The Bad Boy's Broken Illusion

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I'd date a dog before I'd touch Wren.

Roman said it to his boys, laughing, like it cost him nothing.

I'm Wren.

One month later, his best friend pinned me to a wall and told me he'd wanted me for a long time.

Then Roman saw the marks on my neck, the ones that weren't his. The laugh died in his throat.

His face went still in a way I'd never seen, and when he spoke, the words came out low and lethal.

"Who," he said, "let you touch her?"

He wasn't looking at me.

He was looking at his best friend.

Chapter 1

I'm the girl who delivers Roman's love letters. From other girls. By hand.

Eleven of them this month.

Everyone trusts me with the job, because everyone knows the two true things about me: I'm Roman's childhood sweetheart, and he would sooner die than ever want me. Safe little messenger girl. Hand it to her, she'll get it to him.

Here's the third thing none of them know.

The first love letter Roman ever tore up was mine.

"Um. Can you give this one to Roman?"

I take the pale pink envelope. Number eleven.

I find him at the lockers with his boys. He lifts an eyebrow, makes a show of trying to remember which girl this one is, then huffs out a small laugh.

"My standards aren't low."

He tosses the letter back into my chest.

"Anything in your league, I don't want."

His friends crack up. Roman watches me the whole time they laugh, something mean sitting behind his eyes.

We grew up next door. Our parents are close, so they decided we were close too, the way parents do. And for a while, we were.

Then came the game.

Truth or dare, a circle of us, fourteen and stupid and far too competitive. Roman drew dare. Somebody asked if he had the guts to kiss me.

"You mind?" he asked.

I didn't even get a word out. He kissed me first.

"Tch. Nothing special."

That was the day I stopped being the honor-roll good girl nobody got to touch.

I became one of Roman's things.

His grades were bad. His parents thought I was the fix: drag him to the library, make him study. We agreed to meet at the station.

I stood there almost an hour.

Then his story went up. Roman, ten-game win streak, glowing in some smoke-choked back-room gaming dive across town.

I didn't go home. I got in a cab and went straight there.

The air inside was thick and gray. There was a girl on his lap. A little crowd around him, cheering. He turned, found me standing in the doorway, and gave me a slow, ugly smile.

"Wren. The hell is wrong with you?"

I got him caught. His parents cut off his money and banned the gaming dive, because I told on him.

"You shouldn't go to places like that," I said. One word at a time.

Back then I still kept how much I liked him folded up somewhere quiet, and I kept being good to him in that stubborn, self-righteous way I thought had to count for something.

It bought me one thing. More of his hate.

He took my chin in his hand.

"Who said you get to manage me?"

His thumb pressed into my jaw.

"One kiss, and you think you're my girlfriend? What a joke."

Roman has a good face. Set it on top of that go-to-hell attitude and the whole school wanted a piece of him. Plenty of girls tried. He took them all and meant none of it.

One afternoon he was on the court, sinking everything, the crowd roaring his name.

Then he turned and threw the ball at me. Hard. No hesitation in it at all.

It caught my arm. The whole court went quiet.

"Sorry," he said, watching me curl over the pain, light as anything. "You won't hold it against me, right? My little childhood sweetheart."

That was the day it became a fact everyone knew: Roman couldn't stand me.

So I let myself know it too.

I took the love letter I'd once written him, every careful stroke of it, from back when I still had a girl's soft secret tucked in my chest, and I put it somewhere I'd never have to look at it again.

And I stopped watching him.

The thing about being someone's favorite thing to break: you don't get to find out why until it's far too late to matter.

Chapter 2

In front of our parents, we still had to play nice.

"Roman's grades are really climbing lately. That's all Wren's doing, I'm sure of it." His mother beamed and pushed a plate of cut fruit toward us. "Eat, eat."

Roman looked pleased too. He just slid me one quiet warning look over the fruit.

His grades weren't my doing.

They were the queen bee's. Prettiest girl in our year, ranked second, the one he'd just started dating. They "studied" together after school. A lot.

I'd never have known, if I hadn't walked past the empty classroom that day.

I'd just been named Student of the Year, and I'd stayed late that day to rehearse a speech for the next morning.

I passed the empty classroom.

The sounds coming out of it were low. Private.

I turned my head, only turned it, and through the gap in the curtain my eyes landed on Roman's. He had her pressed back into a seat. And in the half-second it took him to glance up, he caught me watching.

I knew right then. Another mark, chalked up against my name.

Dating Roman, the queen bee's grades started sliding. Fast enough that the teachers noticed.

They pulled me aside. "Has she been acting strange lately? Spending time with the wrong people?"

I shook my head. "I wouldn't know."

But you can't keep a fire wrapped in paper.

Somehow it got out that I'd been questioned. Roman and the queen bee got exposed, his parents found out, and his father has a temper. He hauled Roman home and beat him.

Nobody was home at my place that day.

Roman shoved his way into my room.

"I underestimated you."

He pushed me. I lost my footing and hit the desk. A drawer flew out, and everything inside it spilled across the floor.

His hand went still on my wrist.

Because we both saw it. The pale pink envelope, face up on the floor.

Two names on it. His and mine.

And Roman knew my handwriting better than anyone alive.

"Oh." The understanding moved slowly across his face. "So that's what this is. You're jealous."

He tore the letter to pieces. Then he caught my wrist again.

"I didn't tell on you," I said, twisting against his grip.

He raised an eyebrow. "There's something more useful than that right now."

He picked the scissors up off my desk.

The cold of the blades grazed my temple before I understood what he meant to do. A tug. One small, dry sound.

He held the lock of my hair up between us.

"Wren. I wouldn't date you if I were dating a dog."

He took that piece of me to the queen bee and put it to work. Held it up as proof he'd cut me loose, that I was nothing, that she had nothing to worry about. A girl shaved down into a lie he could hand another girl.

It didn't even save him. His father transferred him out anyway.

The day Roman left, the queen bee cried for a long time. I thought the two of them would last forever.

A few days later, she got photos of him with other girls.

And my hair, the ragged ends at my temple, the lock he'd taken, none of it ever came up again. It just dropped, like it had never happened. Like I had never happened.

Her grades cratered. She begged me to set up one meeting with Roman. Just once. She wanted to see him.

I didn't manage to say no.

What I didn't plan for: the day I went, Roman was already drunk in some bar.

He knew me the second he saw me. And he made very sure I wasn't going anywhere.

"Wren." He smiled, and the smile didn't reach anything human in him. "Isn't this exactly what you've been waiting for?"

Chapter 3

By the next morning, the queen bee had the photo.

Roman, drunk, pinning me against the door of that private booth. His mouth on mine. My hands trapped.

I never wanted it. The angle of the shot didn't care.

She cut me off completely. Then the photo went around, and just like that, I was the one everyone wanted to burn.

"See, that's why she snitched. She's been pining after Roman this whole time and can't have him."

"Right? And this time she actually gets her shot. Goes to help them get back together and throws herself at him instead. Isn't that disgusting?"

I became the girl no one would sit near.

The funny part: somewhere in the retelling, they'd all forgotten whose hands had started any of it. Whose roaming, throwaway heart.

The day I transferred in, Roman made a point of showing up to enjoy it.

"What's this. Couldn't hack it there either?" Every word soaked through with it. "You had this coming, Wren."

I just nodded, numb all the way down. "So did you."

He laughed out loud. Then he leaned in close to my ear.

"Doesn't matter, though. Now they all think we're the same kind of ruthless. A matched set. Made for each other."

Were we.

Standing there, something in me went cold. For the first time, I think I started to hate him.

Two months in and Roman had already run through every pretty girl at the new school. He ended it every time. They did the begging.

Someone pointed me out to him once.

"What about her? She's gorgeous."

Roman just laughed, like it wasn't worth the breath. "I wouldn't date her if I were dating a dog."

A beat.

"Besides. She's been my dog for years."

And then, from somewhere behind him, a voice cut in.

"There's really no need to talk about a girl like that."

Brooks was Roman's roommate. His tightest friend in the world.

I didn't know him because of Roman, though.

I knew him because, a few days after I transferred, the sky opened up, and the two of us ended up waiting out the downpour under the same stretch of the main building. Just the rain on the awning. Neither of us saying a word.

Then, as it thinned, he spoke.

"So. You're, uh. You're Roman's childhood sweetheart?"

I'd landed in Brooks's class. Roman was next door, and Roman's current girlfriend had the seat right beside mine. To keep the whole queen-bee disaster from running a second time, I switched seats. Which made Brooks my deskmate.

Something about it sat wrong with me. It didn't faze him in the slightest.

He scrambled to clear his books out of the way, dragged a desk over for me himself, and grinned, a little awkward about it.

"I've never actually had a deskmate before. You won't hold it against me, will you?"

When Brooks grins, two little fangs show at the corners of it.

I didn't take the warmth he was holding out. I just lowered my eyes and nodded.

Transferring didn't change the fact that Roman couldn't stand me. If anything, it got worse. The more I kept out of his way, the more it seemed to feed him.

That day was like any other.

The court sits right on the path to the dining hall. A wall of girls were cheering Roman on. The ball cracked against the floor. I threw my arms up over my head and tried to move.

Too late.

A hard sound of impact.

The pain I braced for never came.

I turned my head and went still.

Brooks had come out of nowhere, put his body between me and the ball, and taken it square in the shoulder blade.

The ball dropped and rolled away.

Roman crossed the court in three strides, his voice gone cold.

"Brooks. Are you out of your mind?"

Chapter 4

Off the court, Roman blocked the two of us.

I was still feeling my way around it, trying to work out whether to walk Brooks to the infirmary. Brooks just laughed, breezy about the whole thing. "It's fine. I'm built like a brick. I can take it."

"What do you think you're doing?" Roman said.

Brooks let the smile go. Took his time. "What do you think you're doing? Why'd you throw a ball at her?"

Roman stalled. "...How is that any of your business?"

"I'm her deskmate."

Roman looked at him for a long moment, something complicated moving behind his eyes. Then he turned that same look on me and smiled, thin and mocking. "Quite the charmer, aren't you."

Brooks stepped in front of me. "Roman. Don't do this."

After a moment, Roman smiled. "What, you've got a thing for her?"

Roman always looked at me with that exact expression. Like the win was already in his pocket. Like I wasn't his childhood friend, wasn't even the person he hated most. Like I was just something he owned.

Brooks stayed planted in front of me. "Come on. Your families go back years. Don't"

"It's a lot more than that." Roman cut across him, smiling faintly. "There's history you haven't heard. Want it?"

Something bad turned over in my stomach. Too late to stop him.

Roman gave Brooks's shoulder a shove and spaced every word out, flat and deliberate.

"Her first kiss was mine. She transferred schools for me. She wrote me love letters, pages about how much she liked me." A pause. "So what exactly are you?"

I walked Brooks to the infirmary