Chapter 168 BACK TO SCHOOL, I GUESS...
BACK TO SCHOOL I GUESS...
AURORA’S POINT OF VIEW.
YEARS BEFORE…..IT WAS ALL A DREAM.
You want to know something about pain? It never starts loud. It’s silent, slow, and deadly—especially the pain from heartbreak. I knew I should have followed my instinct telling me to skip school for the day, but for some reason, another part of me silently nudged me to go. My pain, however, did not start slowly.
Instead, it was a gut punch to my soul.
My wet shoes squelched against the marble tiles of Ravenscroft High with every step I took towards the lecture hall for the scholarship students. I shook off the warning bells in my mind, letting excitement overtake my senses at the thought of seeing my boyfriend again. Tobi was my only solace in this school made for the elite, and students with royalty-level egos.
Someone like me could never make it….not unless Father helps me anyway.
I’d suffered everything painful in this world… but this betrayal, it hurt more than any other thing.
The door to the classroom was left slightly ajar. That’s odd……Mister Lucas hates it when we leave it open. I stepped closer, ready to head in so I could rest my head, butt he sight before me…it made my world turn black, and what was worse was the words they spoke.
From the corner of the room, I heard her icy, snake-like tone before I saw her red hair. Morgana.
My step-sister. The perfect, cold, untouchable nightmare who had taken my father’s love and twisted it into poison against me. She and her mother, Denise, were demons sent from hell to torment me every day of my life, and what’s worse, I could never outrun her.
Not only was she dating one of the wealthiest guys in school, the same guy who is a part of the most notorious group of players in all of Ravenscroft High, The Horsemen, but she was also one of the hottest girls in school.
Kai Mercer, my nightmare, my bully, my hell, was her boyfriend, and everyone knew never to mess with Morgana, or else…he would go berserk. She knew it, too, and she never let me hear the end of it.
“…and once Celeste is out of the way, that bitch will finally know her place,” Morgana said, her voice painfully, and deceptively soft. It was the tone Sue used to make me look like the villain in front of everyone. I’d pay for her bullshit. The sound of my mother’s name from her lips made me gasp sharply.
I froze fast, my heart stopping as I watched them. Both of them were naked, and sweaty…as if they’d just had sex. He had his arms wrapped around her waist, not even bothering to skip her lean ass, which he grabbed, the love-struck look he’d always given me now directed at her.
“…and you’ll get her to step aside, right?” I heard my boyfriend, Toby, whose weak, trembling voice still had a note of desperation enough to make my blood boil.
I thought he hated rich people too… he never let me hear the end of how rich people made his father lose his shoe shop because they needed to bulldoze it to build the now famous Mercer Metropolis.
“I—you know you’re the only one I actually like,” Toby stammered, the boy I had trusted, the boy I had thought was mine and given my virginity to, because I thought he felt the same way towards me, shattered my soul with barely ten words. “I’m only with her because you said to date her…..I hate her as much as you do, baby. I just need to know when I can dump her and start dating you publicly. You said you would leave Kai Mercer for me, that you did not care about me being a scholarship student.”
He was a fool…a fucking fool.
No one knew Morgana better than me. There was no way in hell she would leave someone like Kai for someone like Tobi. While one was poor with no future she could flaunt, the other was the son of a billionaire with a legacy family of trillionaires backing him up. He was the heir to an astronomical level of wealth that would leave everyone else spiraling.
Hell, the horsemen were men just like him. Why did he think Morgana would leave Kai for him?!
How could he do this to me?
“I said we do this, Toby,” Morgana interrupted smoothly. “You play your part. You cozy up to her, make her think she still matters, make her feel better about the pain of her mother, while I get someone to kill that Celeste bitch off, and we handle the rest. Dating can come after.”
I couldn’t fucking breathe.
Not yet….. Not until I barged inside, unable to take it anymore. And that’s when I saw them fully. I’d stared at them through a small crack before…but now, the pain fully hit.
Toby. My boyfriend had his naked back pressed against her naked front. They were smiling and laughing as if they hadn't plotted my mother's mother. He knew everything that happened with her….so how could he ever….?
I didn’t want to think of it. I should’ve screamed. I should’ve thrown something at the two of them. But all I could do was stare until I prayed it would be a dream like last night’s one about being some stripper.
They didn’t even notice me at first.
And that was worse.