4

AELA

BEFORE

IN MY PLAID skirt with its box pleats, a crisp linen shirt, and a heavy jacket, I felt more than just stupid. I looked it too. My squeaky leather shoes had these tiny tassels on them, for God’s sake. Throw in the knee socks, and I looked like a character from some weird show.

I wasn’t used to wearing a uniform. Back before Dad’s promotion, I’d just worn regular clothes at my regular school. Then I’d had to move to St. Mary’s Middle School for Girls, and we were now being shunted off to St. John’s High. St. Mary’s had been bad enough with its ankle-length skirts, but, and I knew this was horrendous, it hadn’t mattered at St. Mary’s.

I was just one girl among a thousand.

St. John’s was a different matter entirely.

It was mixed.

Boys were going to see me wearing this getup.

Somehow that was more nauseating than anything else, and I didn’t consider myself a vain person. My friend Deirdre, on the other hand, was totally vain, but the only reason she wasn’t bitching about the uniform and the fact that we looked like some creepy uncle’s ‘favorite’ niece was because of Declan.

Declan Shmeclan. I’d be glad to meet him at long last just because she went on about him so damn much.

Honestly, it was boring. Like, it never stopped.

Declan this and Declan that.

You’d think he was Brad Pitt with the way she could wax poetically about him. Sister Sarah would have fainted with glee if she’d shown as much imagination in English class, that was for damn sure.

I was pretty certain that Declan was either going to be the most handsome guy the world had ever seen or the most blah. The fact that our other friends had met him and seemed to agree with her told me I was in for a treat, even if it was only on the eyes.

“Stand up straight,” Mom chided me, as she shoved me against the wall beside the door.

With Dad’s promotion, we’d moved to a better building, but though that move had been two years ago, I still missed the old place. The wall beside the front door had little pencil marks measuring how tall I’d grown, and it was a ritual for us to take my first day of school pictures here.

We were making new rituals in the apartment, but it wasn’t the same.

Not much was.

Dad had never been that important in the Five Points, and he still wasn’t, but ever since he’d moved up a level, he just wasn’t around as much, and he hadn’t been around a lot before. If I missed him, I couldn’t even imagine what Mom felt. It was no wonder she was taking more and more of her happy pills. Of course, the more she took of them, the less happy she was. Go figure, huh?

I gave her a false smile because she looked so proud to see me dressed in this outfit, and I straightened my shoulders as she held her breath for a second, then hovered her finger over the button. In a snap, a Polaroid was spitting out a little photo, and she wafted it in the air, beaming at it then at me.

“You look beautiful,” she told me with a grin, dumping the picture on the hall table before bustling over and hugging me tight.

She gave the best hugs.

Always.

I squeezed her back, loving the way she almost always smelled of vanilla cookies, and wished I was just going to a regular school. Sure, I had friends now, and those friends had been hard earned, but I’d still prefer my old PS.

She kissed my temple and murmured, “You’re going to knock ‘em dead.”

“I doubt it,” I grumbled. The only thing unusual about me wasn’t something the sisters at St. Mary’s had appreciated. I had a good eye for color. That was it. Everything else about me was just average, but I was okay with that.

“You will. Chin up, sweetheart.” Another kiss to my temple. “Now, come on. The bus will be here soon.”

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting beside Deirdre on the bus as she primped and preened in a mirror.

I wasn’t sure how often she had to confess about being vain, but I knew the sisters had removed her compact mirror more times than they’d chided me for my inability to concentrate.

“I can’t wait to see him,” she was saying, excitement making her voice breathy.

I shot her a look. “You saw him yesterday, didn’t you?”

We weren’t high enough in the ranks to have attended the end of summer BBQ the O’Donnellys held at their compound, but we all knew about it. And everyone who couldn’t attend wished like hell they could.

“Well, yeah, but it wasn’t enough.” She released a dreamy sigh. “I’m so lucky he’s mine.”

Wanting to gag, but managing not to, I just hummed. I still wasn’t sure why I was friends with Deirdre. She and I weren’t alike, but I was grateful to her because she’d taken me under her wing my first day at St. Mary’s and had brought me into her circle.

Sometimes I thought it was for the same reason a bride always made her bridesmaids wear shitty dresses—to make

herself look better—but I was still happy not to be on my own. She tended to search me out too, sitting next to me and choosing to talk with me rather than the others, though she’d known them a lot longer than she had me and their families were similarly ranked.

Last year, we’d learned about the caste system in India, and I’d realized that was how life was in the Irish Mob. You stuck to your caste, you didn’t move from it, you didn’t leave it ever, and you worked among it too. Unless you were promoted, and those promotions happened for a reason.

Dad had never said why he’d gone from being a run-of-the-mill gofer, a simple runner who ducked and dove for the Points, to a crew man who answered to a captain, and I’d never ask.

I didn’t want to know.

Our good fortune was paid for by the blood of others.

Sometimes, I thought I was the only one who saw that.

In the distance, St. John’s loomed up ahead.

It was an old building, looking like something from an architecture magazine, because it resembled a cathedral in my opinion, with its towering turrets, endless rows of windows, and craggy walls that had gargoyles on them—gargoyles I knew I’d be studying and drawing later tonight. It took up an entire block, and in space poor Manhattan, that was really saying something.

As Deirdre carried on talking about Declan—her favorite subject and potentially the reason why she liked sitting next to me, because I let her talk for hours on end about him—I stared at the high school and tried not to be nervous.

I hated new beginnings.

I hated change.

By the time we were halfway through the day, I was still feeling on edge, nervous, but a little better because with the morning done, I only had a couple of hours before I could get the hell out of this uniform. The box pleats bunched up under

my butt, making it uncomfortable to sit on, especially because Mom had used a whole freakin’ bottle of starch on it. And the shoes pinched.

Badly.

Grunting as I took a seat at the cafeteria table opposite Deirdre, I muttered, “Anyone else hate this uniform?”

It wasn’t the first complaint, but because we’d all been dealing with it for half the day, it stirred an argument because Kylie insisted plaid did better things for her butt than the old skirt at St. Mary’s had.

As I pondered how plaid could do anything for a butt, I saw him.

I didn’t have to know his name to recognize who he was.

What he was.

An O’Donnelly.

He wore the same crappy uniform as us, but he somehow managed to look like a man instead of a boy in it. The guys wore gray pants with a faint pinstripe, a white shirt, matching shoes, and a larger blazer with a long plaid tie. The tie he’d loosened, and he’d unfastened the top button of his shirt. In his hand he held his blazer, and it was all bunched up in a way that told me he didn’t give a shit if he wrecked it, and that money didn’t matter because if I’d done that and had to buy a new one, Mom would have had a fit.

But the uniform wasn’t what made the man, because I was most definitely looking at a man. He was surrounded by boys with fuzz on their lip, for God’s sake, weeny kids, where he was a mile ahead of them.

Was it Conor? I knew he was the eldest O’Donnelly at school. Eoghan was a couple of years below me, so this could be Declan.

Deirdre’s Declan?

She’d never shown me a picture, but God, no wonder she could talk about him for days.

He was beautiful.

I wanted, so badly, to draw him.

To capture his face in ink, in pencil, in charcoal, in paint. Oils first, then acrylics. I’d even try watercolor, just to see if I could match the color of his skin that was like gold but not. Black Irish. Everything about him screamed it.

Blacker than black hair, rich blue eyes.

Damn.

Just, damn.

I licked my lips, aware I was staring and unable to stop myself. He was so much more than I’d anticipated, like a rock star had come storming into the cafeteria rather than another student.

And I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Conversation hadn’t stopped, but it had definitely toned down. People were watching him, watching his crew, and a weird feeling hit my stomach, something that made me feel hot and shivery as I saw how he commanded the place without even trying.

His gaze darted around the room, and when he found Deirdre, whose back was to him, and who was deep in the middle of a conversation about how the knee socks made her ankles look fat, I expected him to smile—or do something that indicated he liked her.

If anything, his mouth pulled taut, his eyes pinched, and a strange kind of… no. That couldn’t be.

His features twisted slightly, marring his beauty, before one of his friends caught his attention and his focus broke as he replied.

Then, after he had, and he grinned at whatever they’d been talking about, he turned back to Deirdre.

I sucked in a breath.

He looked at her like he hated her.

Then he looked at me, and I knew why.

Like any predator, he’d scented prey, and my reaction had drawn his eyes to me.

Only, when he looked at me, it was the exact opposite of hatred that flashed over his face. He looked startled. Surprised. He even halted in his tracks, which had his buddies bumping into him, which forced him to carry on moving. His nostrils flared for a split second before he managed to get his features under control.

By that time, I ducked my head and focused on my lunch.

As I stared at the baby carrots I’d been dunking in ranch, my mind raced a mile a minute.

What had just happened?

Why had he looked at Deirdre like he hated her, then looked at me as if he didn’t?

Feeling overheated and sweaty—neither of which was pleasant in my polyester uniform—I forced my lungs to calm, my heart to slow down. Then he approached my table, and all hell broke loose.

I thought I was going to burn to a pile of ash on the seat, especially when he put his hand on the table and leaned on it.

His body was beside me, his heat so close that the ash thing could still happen, and his scent? Sweet baby Jesus. I’d never smelled anything like it.

It was like heat and man and musk and mint and citrus.

Who  smelled  like  that  when  they  were  a  teenager?

Shouldn’t he reek of Axe?

I licked my lips, well aware that, though he was beside me, he didn’t look at me again. His focus was on Deirdre, and his voice? Unpleasant.

Oh, not his actual voice. That was deep and husky. Again, making me wonder if he’d had to stay back a grade or something because he was so old. He felt so much more mature than anyone else.

Aware I was sweating like I’d been in P.E. all morning, I hunched my shoulders as I recognized that the inherent dislike I’d seen on his face when he’d looked at Deirdre was totally present in his tone too.

She didn’t notice. Her cheeks turned bright pink, her eyes glittered, and she stared at him like he was a trophy she coveted.

Maybe he was.

She liked to think of herself as the leader of our little gang, so being tied to Declan upped her position not only among her friends, but in the entirety of the Points.

If she could keep hold of him, tight and fast, and get him to an altar… that would change her whole future.

The thought left me shaken for some stupid reason. I had no idea why the thought of Deirdre marrying Declan like he was some kind of cash cow put me on edge, but it did.

It was done in our world all the time.

Advantageous matches were the norm.

I bit my lip as I reached for my Diet Coke, but unfortunately for me, my movement came at the same time Declan snapped, “You need to stop fucking around, Deirdre. Either you can go, or you can’t—”

While I was used to Dad huffing and puffing, the hatred in Declan’s voice had me stunned. I knocked over my can, and immediately went to right it, but his hand was there, catching it.

His fingers brushed mine.

And it was like something from a book.

The sparks shot through me, making the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

I gulped as he gritted out, “You should be more careful.” But his tone was different.

Softer.

Peeping up at him, I shot him a shy and apologetic glance. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” His eyes lingered on mine, and I felt the laser-like brand as if I’d just had LASIK.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Deirdre puff up like a pissed off peacock and immediately ducked my head and stared at my tray.

Conversation started up again, and his deep, rumbly voice carried on, but even though everything just muddled on its way, nothing was the same.

Nothing at all.

And I had no idea why.