer hall, the private elevator chimes with a sharp ring.

Frantic footsteps pound across the vestibule carpet outside, running straight toward the penthouse doors.

I freeze. Down on the floor, Raiden goes rigid. The cold mask drops right off his face, and for the first time all night----for the first time in two years----Raiden Blackwood looks genuinely afraid.

He surges to his feet, catches me around the waist with one powerful arm, and shoves me behind the heavy floor--length velvet curtain beside the window. His chest crowds against mine in the dark narrow gap, his hand hovering inches from my trembling mouth.

"Not a sound, Donovan," Raiden breathes against my ear, his jaw clenched tight. "If you want to know why your best friend actually sold you out tonight, stay quiet."

He steps out from behind the drape just as the front door bursts open against the foyer wall, and Elijah's breathless, panicked voice tears through the room:

"Blackwood! Kaleena----where is she?"