Four Of A Kind

Chapter 266: [4.84] Winning Him

That was a lie.

She was so jealous she could taste it, a metallic flavor at the back of her throat that reminded her of biting her own cheek during arguments she couldn’t win. She was jealous of Sabrina’s patience, of the way Sabrina could sit in silence and make it feel like a gift instead of a threat. She was jealous of Harlow’s ease, the way Harlow touched people without second-guessing the contact, the way she said "love u" like it cost nothing and meant everything. She was jealous of Vivienne’s competence, the way Vivienne walked into rooms and everyone turned to listen, the way she wore power like a second skin instead of the borrowed coat it felt like on Cassidy.

But Cassidy had something none of her sisters had.

She had the bet.

Twenty-four hours where no rotation schedule applied. Twenty-four hours that existed outside Sabrina’s research papers and Vivienne’s color-coded spreadsheets and Harlow’s sunshine diplomacy. Twenty-four hours where Cassidy Renée Valentine, the problem child, the wild one, the girl whose mother had labeled her a disappointment so many times the word had lost its sting, got to be the only person in Isaiah Angelo’s universe.

And she was going to make every second of those twenty-four hours so intense, so overwhelming, so completely and undeniably Cassidy that when it was over and the rotation resumed and her sisters took their turns being sweet and smart and mysterious, Isaiah would close his eyes at night and think about her.

Not Vivienne with her bathroom kisses and quarterly reports.

Not Harlow with her waffles and vampire bites and sunshine.

Not Sabrina with her long game and her stolen footage and her careful devastating patience.

Her.

The one who burned hot enough to leave marks. frёeωebɳovel.com

Cassidy lifted her head from the steering wheel and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Wine-red hair with the black streaks she’d put in herself. Purple eyes behind black-framed glasses she pretended to hate. Chapped lower lip where she’d been gnawing at it all morning. Smudge of ink on her right hand from the red pen she’d used to color-code her algebra problems at 2 AM because Isaiah taught her that her brain worked differently and differently wasn’t broken.

She looked like a mess.

She looked like someone who’d just promised a boy she was going to win.

Her phone lit up one more time. Not the group chat. Not Harlow’s enthusiasm or Vivienne’s scheduling or Sabrina’s cryptic single-word responses.

Isaiah.

The message was short. Characteristically short. Isaiah Angelo communicated through text the same way he communicated through speech, which was with the bare minimum of words required to convey the maximum amount of meaning, a quality that should have been infuriating but instead made Cassidy’s blood run hot because everything he said landed with the weight of something carefully chosen.

"Eighteen out of twenty. Sleep tonight."

Two sentences. No emoji. No explanation. No motivation speech. Just the score she’d earned and an order to rest, because he knew she’d stayed up until 2 AM doing the problems and he knew she’d stay up again tonight if he didn’t tell her to stop, because he paid attention to her in a way that nobody else ever had, the way someone pays attention to something they consider worth watching.

Cassidy typed back with fingers that were still shaking from the library, from the tie, from the two inches of air between her mouth and his that she’d chosen not to close because she wanted the anticipation to build until it became unbearable, until the explosion was so massive that it rewrote the laws of physics.

"make me"

She sent it before she could second-guess herself. Then she added a devil emoji because she was Cassidy Valentine and subtlety was for people who were afraid of being too much.

His response came in eleven seconds.

"That’s the plan."

Cassidy dropped her phone into her lap, pressed both palms over her face, and screamed into her hands with enough force that the windows of the Supra fogged from the heat of her breath. The sound bounced off the leather interior and the custom dashboard her father had helped her install during the summer she turned sixteen, the last summer he was strong enough to hold a wrench.

When she finished screaming, she picked up her phone and read the message again.

That’s the plan.

Three words. No emoji. No elaboration.

Isaiah Angelo was going to make Cassidy Valentine sleep.

The implication of that sentence, the context of ownership and beds and the twenty-four hours that awaited them, sat in Cassidy’s stomach like a coal from a fire that had been burning since the first day of school when a tired boy spilled coffee on her shirt and looked at her with those dark eyes and did not flinch when she promised to ruin his life.

She started the Supra. The engine turned over with the throaty growl that always made her feel more like herself than anything else in the world. The parking lot was emptying as students filtered toward their own cars and their own lives and their own problems that were probably simpler than being in love with a scholarship student from Philadelphia who was also being pursued by your three identical sisters while your mother threatened to destroy him from thirty thousand feet.

Cassidy drove.

She didn’t go to the manor. She went to the tennis courts at the public park three miles from campus, the ones with the cracked concrete and the sagging net that nobody used because Hartwell students had access to actual maintained facilities. She parked the Supra and grabbed her racket from the trunk and walked onto the court in her school uniform with her thigh-highs slipping and her shirt untucked and her tie hanging loose like a noose that had given up.

She hit serves for two hours.

Each ball left the racket with a crack that echoed off the surrounding trees and the chain-link fence and the empty bleachers where nobody sat to watch the Valentine girl who couldn’t do math destroy tennis balls with the focused rage of someone who had decided, for the first time in her seventeen years of life, that she was going to win something that mattered.

Not the bet.

Not the test.

Him.