Page 15 of Vicious Games

I stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, the deep purple and blue swelling around my eyes mocking me.

In all my eighteen years, no one has ever dared to lay a finger on me—primarily because of my last name. Yet here I am, living proof that someone didn’t give a damn that I’m the son of the notoriousCapo dei Capi,Vincent Romano.

Someone clocked me anyway.

A girl.

I gotfuckingpunched by a girl.

In front of the whole class.

I’ll never live this down. Walking the halls of Sacred Heart will be hell.

I’m beyond pissed.

“Huh,” Enzo muses behind me, his arms crossed, also staring at my reflection. “I guess now I reallyamthe hotter twin.”

“Fuck you,” I growl, turning away from the mirror. I lean against the sink, crossing my arms to stare my twin down. “Even with this shiner, I’m still the better-looking twin.”

“Sure,” Enzo snickers, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “Keep telling yourself that.”

Then he waltzes out of our shared bathroom with an annoyingly cocky bounce in his step.

“I am!” I call after him as he grabs the doorknob to his bedroom door.

“Sure you are, Lucky. Sure you are,” he taunts, disappearing into the hallway and heading downstairs.

I shove my hands into my pockets, scowling, because the worst part is that he’s not wrong.

Enzo and I may be twins, but we’re not identical. And yeah, maybe Iama little vain, but in a family full of people with standout qualities, it was nice thinking I had most of them beat in at least one department.

Fine. Maybe not Marcello—he got dipped in the same bottle of divine genetics as Annamaria. But he doesn’t evenuseit. The guy won the cosmic beauty lottery, and what does he do with it? Hides at the gym, head down, wasting a perfectly good face.

If I looked like him—brooding, chiseled, all mysterious and shit—I’d bedrowningin pussy.

But that’s neither here nor there.

I’m the one who has to walk through Sacred Heart with a mangled face.

And it really was a pretty face.

Argh.

Frances O’Malley just skyrocketed to the top of my shitlist.

And to make matters worse?

Now, I’m all but being blackmailed into tutoring the heathen.

Kill me now.

I saw right through Sister Agnes’s inspired solution yesterday. She took one shit show of a situation and thought she could kill two birds with one stone.

She had been hounding me all day, asking if I had thought about her idea of tutoring as a way to get my hundred hours.

I, of course, continued to turn my nose up at the idea, saying that I’d figure something else out.

In all honesty, I wasn’t spending much time thinking about what to do to get my community service done. I’ve been more concerned about how I was going to up the ante of our last prank without getting caught. I didn’t have time to think about anything else, much less do something to win me brownie points with the Mother Superior.

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