Two hours earlier, Isabella Cruz had been sitting in the front passenger seat of a silver Audi driven by a boy who had perfected the art of charm in front of teachers and cruelty in private.
Caleb Whitmore had the kind of smile that adults described as “promising,” which was another way of saying they saw themselves in him and therefore refused to look too closely at the cracks; he was captain of the hockey team, son of a city councilman who was rumored to be eyeing a congressional run, and he had been asking Izzy to Winter Formal for weeks.
She had already told him no, politely at first, then firmly, and she had thought that was the end of it, because in her world “no” had always meant exactly that.
“Why are we turning?” she asked when he passed the exit toward her aunt’s townhouse and headed instead toward the dark side of campus where the old gym and back lot sat unused except for the occasional cigarette break.
“We need to talk,” Caleb said, his voice smooth, but his jaw tighter than usual.
“About what?” she asked, though something in her stomach had already begun to sink.
“About your attitude,” he replied, parking near the chain-link fence where snow had begun to drift into small dunes. “You think you’re better than everyone else.”
She laughed once, sharp. “Because I don’t want to go to a dance with you?” Before she could reach for the door handle, she heard the click. Locked.
The back doors opened almost simultaneously, and three of Caleb’s teammates slid in, bringing a gust of freezing air and the smell of cheap cologne with them.
“Hey, Cruz,” one of them—Tyler Grayson—said, leaning forward between the seats. “Heard you’ve been playing hard to get.”
“Let me out,” Izzy said, keeping her voice steady even as her pulse quickened.
“Or what?” another one chimed in. “You gonna call Daddy’s lawyers?”
They believed the story she had fed them for two years, that she lived with her aunt because her parents traveled constantly for business, that the reason she left school in a nondescript sedan instead of a chauffeured SUV was because she liked independence, that the reason no one ever came to parent-teacher conferences was because her family valued privacy.
The truth—that her father ran one of the most powerful motorcycle clubs in the region, that the Red Saints had more influence in certain neighborhoods than the police did, that violence was something she had been raised to understand but not to romanticize—was something she kept buried, because normalcy was a luxury she guarded fiercely.
“Caleb,” she said now, turning toward him, “this isn’t funny.”
He stepped out of the car, walked around to her side, and yanked the door open, the wind immediately stealing the heat from the interior.
“Here’s how this works,” he said calmly. “You sit out here and think about how you talk to people. When you’re ready to apologize and say yes, you can come find us at Tyler’s place. Five blocks east.”
“It’s below zero,” she said, disbelief creeping into her voice. “You can’t just leave me here.”
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her out onto the icy pavement. She slipped, hit her hip hard, and before she could scramble up, someone had tossed her phone into a snowbank and her keys in the opposite direction.
“Have fun,” Caleb called over his shoulder, and then the Audi’s taillights disappeared into the whiteout.
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