Page 97 of Gilded Fake

“Yes,” I said. “Get dressed. We should go, in case he tells his parents I shot out the window.”

Colt just shook his head and stood, grabbing his clothes off the floor and turning his back to yank on his boxers. “What now?”

“Now we go back to how things were before,” I said. “I’m the queen. You’re the leper. Nothing’s changed.”

“Glad you think so.”

“What did you want me to do?” I asked, my lip starting to tremble.

“Not that.”

I bit down on my lip until I tasted blood, staring at the ceiling and blinking until the tears sank back into my eyes and my throat didn’t hurt so bad I wanted to tear it out just so it would stop. By the time I’d composed myself, Colt was dressed. He handed me my shirt.

“I think it’s safe to say I won’t have any trouble moving on now.”

I nodded. “Good.”

He nodded back. “Good.”

“Go,” I said, gesturing with the gun.

He hesitated, then stepped toward the door. After pulling it open, he stopped and turned back. “I’m sorry you couldn’t leave.”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t.”

He gave a slight nod, then ducked out the door. I wanted to crumple to the floor, to shatter the way I used to, let myself be incapacitated by the force of my sorrow. But those big ugly sobs were foreign to me now. I didn’t cry like that anymore. It would’ve taken a dozen shots of tequila to make me lose control that way. So I didn’t cry. I walked out of the pool house into the cold November night. I stood at the edge of the pool. My skin prickled with goosebumps, but I dove in anyway. The water was icy, and it nearly took my breath. But I wouldn’t give in. I was stronger. I was the strongest person in all of Willow Heights, and I hadn’t gotten there by accident.

I just needed a reminder. A reminder than I was stronger than my body, than any instinctual drive or animal urges. I was Gloria Fucking Walton, the Queen Bitch of Willow Heights. My skin was a shell of diamond. My heart was stone. My body was not me. It did not control me. It was a commodity, one that was traded between men because they considered it beautiful, valuable. I had to remember that. It was not my job to feel, to experience bliss or freedom. It was my job to be beautiful.

I turned over onto my back, forcing myself not to shake in the water. I did the butterfly all the way to the far end, a leisurely, unhurried stroke. I couldn’t feel my toes, my feet, my legs. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my arms. I couldn’t feel the ache or the burning heat Colt buried between my thighs.

I only felt ugly, and ugly could be fixed.

*

I didn’t go home and cry in the tub like I did last year. That girl was back where she belonged, in her diamond cage. Colt had made me feel like a beautiful butterfly, worthy of admiration and the freedom to fly away from my life, but Cotton had shattered that illusion. I wasn’t a butterfly. I was an ugly caterpillar, and now I’d formed a cocoon from my pain and crawled inside. Suspended inside that cocoon, a cryogenic chamber where bodies were stored with the hope that someday, in the far future, they would discover how to live again, was the girl Colt had freed for a week, a moment, a single breath of rarest air.

I bathed, put on my anti-wrinkle cream, took a pill, and went to sleep. I couldn’t look tired in the morning. When Mom told me at breakfast that I looked grey and slapped both my cheeks, I didn’t respond. She was right. My color was off. At school, I added more blush and then went into a stall and checked that the foundation I used to conceal the bruises from Colt’s fingers hadn’t rubbed off.

I was glad he wasn’t at school.

By that afternoon, reality began to creep back in. What had I done? My one taste of freedom, the one choice I’d ever made for myself, my once glimpse of happiness—I’d thrown it all away to maintain a status quo that was my version of hell on earth. I texted all day trying to apologize, but he never answered.

The next day when I found out he’d been attacked, my heart stopped beating. Without thought, with rising panic, I jumped in June Bug and raced to the hospital. What had I done? What if I never got the chance to make it right? To tell him he was worth the risk, worth more than all the elites combined?

I raced inside and up to the counter in the waiting room. I almost ran over Preston before I noticed who he was, this tall figure with a white mask over half his face.

“Where’s Colt?” I demanded, grabbing onto his arm.

He recoiled as if I were a snake. “Why would I tell you?” he asked. “So you can put a pillow over his face and finish him off?”

I took a breath to answer, and then reality caught up to me. I looked around the waiting room, where several people were waiting, one of them a mom with a crying baby.

The Dolce twins were sitting in chairs, side by side. Duke had his head in his hands, his fingers fisting in his hair, but Baron was watching.

Baron was always watching.

I couldn’t forget that.

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