Page 26 of They Break Beauty

Before he turned his back and headed to the door, we both caught that dangerous dark look in his eyes.

It had Mason worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, while, for me, excitement bloomed for the first time in a long fucking while.

Things definitely weren’t boring when Lev was around.

And it looked like he was about to prove that really quickly.

Welcome home, Hellraiser.

7

~Brianna~

“All right, just call me when you get back. Or, better yet, come by my place so we can actually talk in person. I don’t like that the last time I saw you was for a brief five minutes before you headed off in your mom’s town car. And then the longer time before that was you pissed drunk at that frat party and then—”

“I get it, Bree. It’s okay,” Chloe assured me down the line.

I grimaced. Was it okay?

It certainly didn’t seem like it.

And, worse, it certainly didn’t seem like she was going to sort it out either.

She might be a spitfire and somebody who lived their truth, marched to the beat of their own drum and all that, but it completely went out the window when she was facing down her fashion mogul mom, Celeste Anders. In fact, the way Chloe was around me and the students of Stonewell University was very clearly a case of overcompensation for that.

When she was in her mom’s orbit, there was some major regression involved. She became disturbingly subservient to that overbearing woman’s demands and decrees.

The night she’d texted me that she was ready to talk, I’d finally found out what had been eating at her and had her drinking herself into a stupor at the homecoming party. Although she’d claimed that she hadn’t texted me, I’d arrived just in time as she’d been headed out of her apartment.

Because I’d been right there in her space, she’d actually told me what was going on.

Apparently, her mom didn’t think Chloe was making enough traction in her career through her studies here, not getting enough notice and attention. So she’d hooked her up with a prestigious right-out-of-the-nepo-babies-handbook opportunity where she’d work at her mom’s design firm while also studying at a private fashion school.

It was odd that it had come out of nowhere.

It was even stranger that her mom was suddenly seemingly worried about such a thing, seeing as though she’d been fine with Chloe coming here to Stonewell to study and she’d been applauding her designs and studies all of last year. Her main goal was to learn, not to garner attention all over the place. That would come in senior year once she had the knowledge to back her up, once she’d learned what she needed to in order to become a designer worth noticing, when she was actually ready to get her name out there.

This turnabout with Celeste made no sense. Not just because the timing of the first week into her second year was messed up. But also the fact that Chloe had thrived at this college because she could be herself away from her mom’s influence. She’d grown into herself here.

And now, unless Chloe could stand up to her and stick to what she wanted, she’d lose that.

And we’d lose each other.

I’d offered to go with her, but she’d refused, wanting to handle it on her own.

I shook my head to myself as we said our goodbyes on the phone and I returned to reading over the assigned chapters in my textbook on data structures, while also finishing up eating my meatball sandwich. God, the marinara sauce was to die for. It was definitely going in my sandwich recipes book.

That’s right, I had a recipe book just for my sandwich experiments.

I was a major fan of them—different types of bread, different and mixed ingredients, often with what would be seen as strange combinations to a lot of people. Sometimes I ate a sandwich for breakfast and lunch. At least I hadn’t crossed over to dinner with it too.

I swallowed my last bite, then started packing my Tupperware back into my fluffy pink messenger bag, because my next class was in ten minutes. Usually I got excited at the prospect of an upcoming class but, this time, as I looked around the quad from the uttermost far back picnic bench out of the way of everybody else, it was bittersweet not having Chloe here.

Sure, we weren’t in the same program, but we’d always plan things between our class schedules where we’d meet during the day for lunch—like we would’ve just now—or fun we’d have later at night. It sounded strange, but I could feel the emptiness without her here.

That was probably being compounded by the utter shock of running into Levi Knight after all this time.

He’d been gone and he was slated to be for a good long while—enough time for me to get my degree and be on my way out of Stonewell without ever encountering him.

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