I read this book before I lived it.
Last summer I beta-read a manuscript called The Bramble Crown for my godmother's YA imprint. Pendleton House. Three hundred and forty pages of prep-school tearjerker, the kind where the modest, soft-spoken girl gets every senior boy in the East Coast inner circle to lay himself down across her path like coats over a puddle. The villain in chapter one is a girl named Beatrix Marlowe — old money, sharp jaw, a face the author described as beautiful in a way that scared people. Her job in the book is to stalk the soft girl, get publicly humiliated by the soft girl's knights, and be expelled from St. Cyprian's by chapter four.
I close my locker and look at my reflection in the mirror inside the door.
Beatrix Marlowe. The face the author described.
Mine, apparently.
According to The Bramble Crown, in twenty minutes I am supposed to corner Sophie Linden by the boathouse, the senior boys are supposed to corner me back, and Jude Ashford is supposed to break me down to my school shoes in front of his rowing team. Then I cry, then I'm expelled, then I disappear from the book.
Lapdogs, the manuscript calls them. Sophie's lapdogs. Four of the most decorated seventeen-year-olds in the Northeast, on a leash she doesn't even hold tight.
I smile at the mirror.
If she's not going to claim them — fine. I'll take all four.
Be my king, I'll tell the first one.
From today, you, your brothers, and this entire school answer to me.
"Marlowe."
The voice cracks against the back of my neck. Cold, male, the kind of voice that does not have to be raised to be heard.
"Stay the hell away from Sophie. One more stunt and I will have you out of St. Cyprian's by Monday."
I turn around.
The boathouse stairwell is dim, the river light cutting in slats through the slats of the window. Jude Ashford is standing two steps above me in his rowing pullover, hair still wet, eyes the kind of pale that makes contempt look like weather. Behind him, four of the Lions. Henry Cabot-Wells leaning against the rail. Reeve Tanaka-Mercer with his arms crossed. Bo Whitlock grinning the way Bo grins, which is the way an animal grins.
"Damn, Jude, why are you even talking to her."
"Yeah, just sign the paperwork. Done by chapel."
"Should've done it after she shoved Soph in the dining hall last spring."
I never shoved Sophie in the dining hall last spring. According to The Bramble Crown, Sophie told her advisor I looked at her wrong and the chapter ran with it.
This is the chapter where I cry.
Twenty minutes ago Beatrix Marlowe, the villain, slipped a note into Sophie Linden's locker telling her to meet at the boathouse after practice. Sophie ran straight to her boys with shining eyes and a trembling lip. Now I am supposed to be standing here with my back against the wall, taking the warning, taking the laughter, learning my place. Then a long walk across the quad while everyone watches. Then a packed suitcase by Friday.
I look at Jude Ashford's face. The face the manuscript describes as brutally elegant, like something carved from old money.
I look at the four boys behind him. Composer. Athlete. Hacker. Heir. The four most expensive seventeen-year-olds in Connecticut, and they have lined themselves up like attack dogs because a girl said someone looked at her.
Says who.
I take a step forward instead of back.
My heels — Louboutin, red soles, deliberately against dress code — hit the marble landing one at a time. Click. Click. Click. The sound is louder than any of them planned for. Jude's eyebrow moves. The boys go quiet for one beat, then two.
I walk all the way to him. The top of my head reaches his collarbone.
I tip my face up. He looks down. For half a second something in his expression is just confusion — what is she doing. I let him have that half-second.
Then I hook my hand behind his neck, pull him down, and kiss him.
The stairwell goes silent the way a room goes silent when somebody drops a glass. The boys' mouths open and stop opening. Jude's whole body locks. He has spent his entire seventeen years being kissed by girls who first asked permission with their eyes; he has never once been ambushed. His mouth tastes like river air and clean cold. I count two seconds.
Then I step back, slide my thumb across my lower lip, and touch the tip of my tongue to it.
Jude does not move. Jude does not appear to be breathing.
"Wolf-pup," I say, soft. "All that growl."
I tilt my head toward Sophie's name without saying it.
"Whose dog do you want to be? Hers — or mine?"
His pupils blow. There is a flicker on his face I do not think he knows is there: caught, named, and a little hungry.
I do not let him recover. I turn to the boys.
"Listen carefully, gentlemen. I'm only saying this once."
Henry's mouth is still open. Bo has gone the color of something that has lost a bet.
"Being her lapdog is beneath you. Be my court instead."
A pause. I let it land.
"From today — you, your brothers, and this entire school answer to me."
Then I walk past them. Click. Click. Click. Down the stairs, across the boathouse floor, out into the autumn afternoon. The sun on the river is doing that gold thing it does in October. Behind me the stairwell stays silent — the kind of silence five very smart boys make when none of them knows which one of them is supposed to react first.
The book just derailed.
I keep walking.
By breakfast the next morning, the boathouse stairwell is the only thing anyone is talking about.
Bo Whitlock cannot keep a secret in a vault. The Lions' group chat leaked to a senior, the senior leaked to the prefects, the prefects leaked to Cypress, and Cypress is the school's anonymous gossip site, login-gated to a St. Cyprian's email and IP-logged in the back end, which is a detail that will matter later.
The version on Cypress changes by the hour. By first period I assaulted Jude Ashford. By second period he was already in love with me and we'd been sneaking around since September. By third period I drugged him. By fourth period the whole rowing team is in a polycule. The girls' wing has decided I am the antichrist of cotillion.
I sit at my library table during free period with my AirPods out, ankle crossed over the other knee, and let it wash past me.
Sophie comes in around eleven.
She walks the long way to my table so the other six tables can see her doing it. Pink-rimmed eyes, sleeve pulled over her thumb. Concerned-friend voice.
"Trixie. Hey. I just — I wanted to make sure you're okay. I told Jude not to be too hard on you, I really did, he just — he gets so protective, and I told him you didn't mean it, you're going through a lot —"
The smell of someone else's saint act is unmistakable up close.
She has done this perfectly. She has put me back in the chair labeled unstable rich girl and herself on the slightly higher chair labeled generous saint who keeps trying. The library has tilted its ear toward us the way a hayfield tilts toward a fox.
In The Bramble Crown this is the chapter where Beatrix Marlowe screams at her in front of the librarian and gets a behavioral citation that the disciplinary committee will use against her in chapter four.
I look up at Sophie. I smile.
"Oh? You did?"
I tap my phone on the table. I open Voice Memos. I press play.
The volume is low. Just loud enough for the three nearest tables.
It is Sophie's voice, two nights ago. Crying. The genuinely good cry, the one she has practiced.
"Jude — Jude, please, she sent me a note, she wants to meet me at the boathouse, I'm so scared, what if she — what if she does something — please don't let her — please —"
Sophie's face goes the color of bone.
I let it run for nine seconds. Then I turn it off.
I stand up. I lean in close. I keep my voice at the volume she has been using on me.
"Sophie. Next time you cry into a phone, check if the other person's recording. People in this school carry receipts."
I start to step back. Then I stop. Lean back in.
"And Jude. He's not yours. He's just on loan."
She trembles. Once. The kind of tremble where the saint persona briefly slips and you can see the girl underneath, who knows exactly how the trick works and is furious that it was caught on tape.
I pick up my bag and walk out.
My first stop is not Jude. He's a feral thing. I'll handle him last.
I go down to the old music annex.
According to The Bramble Crown, chapter nine, Cassian Vance is going to spend today turning his music room upside down looking for the score he wrote for the National Young Composers Showcase. He won't find it. In three days, his rival — a kid named Henry Reston from a feeder school in Boston — will perform Cass's piece note-for-note at the regional final and accuse Cass of plagiarizing him. Cass's reputation collapses. Then Sophie, by holy coincidence, finds the manuscript copy in Henry Reston's locker and saves Cass's life. Cass falls at her feet. Knight number two added to the chain.
The score isn't in Henry Reston's locker. Cass dropped it himself, two practice rooms over, the night he and Reston were both rehearsing late.
The old annex is empty. There is a cello case leaning against the wall, a tuned-up Steinway under a dust cover. I crouch, slide my hand under the piano frame, and there it is — eight pages of staff paper, Cass's blue-pen scrawl across the top:
Untitled — for cello and ambition. C. Vance.
I pick it up.
I do not go to Cass yet.
I wait.
People who get rescued at the moment of greatest panic are people who never forget who rescued them.
Last period, my phone vibrates. The text is from the PI my father keeps on retainer:
Looked into Reston. His father's family office took a $30M position last quarter in a small label called Aria North. Aria North's CEO sits on the Showcase advisory board.
Beautiful.
I find Cass in the soundproof practice room at the end of the senior corridor. Door closed. He has been at it long enough that there is a half-eaten protein bar on the piano and the practice room looks like a small hurricane went through it. He is on his knees going through his own backpack for the fifth time.
He looks up when I come in. The expression slams shut.
"Marlowe. The hell do you want. Get out."
I do not say anything. I cross the room, lift the lid of the piano, and lay the eight pages of his score across the strings.
Cass goes still the way prey goes still.
He gets up slowly. He walks over. He picks up the pages. He flips through them. He flips through them again. Then he turns on me.
"How the hell did you get this. Did you take it."
"If I'd taken it, Cass, I'd be giving it to Henry Reston. Not you."
He flinches at Reston's name.
"What does that mean."
I take out my phone, open the email from the PI, and turn the screen so he can read it.
"Reston's father invested thirty million in Aria North last quarter. Aria North's CEO is one of three judges at the Showcase final."
I watch his face go from anger to confusion to white. He is not stupid. He is, in fact, the smartest of the four. The math gets done in his head in about six seconds.
"This isn't a plagiarism thing," he says quietly.
"No. It's a capital thing. Even with your score in your own hand, you'd lose."
He looks at the eight pages in his fingers. The fingers are shaking a little.
I came here for that exact tremor. The drop from cliff to ocean. Now I bring him back up.
"I can fix it."
He does not look up. He waits.
"I can put you on that stage with your name on the program and walk you off it with a trophy. And I can put Reston's father's label out of the music business by the end of the quarter."
His head comes up.
"Why."
"Simple." I extend my hand, palm up, the way you'd offer one to a horse. "Be mine. Compose for my reign."
He stares at the hand.
The sun is coming through the practice-room window in long bars. I let him take as long as he needs.
I see the hostility in his eyes start to come apart. Underneath it: shock. Calculation. And something I had banked on being there — a quiet, very old hunger to win that has nothing to do with Sophie Linden's smile.
He is silent a long time.
Long enough that I almost wonder.
Then he says, low, "What do you want me to do."
I smile.
Hooked.