“You think you’re just going to live happily ever after?” she sneers. “Hailey, I’m going to make your life on campus so miserable, you’re never going to finish school.”
“How?” I ask just to get it over with. “What, are you going to sleep with my professors and get them to give me bad grades?”
“I have friends,” she threatens with a smile.
“So, what? You’re going to start rumors about me? About how I’m a whore? How I have STDs? What, Danica? Tell me.”
Her jaw ticks as I guess her evil plan, and I roll my eyes.
“I used to go to high school smelling like manure with holes in my clothes. My snow boots freshman year were tennis shoes with bread bags tied over them. If you think I give even the tiniest shit what a bunch of frat boys and sorority girls think of me, you’re wrong.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” Danica mocks with an exaggerated pout. It twists into a smile, and she taunts, “What did Mike think of my dress, Hailey? The one with the blue flowers you loved so much.”
My blood boils under my skin, but I force a smile back. “That stupid video you sent him? He didn’t even watch it. And even if he had, I’m sure he wouldn’t have liked it as much as the red dress I wore when I starred in the band’s music video.”
White rage flares across Danica’s face, and she hisses, “You’re lying.”
“I’m a terrible liar,” I remind her, echoing something she’s told me a thousand times. “Look at my face. Does it look like I’m lying?”
One minute, she’s studying me—my eyes, my mouth, my serious expression. The next, blood is exploding against my teeth, the force of her fist knocking me backward. I fall from the unexpected blow, and my brother drops to his knees to help me. My rattled brain is still trying to register what just happened, when he starts to rise to his feet, anger rolling off him.
I latch on to Luke’s elbow to keep him from getting involved, and when I’m confident he’s not going to throw everything my dad ever taught him about not hitting girls out the window, I force my legs to lift me back to my feet.
Adrenaline is pulsing through me so rapidly, my whole body is shaking. I’m so angry, I want to cry. I want to scream so loud it hurts, and then I want to fall apart on the sidewalk. Instead, I meet Danica’s furious glare, and I make sure she hears me. “You’re the ugly stepsister, Danica. You try so hard to be the princess, but you’re hideous inside. Your daddy is the only man who’s ever going to love you.”
Angry tears glisten in her eyes as she clenches her fists at her sides. I wait for her to punch me again, but when it doesn’t happen, I wipe my sleeve against my bloody lip and turn away from her. “She’s not worth it,” I tell Luke when he holds his aggressive stance, and he eventually lets me pull him away.
I hope the blood in my mouth is enough. I pray my swollen lip was what she needed. If she needed to knock me down, fine, she knocked me down—
“This isn’t over,” she calls after me as I walk away, and I close my eyes, knowing that words will never be enough to stop her from wreaking havoc on my life. It will never matter to her how many times she knocks me down, because I will always get back up.
When I turn around and walk back to her, her eyes have dried, and her face is vicious. The little girl I knew in Indiana is gone, possessed by a coldhearted bitch who’s spent the past few months manipulating me like a puppet.
“You have something you want to say to me?” she barks, and I look her straight in the eye.
“Yeah,” I say, channeling years of lifting hay bales and mucking stalls and wrangling horses. I spit a mouthful of blood on the sidewalk, and I fist my hand like my daddy taught me. “You punch like a little bitch.”
When I pull back my fist, I pull it back far. And when I punch Danica in her startled face, I punch her as hard as I can.
Chapter 52
If my life was a fairy tale, I suppose I would have knocked Danica out on that Thanksgiving afternoon four months ago. She would have fallen on her ass, the hit would have been clean, and I would have stood over her victorious, noting a look of surrender in her eyes.
Instead, there was blood everywhere.
Danica’s nose crunched against my fist, and the scene that followed was like something straight out of a horror movie.
“Oh my God!” I gasped as I dropped to my knees beside her on the sidewalk. She was bawling her eyes out, holding her nose as blood streamed over her fingers. “I’m so sorry!”
“I think you broke her nose,” my shocked brother said as Danica cried hysterically, and my hands shook as I panicked, not knowing how to help her.
“Get Mom and Dad!”
My brother ran back to the house, and I stripped off my favorite hoodie—the Ivy Tech one that Mike rescued for me the first night we met—and used it to try to stop the bleeding. I pushed her hair back from her face, I rubbed her back, I told her over and over again how sorry I was and how it was going to be okay.
We haven’t talked in the months that have passed since that day. Danica dropped out of school even before the semester ended, and I heard she’s dating a doctor now—the one who fixed her broken nose. My mom told me he’s a few years older than her, with a big house and a fancy Porsche, and I guess he was enough to make her forget about rock stars, because Mike hasn’t heard from her either.
I’m watching him beat the drums now, a slow, easy rhythm as the guys do a lazy afternoon sound check. Mayhem is empty save for the band, a few staff members, and me, Rowan, and Dee, but outside, a line is already stretched around the building. It’s The Last Ones to Know’s first big show since their music video for “Ghost” released and the single went platinum, and tonight, one of the few bands bigger than they are is opening for them as part of the celebration, so the show sold out within minutes.
While I spent the night in Mike’s arms, fans slept on the concrete sidewalk outside this building waiting to see him play, and a chill dances up my spine as I watch him. He yawns and plays the drums with one hand, and I smile, remembering that I didn’t exactly let him get much sleep when I came over last night.