“But you know what? All Blackbrook kids are stupid in the exact same way. I know that better than anyone.”
“I don’t want to—”
“You think you’re so special. So perfect. You’re so full of yourself, you can’t see the obvious truth.”
Vaughn rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know this story. Dick Fain stole everything from Gemma. Gemma was the one to invent the glue that had made him and Blackbrook millions. The fortune should be hers.” And Oliver’s. And . . . his.
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
For once.
“I mean the whole good twin/bad twin fantasy,” she said, her tone poison. “You think we kept everything from you because we wanted to protect you? Not even remotely. We wanted to protect ourselves. You can’t be trusted to keep our secrets. To do what needs to be done.”
“You needed to murder your boss? You needed to kidnap those kids?”
She looked away. “I made a lot of mistakes. I got scared. Oliver won’t have that problem.”
“Oliver’s not a killer,” he said. But his tongue felt heavy afterward, as if there were more words to come.
Not yet.
I hope.
Mrs. White looked as if she could finish his thought as well.
But then again, she was a murderer. Vaughn hated to think they could spot their own kind. He also hated that these were the categories he had to put people in now: murderer or not, capable of murder or not.
Mrs. White didn’t get any other visitors. He was quite certain Scarlett Mistry wasn’t braving the prison’s grimy folding chairs, even though she’d liked her old residence proctor well enough when they’d all lived happily together in Tudor House. You didn’t stand by the murderer. Everyone knew that.
And yet here Vaughn sat. Maybe he was stupid, after all.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said at last, crossing her arms. “Oliver’s going to go through with his plan, whether or not I help him.”
“Okay, then help me,” Vaughn begged. “Help me so he doesn’t hurt anyone. So he doesn’t make the same mistakes you did.”
“Still playing good twin?” she mocked.
“Still playing brother.” Vaughn was done with games, just like he’d told Orchid. “He’s the only family I have, Mrs. White. My parents are gone. Gemma is gone. I can’t lose him, too.”
This seemed to get through to her. Vaughn remembered all the afternoons at Gemma’s kitchen table. He remembered his grandmother’s experiments, turning pennies green and making hot ice. Always, Mrs. White had been there, too.
“I should have helped Olivia when she was still alive,” Mrs. White said at last. “We shouldn’t have waited so long. When Dick died, I should have . . .”
She didn’t finish. There was little enough to be done then. At least, that’s what Gemma had thought. Oliver believed differently and was determined to stop at nothing to reveal the truth.
Vaughn had never been sure exactly what that meant. Lawsuits, he supposed. And those were won by whoever could pay the lawyers the most. That certainly wasn’t Oliver.
So what was left? Once Oliver had set the record straight but gained nothing in the process?
Vaughn wasn’t naive enough to think his brother would be satisfied. When they’d first come up with the plan of the two of them attending Blackbrook as one student, Oliver had thought he could get into the labs and quickly prove his mettle. But he couldn’t even keep up with the other students, let alone recreate his grandmother’s work without her notes.
Vaughn had thrived at Blackbrook, but all Oliver had seen was the gulf that separated him from the other kids there. And that’s when his plans had turned from justice to revenge.
“If you tell me what he’s looking for, I can help him stay on track and out of trouble.”
He hoped.
Mrs. White was quiet for a long time. Vaughn felt hot. He wasn’t a fool. And he wasn’t a sap, either.
“He’s my brother. I would never do anything to get in his way. I just want—I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. I’d like to think that after all that’s happened, you care about that.”
She looked down. “Okay,” she whispered at last. “But you aren’t going to like it.”
3
Scarlett
“Time’s up!” Scarlett said, and threw her pencil down. “Let’s see how you did.”
Orchid didn’t put up a fight when Scarlett whisked her test sheet out of her hands and lined it up with her own.
“I’ll just check the answers.”
The blanks on her own form seemed to stick out like blinking hazard lights to Scarlett. She wondered if Orchid could see them. Quickly, she flipped to the solution page of their test-prep binder and started to score the tests.
It . . . went about as well as she’d been expecting. Orchid had improved. Only eight wrong answers this time. Down from ten.
Ten! That number had been floating in her head the entire time they’d taken the test. She was lucky they weren’t doing the math portion. Only ten wrong! And Orchid was supposed to be the math and science genius of their little duo. Verbal was supposed to be Scarlett’s strength. That’s how it had worked with her and Finn. If Orchid was a double threat, it changed the calculus.
Actually, given Orchid’s past, she was maybe a quintuple threat? Some girls had all the luck.
Scarlett totaled the scores, then gave herself an extra 150 points for good measure.
“So much better!” she announced. “You’re up to a 740.”
Orchid smiled. “That’s great. What did you get?”
“780,” Scarlett said with a shrug. She was so screwed. And there was no one to help.
The great thing about Orchid McKee was that she was totally trustworthy. The terrible thing about Orchid was that she was totally trustworthy. If Orchid were Finn, they could come up with some scheme. But she wasn’t Finn.
Last term, when there’d been a dead body in the conservatory and secrets around every corner, Orchid was the only person in Tudor House that Scarlett could say with one hundred percent certainty was not a murderer. And when she’d come to Scarlett to confide her biggest secret, Scarlett knew for sure that she was safer with the ex–movie star than with her former best friend, Finn. Who, it turned out, had been lying to her for months.
But that didn’t mean Scarlett didn’t miss Finn’s particular talents for creative—if not entirely ethical—problem-solving.
Although maybe this wasn’t something they could cheat their way out of. And maybe a 630 was fine. Even if it was in verbal. On a practice test. Where she was far less nervous and mistake-prone than she’d be on the actual day . . . ugh!
This couldn’t be happening to her. Not Scarlett Mistry, who was fated for Blackbrook humanities valedictorian—as long as that townie Vaughn Green remembered his place. And if he did beat her, she needed to ace these tests even more. Her parents would kill her if she didn’t get at least a 1400. Actually kill her.
Blackbrook couldn’t take any more bloodshed.
“Are you okay?” Orchid asked.
“Fine,” she snapped. “Should we try math?”