Wicked Idol: A Hellfire Club Novel Read online

  Wicked Idol

  Becker Gray

  Wicked Idol

  Dangerous Press

  Becker Gray © 2020

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book only. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Dangerous Press LLC.

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Wicked Idol

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Want More Midnight Dynasty?

  Wicked Idol

  The new girl doesn’t belong here. So why can’t I stop thinking about her? Iris Briggs a goodie two-shoes with a headmaster father who aims to ruin my school year before it’s even begun. She gets under my skin. With her demure skirts and braided hair, Iris flits around the periphery until she runs right into me, hot coffee soaking me as she looks up at me with wide, innocent eyes.

  We start off scalding. In the library, we reach lava levels.

  And then in the city? We go nuclear.

  She’s a good girl, but I’m a Constantine. My duty is to my family. At least, it was until I started unbraiding the good girl and realizing there’s more to life than duty.

  1

  Iris

  The very first thing I did as a student at Pembroke Preparatory Academy was piss off the Hellfire Club.

  It had been an accident—the kind of accident that was entirely preventable, but an accident, nonetheless. I was checking my bag as I walked through the stone-paved courtyard to make sure I’d packed my camera, and then I stumbled right into a bleary-eyed teacher. Not wanting to make any extra enemies among the staff—my father was the new headmaster and had already threatened all the teachers with salary freezes along with promising to gut the athletic department—I staggered sideways and stammered out an apology.

  And slammed right into the back of Keaton Constantine, sending his whipped dalgona coffee flying all over the tailored school blazers and silk school ties of his friends.

  Not that I knew then that he was the Keaton Constantine, rugby captain, king of the school, and scion of one of the most powerful families in New York.

  All I knew was that when he wheeled around, he had the fullest, firmest lips and bluest eyes I’d ever seen.

  “God, I’m so sorry—” I blurted out, but he cut me off.

  “Who the fuck are you?” His eyes raked over me like hot sapphires, taking in my scuffed, secondhand Mary Janes and my brand-new Pembroke uniform.

  Which is when I knew I was toast. His derision was obvious in his cruel smirk.

  I’d followed the regulations in the student handbook exactly and kept the pleated gray skirt at knee length and wore the sweater embroidered with the Pembroke crest over my white button-up shirt. My red hair was in two simple braids, and I hadn’t worn any makeup. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself by flouting the school rules—not to mention my father would’ve had a fit if his daughter wasn’t the paragon of student handbook adherence.

  Turns out that I was drawing more attention to myself by wearing the uniform perfectly. The other girls had their skirts hemmed up high, fluttering well above their knees, and their shirts untucked and rumpled. Some were clearly in their boyfriend’s sweater or blazer, others had skipped it all together, and all of them had artfully messy hair and influencer-level makeup.

  The boys were just as bad. Untucked shirts, loosened ties, tousled hair. Some were smoking, others had girls parked on their laps.

  And the boys I’d just inadvertently splattered coffee all over were the most insolently rakish of them all.

  No, all I’d done with my immaculate and prudish uniform was prove how insignificant I was going to be in the Pembroke Prep social ecosystem. I’d also unofficially stamped myself as little miss uptight with my regulation-to-a-T uniform.

  “I said,” repeated the boy I’d run into, “who are you?” He took a step towards me, dark blond hair tumbling over his forehead. His skin was lightly kissed by the sun, like he’d spent the summer in the Hamptons.

  “Um,” I said, and then wanted to kick myself. All I wanted was to get through this year alive and get away from my parents. And in order to do that, I needed to survive everything Pembroke Prep would throw at me, including angry boys. “Iris Briggs.”

  “Briggs,” repeated the boy. His eyebrows lifted, highlighting those deep blue eyes. “Like the new Headmaster Briggs? The same new headmaster who is talking about decreasing funding to the athletic department?”

  His friends, who’d been busy scowling and disgustedly trying to swipe the coffee off their uniforms, now watched with undisguised interest.

  “Perhaps she could send a message to her father for you, Keaton,” someone behind him said. I looked past Keaton to see a pale, beautiful boy with glittering onyx eyes and a cruel mouth.

  Danger, my mind warned. That one is dangerous.

  Not that Keaton wasn’t dangerous—a fact that became clearer as he took another step towards me. He worked his square jaw ever so slightly to the side, and his eyebrows were slashes of irritation over those hypnotic eyes.

  And he was big—jock big. Tall and broad-shouldered, with muscles that tested the fitted seams of his blazer.

  “Listen here, Iris Briggs,” he said in a voice full of soft menace. “I’m not going to forget the coffee. And I’m not going to forget what your father is doing. And I’m not going to forget you.”

  He was so close now that he could lean down and kiss me if he wanted. Close enough that I could see the faint crease in his full lower lip.

  Stop it. You don’t need this kind of trouble.

  Shivers raced down my spine, and chills crawled up my neck—even as indignation fired my blood—and something went tight. Low, low in my belly.

  I parted my lips—I didn’t know what I was going to say, but it was probably going to be something along the lines of fuck off, dude, it was an accident—and his eyes dropped down to my mouth. For a minute—an instant—I could swear I saw hunger flash in his stare.

  But what he was hungry for? I never found out, because a girl’s voice cut into the moment and brought me back to reality.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. He’s going to forget you. I’ll make sure of it.”

  I turned around to see a slender girl with dark brown skin, a thick mass of gorgeous curls and big, arty glasses perched on her nose striding towards us. She planted her feet and folded her arms when she got to Keaton. “Fuck off,” she told him. “Feeding time is over.”

  “Yeah, well just so you know, because of her, coffee time is over,” one of the other boys said dryly, still mopping at his tie.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying not to sound irritated. But really, it wasn’t like I did it on purpose. “I ran into someone else, and I—”

  The girl held up a hand to stop me. “Never concede anything to the
se jackasses. It won’t get you anywhere but under their feet.”

  “You never know until you try, Serafina,” the onyx-eyed boy said in a silky voice.

  Serafina slid her gaze to him, her eyes narrowing. “How about you try this, Rhys?” And she flipped him off as she looped her free arm through mine and marched me away from the boys.

  When I dared to look back, Rhys and the others had clustered back into a circle, muttering to each other and trying to fix their uniforms. But Keaton still stood in the middle of the courtyard, his long fingers curled around his now-empty coffee cup and his furious gaze trained right on me.

  ***

  A few minutes later, we were up the shallow steps and into the main heart of Pembroke, walking into the dim, wood-paneled hallway and stopping by a large window. Through it, I could make out the rolling lawn and the thick Vermont woods clustered around the brick and stone buildings that made up the boarding school. This early in September, everything was still green and sunny and warm, and students were stretched out on the lawn, making out or reading before class.

  “I’m Serafina van Doren, by the way,” the girl said, by way of introduction. “And you must be Iris Briggs.”

  “How did you—”

  “Rumors have been flying about you,” she said, anticipating my question. “We don’t get many new students here at Pembroke. Most of us have known each other for years, grown up together and all that. It gets very stale and incestuous, so it’s exciting to see a new face.”

  I could think of five people who weren’t excited to meet me. “Who were they?” I asked, pointing my head back towards the courtyard.

  “Oh, them?” She twisted her mouth. “They call themselves the Hellfire Club.”

  The Hellfire Club.

  “That’s very poetic,” I commented.

  “It’s very ridiculous,” Serafina said, rolling her eyes. “But I’d still steer clear of them for a while. They’re . . . influential.” She said it in the voice of someone reluctantly admitting an indisputable truth.

  “Are they dangerous?”

  Serafina lifted a shoulder. “Yeah. But just avoid them and you’ll be okay. They’re like male lions—too lazy to chase anything unless it’s threatening their territory.”

  I thought of Keaton’s eyes—sharp and hungry in the morning sunlight. Did he think my father was invading his territory? Or worse, that I was?

  I looked over my shoulder, suddenly terrified I’d find him at the end of the corridor, watching me.

  Serafina sensed my uneasiness and touched my shoulder. “Hey, I promise they won’t hurt you, okay? I won’t let them. They’re mostly harmless. Well, except for Lennox Lincoln-Ward, the boy with the white hair; his only goal in life is to torture Sloane.”

  “Sloane?”

  “My roommate. She’s very quiet, a little scary, but she keeps to herself mostly. I don’t know why Lennox hates her so much—well, other than that he’s an asshole.”

  I think of the boy behind Keaton, the one with the glittering eyes and sharp mouth. “What about the one you called Rhys?”

  Serafina frowned. “Okay, maybe I lied about them being harmless. If the Hellfire Club were all lions, Rhys would be the lion who kills for fun. He would be Uncle Scar. Be careful around him.”

  “And Keaton? Should I be careful around him too?”

  Serafina hesitated, then shook her head. “No. Like I said, just avoid him and he’ll forget about you. Constantines are like that.”

  “Constantines?”

  Serafina tilted her head. “You really are new, aren’t you? The Constantine family is like the Kennedys—if the Kennedys made their money doing shady shit. Oh and owned half of New York City.”

  “Half?”

  “I mean, I’m including the legal holdings as well as the less-than-legal holdings here.”

  Alarm spiked. “Um, are they like a crime family?”

  “Only in the technical sense,” Serafina said, waving a hand, like I was getting hung up on some insignificant detail. “They’re very respectable otherwise. One of those Mayflower families, you know, like all the women wear real pearls, every summer is spent in Bishop’s Landing, they go golfing in Kiawah, that kind of thing.”

  A respectable crime family? That didn’t seem like a thing to me. “I’m less worried about their respectability than I am Keaton having me whacked or something.”

  Serafina burst into giggles. “Whacked?”

  “Whacked! Offed! Rolled into a tarp and then fed to the local deer or whatever!”

  She was still laughing. “I promise the Constantines don’t feed people to deer. And don’t worry about Keaton. He really will forget all about this morning; he’s usually too busy with his girlfriend and rugby to worry about anything else. And anyway, you’re with me now.”

  “I am?”

  “You are,” she confirmed, beaming at me. “I’m the queen around here. And Sloane is my lady knight. We’ll make sure none of those Hellfire morons bother you.”

  Relief and gratitude eased something in my chest. “Thank you,” I said.

  “What class do you have first? I’ll walk you there.”

  I pulled out my schedule. “AP Physics.”

  “Excellent! Sloane does too.” We started walking down the hall towards the south wing of the school, where all the science labs and lecture rooms were. For the first time since my father took this post, I started to feel a little hopeful that this year might not be so terrible after all, even if I had inadvertently angered the son of a respectable crime family.

  “So, what’s it like being the headmaster’s daughter?” Serafina asked.

  As we walked to the physics lab, other students called out to her or playfully tugged on her blazer or reached out for high fives. She strode through it all like a monarch striding through a throng of courtiers, and I knew she hadn’t been joking about being the queen.

  I was even more grateful she’d decided to befriend me. If anyone could keep me safe from Keaton’s furious stare, it would be her.

  “It’s mostly terrible,” I said. “This is the third school of his I’ve gone to, and he always wants me to be the best at everything. I used to think he’d go easier on me once I turned eighteen and my perfect older sister moved out, but no. Not to mention he’s not really down with my photography obsession.”

  I didn’t elaborate any more than that. I was still upset about my birthday this summer, when I’d announced to him that I wanted to study photography in Paris and not law at an Ivy like he wanted me to. He’d wanted me to be more like Isabelle—the obedient one, the one who did everything right, including getting impeccable grades at LSE.

  He’d yelled; I’d yelled back.

  My mother had hidden, like she always did whenever there was conflict.

  “Photography?” Serafina asked. “That’s pretty fucking cool. Are you taking a class on it this year?”

  Excitement—real excitement—fizzed in my veins and made me smile. “Yeah. Advanced photography seminar. First class is on Friday.”

  She smiled back as we got to my classroom. “I’ve got another lady knight in there. Aurora. She’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “You really are the queen here.”

  “I’m a van Doren,” she said, like that explained everything. “Ah, Sloane! Save a seat for Iris, would you?”

  I looked across the room to see an unsmiling white girl with a very short, no-nonsense ponytail and a helix piercing high on one ear. When I came up to the table and held out my hand, she shook it without a word. But her green eyes were quick and keen as she took in everything about me, and her handshake was strong and efficient. She seemed like the kind of person who knew where every exit in the room was, along with everything that could be turned into a weapon.

  “Sloane, this is Iris. We’re adopting her. Also, make sure Keaton leaves her alone.”

  Sloane nodded and silently gestured for me to take a seat.

  Serafina left with a wave and a pr
omise to see me at lunch, and then the physics professor burst into the room, breathless and late, and just like that, my first day at Pembroke Prep had officially started.

  Now, it was time to forget about Keaton Constantine. I was going to lay low and survive until Paris, when my life could truly begin, and I didn’t have time to worry about spilled coffee or the rugby-playing sons of well-mannered criminals.

  And I definitely didn’t have the time to think about his full lips and tousled blond hair. Or his wide, powerful shoulders. Or his midnight-blue eyes.

  No time at all.

  I flipped open a fresh notebook, took a deep breath, and began taking notes.

  2

  Keaton

  Bloody back-to-school night.

  I knew for a fact the storied tradition was designed for the purpose of torturing students. The only people who looked forward to the weekend were parents who loved to come back to Pembroke Prep. Show off their money, their influence, all the while leaving behind their precious cargo for someone else to raise, someone else to teach.

  Well, most parents anyway. My mother was wholly devoted to her fulltime job of being the matriarch of the Constantine family—which mostly involved hosting lavish parties, keeping my sister Elaine out of the press, and making sure my oldest brother Winston continued raking in money for the family through our various business holdings. She wasn’t cold, but she wasn’t warm either, and it didn’t matter how many rugby games I played or how many championships I won, she was more concerned with my future than my present.