The Devil's bargain
639 Words
She didn't flinch when the lock turned.
Most students broke by now. They cried, or they bargained, or they dropped their parents' corporate titles like weapons. Maya Lin simply sat there, dark eyes lit like flint catching steel. She was a glitch in the pristine, predictable machinery of Crestview Academy, and for the first time in three years, I found myself actually paying attention to someone.
"Locking the door is a bit theatrical, don't you think?" she said, her voice steady even as her knuckles whitened around her backpack straps. "Are we moving from interrogation to hostage situation?"
"I lock the door when I don't want the hallway interrupting my thinking." I walked back toward the desk and chose to lean against the front of it rather than sit behind it. A different kind of distance.
Up close, without the desk as buffer, she looked small and entirely dangerous. There was a smudge of blue ink on her left thumb, and a fierce, unguarded intelligence in the way she held herself that made something tighten in my chest I had no interest in examining.
She was completely right about Julian. My cousin was a liability who left his disasters for other people to absorb, and he had almost certainly used Maya's stolen ID card to paper over his own academic failures. But admitting that out loud meant cracking the Sterling family's wall, something my father would ruin me for before I even finished the sentence.
"You didn't need the test key," I said plainly, watching her face. "Your Advanced Functions average is 99.4. You could sleep through the midterm and still place first in the senior class."
"Then why am I sitting here, Vance?" Her voice softened into something quieter and more dangerous. "If you already know I didn't do it, why play the executioner?"
"Because the board needs a culprit by five o'clock, and my father prefers culprits without legal teams on retainer." I held her gaze. "Unless, of course, you find a protector whose legal team is even larger than his."
Maya raised an eyebrow. "And let me guess; that protector is you." The sardonic edge in her voice was razor-thin. "What's the price, Sterling? People like you don't do charity work for people like me."
I reached into my blazer pocket and produced a small black flash drive containing the real security footage, the footage where Julian's face was unmistakable beneath the hallway lights. I turned it over once between my fingers.
"My father wants me to take his seat on the corporate board next month. He believes he owns my future, the same way he believes he owns this school." I kept my voice even. "I need a distraction. Something high-profile and destabilizing enough to make him look erratic to the shareholders." I paused. "I want you to play the role of my girlfriend."
Maya stared at me as if I had just spoken in a language that had been extinct for centuries. "You want me to — what?"
"Fake date me, Lin," I said, letting the words settle between us. "Play the part of the girl who finally got under the Sterling heir's skin. Drive my family to the edge of their composure for two months, and I will personally guarantee your scholarship becomes a full ride to Oxford."
She stood slowly, and the movement brought her close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off her skin.
"And if I say no?" she whispered, her eyes moving across my face with the careful precision of someone searching for a structural weakness.
I rested one hand on the desk just behind her, closing her into my shadow without touching her. "Then by tomorrow morning your locker will be emptied, and you'll become one more cautionary statistic from the wrong side of the city."
- Writer
