Page 85 of Heartless Game

“Don’t you mean babysitter? Or warden?” I said.

He paused to look at me. “No, I mean bodyguard. I know you think we’re just here to keep you from doing whatever it is that Jones doesn’t want you to do, but he’s made it explicitly clear that our first priority is to keep you safe.”

With those shocking words, he handed me off to Asher, leaving me with questions I was afraid to ask.

“I don’t know why the fuck I’m doing what these assholes want,” Asher said as we walked through campus. “But here I am, doing it.”

“It’s nice to have friends,” I told him. “Even if those friends are completely?—”

“Unhinged assholes?” he offered, and we both laughed.

“Your sister loves Jack,” I said. “So I guess that means we’re stuck with them.”

We walked a bit in silence, before Asher asked, “What about you?”

“What do you mean, what about me?”

“What are you doing with a charmer like Jones? I wouldn’t have thought he was your type.”

“Oh, yeah? And what is my type?”

“Scholarly. Slight. Nice. Probably a little bit of a doormat.”

I considered this for a minute. Asher was right, in a sense. Once upon a time, I thought that was my type. But either I had changed on my own or Isaac had changed me, because now my type was big, tall, bossy jock dickhead with dimples that made my heart squeeze.

And I didn’t think that was changing anytime soon.

“I need to go pick up a book from the library,” I told him.

He smiled at me affectionately, rubbing the top of my head.

“Of course you do, nerd.”

33

Tovah

When Isaac got home, I was waiting for him in the kitchen, a beer in my hand. Isaac’s favorite kind of beer, to be precise. Which I’d doctored slightly by dissolving the pill of Vice that Sebastian had left for me in the fake library book.

I wasn’t planning on taking sexual advantage of him. First of all, I wasn’t a fucking psychopath. Second, Vice didn’t even work that way. While Vixen, the pill for women, could double as a fancy roofie, Vice was like the most intense Viagra someone could ever take.

That was all I needed, though. I wasn’t going to touch Isaac, but I was going to torture him until he had no choice but to tell me all of his family’s secrets. And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel guilty for drugging him, but every single time I’d considered abandoning my plan, I pictured my mom, driving across the country with only the stuff she’d had time to pack, worried someone was following her. I was doing this for her.

Sometimes you did horrible things to protect the people you loved. Or at least I did. And if that made me bad?

So be it.

“What is this, a truce?” he said, looking at the beer in my hand.

“Peace offering,” I told him, hopping off the counter and advancing toward him, making sure to sway my hips. “I was pissed at you for edging me, but I realized you can’t help what a possessive asshole you are.”

He snorted. “You’re right, I can’t.”

Taking the beer out of my hand, he tipped it against his lips and chugged it back, his throat working. An Adam’s apple had never been so attractive in my life.

“You aren’t drinking?”

I hadn’t planned to. But it would look weird, wouldn’t it?

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