“It’s the same color as your hair,” he informs me, but I ignore him, moving through the crowd and pausing by some girls who are busy discussing their character cards.

“I’m fucking the master of the house,” I tell them, pouting slightly, the way the French maid in my stereotypical imaginings might. “But don’t tell anyone. Last night, I saw blood on his shirt just before I took it off.”

The girls all stare at me like I’m an alien creature, most definitely not used to the presence of someone from Prescott High at one of their parties.

“You’re the Havoc girl, right?” one of them finally asks, finally choosing which switch inside her privileged brain to flick. When I first approached them, I could tell they were torn between ripping me apart for being different and falling in love with me. One of the girls is already breathing heavily, like she’d fuck me in the bathroom if I so much as asked.

“That’s me,” I tell them, lifting my glass in salute. “Forgive me if I’m a little off. Fucking five dudes on the regular is exhausting.” That’s a lie, it’s thrilling. You just don’t want them to know how fucking thrilled you are. You love this, love being bad and finding yourself in trouble and feeling emotions like thunderstorms.

I exhale.

“Jesus,” one of the girls says, forgetting for just a second to filter her disgust. She blinks and the emotion is gone. “So why is Jimmy panting after you?”

“Jimmy?” I ask, and the girl lifts her glass in indication. I follow the direction of her bright blue drink with my eyes, finding James Barrasso at the bar, mixing two drinks. Jesus, this guy. He’s clearly making more of what I’ve already got in my glass. In a minute here, he’s going to come back and offer one to me. “Ah, a nickname for James,” I murmur, thinking of the book, Practical Magic, and the movie that followed. Personally—and I know this is a cardinal sin among book lovers—I prefer the movie.

I finish my drink, so that James aka Jimmy can have an opening when he comes over here.

I turn back to the girls.

“Are any of my boys watching?” I ask in a scandalous tone. But again, I didn’t need to ask. I can feel Aaron and Oscar staring at me. Callum is long gone, buried in the crypt of the house, and Hael is too busy collecting gossip to look my way. Maybe that means he trusts me? Or maybe he’s too jealous to look?

My skin burns in all the places his fingers touched me. I want to go find out if there’s a maid costume in that room, put it on, and fuck his brains out in the guest room, on top of everyone else’s expensive coats.

But, business first. Pleasure later.

“The tall one in the suit,” the bisexual or pansexual or whatever girl asks me. The way she describes Oscar, I can tell that she’d fuck him, too, if he were to offer. Even better if we both did, at the same time. I smile into my empty drink.

“Oops,” I say as James slides up alongside of me, offering up one of the drinks.

“Not sure if I got the ratio right, but I tried,” he explains, nodding at my empty glass. “Shall I take that for you?”

“She’s not going to fuck you, Jimmy,” the mean girl says, the one with the nose that’s too sharp. Hope she sued her plastic surgeon for that botch job. Looks like shit. I have to hold back a laugh.

“Why not?” James asks, and I wonder why he hasn’t smiled sloppily and said call me Jimmy, babe. Ugh.

“Because I’m married,” I say, wiggling my fingers to show off the ring that Victor gave me. It’s nice enough that the other girls actually nod in approval. Even to their rich sensibilities, a thirty-thousand ring is okay-ish.

“Not for long,” the spiteful cunt with the fucked-up nose says. She smiles to soften the blow, but I realize then that she never flipped that switch from disgust to interest. She hates me the way Trinity does. Jealous and seething. I’m not saying this because I think I’m fabulous. I just think people always want what everyone else has. Nothing is more desirable than something that isn’t yours yet, but could be, if you just played your cards right. Nothing is prettier than the forbidden, nothing shines so bright and so wicked on a moonlit night. “You’re getting an annulment I hear?”

“What?” one of the girls asks, blinking like she’s just realized she’s stumbled onto a juicy secret. “Am I missing something here?”

“Look, I’m fucking the master of the house and he had blood on his shirt. You want to weigh in on that?” I snap, getting annoyed all of a sudden. When I look back, I see Victor’s still talking to Trinity. He’s smiling, and she’s laughing. Trust your motherfucking husband! I tell myself, but it’s so damn hard. He isn’t making it easy either, Mr. Hard to Fucking Get.

“Um, I’m the laundry lady, and I washed that shirt myself. It wasn’t blood, it was red wine. I’m the suspicious type, so I think he’s having an affair with someone other than the maid.” Pansexual Girl at least deigns to reply to me, the alcohol she’s been drinking slurring her words a bit. The girl’s friend smacks her shoulder and rolls her eyes.

“You’re not supposed to say I’m the suspicious type. You just act that way. It’s how the game works. You’re terrible at this, Amy.” Nose Job rolls her eyes, and I frown. This girl is trouble, clearly a friend of Trinity’s. She likes to brag, obviously, so she might be a good source of information.

I move away though before I decide to throw my drink in her face and then punch her in the gut.

I notice that James has left and is talking to another girl.

My eyes lift up and meet Vic’s, and my breath catches and holds in such a way that I feel like I’m being strangled. It’s not fair that he can do that to me with just a look. I sip my drink and pretend like I’m not miserable, all the way across the room from him. He’s turned you into a bitch, Bernadette, I warn myself, turning away and heading straight for James.

“The fuck?” I ask him, grabbing onto his shoulder to get his attention. He turns a dismissive look my way and shrugs one shoulder. “You give up that easily?”

“I’m not going to waste my time chasing around a bitch who doesn’t want to be caught,” James tells me, and then he smiles. His eyes remind me of a reptile’s. Not the color, but the way his Jurassic reptilian instincts control his every move. “And you can call me Jimmy.”

He turns back to the group in front of him as my fingers reach up to touch my waist, feeling the knife I hid under the loose fabric. Something about the movement draws Jimmy’s attention.

He stares at me, black hair slicked back in a way that tells me he’d literally kill to have some of Victor’s charisma. Just an ounce. A teaspoon.

“Aw, did I hurt your feelings?” Jimmy asks me. Maybe he thinks I’ve put my palm flat against my belly to control something other than blind rage. I already feel like a failure because of what happened with Kali. The first chance I get to right that wrong—even if it’s at the most inappropriate possible time—I’m going to do it. I’m going to kill someone without even meaning to. I’ll blink, and it’ll all be over, and someone like Trinity or James-Jimmy-whatever or Nose Job girl is going to be on the ground in front of me in a pool of blood.

“You have no idea what you’ve just done to me,” I say, moving back from the group while I try to catch my breath. Jimmy smirks at me, rubbing his hand over the lower half of his face. He thinks he’s turned me on by being a dick. While I can’t deny there’s a certain charm to it when Hael does it, or Vic, or Oscar … this guy is nothing to me. He barely registers.

“Oh yeah?” Jimmy asks as I turn, making sure to toss my blood-dipped hair as I do. I head straight for the French doors that open into the entryway. There’s a hallway on one side, with a bathroom and a single guest bedroom. That’s where the costumes must be, based on the people coming and going from down the hall with props in hand.

I decide to start there first, timing my steps so that I enter the room just as the last couple exits the hallway. There are costumes everywhere, all carefully labelled. I bet Trinity hired someone to set up this party for her. There’s no way in fuck she, like, found a game on the internet and printed the character cards. That’s far too rachet.

“I’m the master of the house,” Jimmy tells me, flashing his card as proof. “I hear we’re having a sordid affair.” He looks at me like he thinks he’s got me again.

“I shouldn’t even be talking to you,” I murmur, finding the maid costume. It’s in a package, clearly a Halloween costume, but much nicer than the ones at the Hellhole or Spirit Halloween. It would look good on me; Hael would love it.

“Oh baby,” Jimmy starts, stepping up on me like he thinks I’m examining the costume for his benefit. His hands slide up my waist, and I do what we like to call at Prescott High the poor girl turn. It’s called that because when some skeezy guy comes up to you, thinking you’re nothing but southside trash, and he puts his hands on you, you can spin around and carefully extract his unwanted grip at the same time. It seems flirtatious and fun, so it doesn’t trigger the worst guys right off the bat.

And it’s such a sad fucking thing to do that it makes me sick. Put your hands on me, and I have the right to put my goddamn hands on you. Don’t touch people that don’t want to be touched. If you really need to learn no means no then you should check your privilege at the door and shut the fuck up.

Jimmy accepts the poor girl turn, laughing and downing the rest of his drink. When he backs up toward the door and heels it shut, locking it behind him, I know that one of only two things is going to happen in this room.

Either I’m going to fuck James Barrasso, or I’m going to kill him. Because if I try to leave now, he’s going to force the point and I’m going to be left with no choice. My phone is on the table in the entryway, a terrible place for it to be, no doubt.