Page 90 of Gilded Fake

“I thought you did what you wanted and fuck everyone else.”

“Maybe not everyone,” he amends, smiling a little and reaching for my cigarette.

I hand it to him, watching his lips curl around the filter. “Who’s exempt?”

“Kids,” he says, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth. “My brother. Maybe someone special, someday.”

“Weren’t you giving me shit for trying to make my girlfriend happy?”

“Dixie’s not special.”

“Fuck you.”

He cracks a grin. “You know it’s true.”

“You chose her for me,” I point out. “You must have thought she was good enough for a leper like me.”

“Nah, she was never good enough for you,” he says. “That’s why we chose her.”

“To punish me?”

“That was Royal’s reason,” he admits. “He hates her, but he never underestimated her. He knew she’d make your life hell.”

“Bastard,” I mutter.

“Baron had other reasons,” he goes on. “He wanted intel. Someone on the inside.”

“Bullshit,” I say. “She hates y’all.”

“Maybe,” he says with a shrug. “We didn’t like her either. Doesn’t mean we can’t work together when one of us needed something. How do you think that video of your sister got on her blog? And the one of Harper too.”

“Dixie said it was hacked.”

“Convenient, right?” he asks. “Baron’s a known hacker. No one questioned it.”

“And what was your reason?” I ask. “Don’t tell me you were gathering favors from the start.”

“To humiliate you,” he says flatly. “She’s a dog. I wanted everyone to see you couldn’t get anyone hotter, and that I could get them all.”

“You’re psychotic.”

He flicks the cigarette into the chasm below and leans toward me, pressing his shoulder to mine. His gaze dips to my lips, and he lifts his hand, thumbing my lower lip. “And maybe I didn’t want anyone else to know what this mouth could do.”

For one moment, I think about drawing his thumb between my lips, running my piercing over the pad of it, letting him feel it again, what my mouth can do, this time with experience. He’s only felt it that one time in the basement, when he didn’t deserve what I can give, when I didn’t show him by choice.

This time, I have a choice.

I shove him away.

“If you didn’t want me to have anyone else, why give me Dixie at all?” I ask. “You could have cut me off completely instead of giving me a girl I could fuck in all three holes, and her titties too.”

“You’d already had her,” he says with a shrug. “Doesn’t count.”

“Counted every night I got to stab it,” I say with a grin. “You might think she’s ugly, but that doesn’t mean everyone does.”

“She’s fugly as fuck and you know it,” he says flatly. “Hard one to handle, though. I’ll give you that. I wouldn’t have expected it freshman year. But Baron knew she’d be important. He’s the one who convinced Royal that her connection to our dead sister lasted beyond the grave. We had to give her something that would give us leverage over her without breaking our promise to Crystal.”

“So you didn’t give me Dixie,” I say slowly, working it out in my mind. “You gave Dixie me.”

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