“Whatever. What do I do with his old router after I switch it out with yours? Keep it, or…?”
“Give it to me over at IT. Tell Arthur or whoever one of the Fundy boys said it was broken.”
“But it’s not, is it?”
Skill smirks, “Those Fundies are always saying things are broken when they’re a day old. You know how it is, if it needs dusting, it’s broken, and they’re like, gimme a new one,” he snivels for effect, imitating every Fundy goblin boy ever.
“Yeah,” I grin.
“Anything else?” he asks.
“How long do the camera batteries last? Just curious.”
“A week or two, depending on how active they are. I’ll make sure you have a new batch of cameras to switch out the old ones then.”
“How many times do I have to do that?”
“As many as it takes.”
I groan, “I have to hide cameras in Prince’s suite every week or two until forever?”
Rob asks, “Do you not want to do this?”
“Kind of no,” I say.
Jonah says, “This isn’t for us, Mary. Remember what Tucker said about the kids who got screwed over by Grandma Morgan-Hearst?”
“Yes,” I groan. “I’ve had nightmares about them.” It’s true. Not every night, but I did once, and I was one of the kids slaving away at gunpoint in a factory somewhere, sweating my ass off and hating life like you wouldn’t believe. Guess who my nightmare guard was? Gladys with a gun. Wearing some kind of military uniform. It was almost too real. Probably PTSD, like Rob said back when, only made worse by my time locked in that stupid iron maiden.
“Remember, Mary,” Jonah says, “Prince’s family isn’t any better than Elizabeth’s.”
“Fine,” I sigh. “I’ll do it. Is that it? Or can I go?”
“That’s it,” Rob says. “Anything to report on your end?”
“Report?” I scoff. “What, are we soldiers now?”
“No,” Rob smirks grimly. “Soldiers follow orders. We don’t.” He lets that sink in. “Like I said, anything to report?”
I think for a moment and smirk, “Elizabeth saw me and you talking earlier and overheard you say we should meet up today.”
Rob’s eyes goggle, “Did she follow you?”
I cringe, “Erm, I kind of forgot until just now.”
“Shit,” Rob hisses. He, Jonah, and Skill scatter in two different directions, crouching low and running toward the front of the bleachers.
“Where are you going?!” I whine, annoyed I’m now stuck in their drama.
“Stay there!” Rob snips before turning a corner.
“Fine,” I grumble to myself and wait.
A few minutes later, the three of them return, looking irritated.
“Was she there spying?” I tease.
“We’re clear,” Jonah says ominously.
Rob says, “Mary, you have to tell us immediately if anything like that happens again. It’s mission critical. No one can know what we’re doing. This is serious shit. If we get caught, we get kicked out. You know what that means. Prison. Do you understand?”
“Yes! I’m not an idiot!” Honestly, I hadn’t considered it until now, but obviously spying on a Fundy is not approved behavior in the Castle Hill student handbook.
Rob nods. “Did Elizabeth say anything about you and me?”
“She threatened to tell Prince.”
“Tell him what?”
I roll my eyes, “That we have a thing. You and me.”
“What kind of thing?”
“I don’t know,” I grouse. “I assume she meant we’re hooking up.”
Skill and Jonah both goggle at that.
“You dirty fucking dog!” Skill laughs, elbowing Rob’s muscled arm. “You and War Paint hook up and you don’t tell us?!”
“We didn’t hook up,” Rob barks, glaring at me like he’s disgusted by the idea of us being together and he’s only talking about it because I brought it up.
“And we won’t be either,” I say for the benefit of Skill and Jonah, and to piss off Rob.
Skill grins, “If you aren’t hooking up with Rob, maybe we should be hooking up.”
Jonah barks, “Not now, Skill.”
Rob glares at Skill but says nothing.
I want to tell Rob I’d be disgusted if we had hooked up. I never should’ve let him take me to his room on Halloween night to cuddle. What was I thinking?! He’s not into me. He never was. He’s like, I don’t know, my annoyingly overprotective asshat of a big brother or something. Like I need one of those. I’ve already got Jonah for that, and he’s not one-tenth as infuriating as Rob. Jonah is like the perfect big brother every girl wishes she had. Rob is just a perfect ass.
“Can I go now?” I whine.
Skill holds up the book bag with the cameras and says, “Give me yours.”
“My bag?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? Can’t I just keep my book bag and put your cameras in?”
“Not with the router,” he says insistently. “Just give it.”
“Fine,” I sigh and make the switch. “When do I get my bag back? It has my notebook and stuff.”
“I’ll put it in your locker.”
“You don’t have my combo.”
“I’ll get it,” Skill says suspiciously.
“You can do that?” I ask.
“We can do anything we damn well please,” he grins with smarmy confidence.
What am I getting myself into?
Skill says, “Make sure you spread the cameras around Prince’s suite. We want maximum coverage. Focus on his face.”
“Fine.”
Rob says, “Hide them where Prince won’t find them.”
“I know!” I groan and walk away slowly.
Why do I not like whatever it is I’ve agreed to do? Is it because I really have no idea what Rob and crew plan to do? Or is it because Prince has been nothing but nice to me and now I’m betraying his trust? Time will tell, but I’m starting to worry this won’t end well for anybody.
The funny thing about disasters is, nobody ever sees them coming, do they?
Chapter 34
The only place on campus with internet access is the school library. Unlike the living and dining areas on campus, where the work-study kids are segregated from the Fundies, the library is for everyone.
The Evelyn Morgan-Hearst library.
As I march past the sign and up the steps toward the imposing stone building, I have to wonder if Evelyn is mean old Grandma Morgan-Hearst the child slave lord Jonah and Tucker mentioned, or some other older Morgan-Hearst matron who owned actual slaves back in the Civil War?
I hate to think.
More importantly, I’d like to find out what sort of shenanigans the Lancaster family have or have not gotten themselves into. Is Prince’s family as bad as Rob and the Poor Boys suggest? If I can find proof, it might make me feel better about spying on him. If not, I may have to rethink my agreement and return these cameras to Skill or whoever.
I have to wait for a computer because every one is taken by a work-study kid because we aren’t allowed to own a computer. Obviously, Fundies have their own laptops and use wifi. I pencil my name onto the waiting list, check out a calculator from the librarian, find an empty study carrel, and start on my trig homework, busying myself computing vectors and graphing a bunch of different trigonometric functions.
When it’s my turn for the computer, my curiosity gets the best of me and I Google “Morgan-Hearst” first. I’m horrified but not surprised by what I find. There’s no photos of over-worked kids in sweatshops because it was way back in the 1970s, I guess, but I do find a few grainy black-and-white photos of Evelyn Morgan-Hearst on the socialite pages of the New York papers from back then.
In them, Evelyn wears a variety of frumpy dresses, always with pearls, with her hair up and surrounded by dashing men in tuxedos who have bushy mustaches, sideburns, shaggy long hair, and less than perfect teeth. Definit
ely the 70s.
Evelyn is blonde and beautiful and the spitting image of Elizabeth aka Azzie. Heck, she could be her, but I don’t think time travel is a thing, and I don’t think Evelyn found the fountain of youth to keep herself young. Unless she eats babies or puppies or kittens or whatever witches like to suck the youth out of.
Nah.
The other thing I find is a scan of an old article from the New York Times that paints a pretty dark picture of the Morgan-Hearst business empire, naming Evelyn as Chairman of Morgan-Hearst Industries and pinning the blame on her for a range of dubious business practices, especially overseas. The article ends by suggesting the Morgan-Hearst empire is under ongoing federal investigation for several unnamed humanitarian violations. Everyone knows what that means. Treating people worse than dirt.
I grimace a sigh. I guess Rob and the Poor Boys weren’t exaggerating.
“Mugshot,” someone purrs in my ear, kissing my skin with a scent of minty musk.
“Chase,” I smirk and I turn to face him sitting next to me. I glare at him, “Do you mind? I’m trying to study.”
“What’re you studying?” He looks at the screen.
I hastily X out of the browser window with the New York Times article and smirk, “I was looking up recipes for man repellant.”
“Whatever it is, it isn’t working.” He slides his hand up my stocking-covered thigh toward the entrance of my school skirt.
“Would you stop?!” I slap his hand away laughing in disbelief. “We’re in the library!”
Some of the nearby kids in carrels glance our direction before going back to studying.
Chase says, “We should go somewhere else then.”
My jaw drops and I whisper, “No-a! What is wrong with you?!” If Chase wasn’t so freakishly gorgeous, I would’ve punched him in the face months ago and every day since. But he is that hot. A tad handsy, but it’s hard to hold it against him and his smoky topaz eyes. Every time I see them, a bonfire of hope lights in my breasts, hope that he’s sincere instead of an opportunist, hope that our kiss at the All Hallows’ Ball was more than a passing thing.
“The only thing wrong with me,” he says, “is you, mugshot.”
“Not my problem,” I smirk.
“You’re mine. I can’t get you out of my head. Ever since you moved in with Prince, I keep asking myself where I went wrong.”
“You’re pathetically predictable, Chase. You just want what you can’t have. Whatever happened to that blonde you screwed in drama class, the one in the theater box?”
“She came,” he grins. “Several times.”
I laugh in disgust, “Do you hear yourself?”
“No, but I heard her,” he chuckles, eyes faraway like he’s remembering. “So did everybody, if I remember.”
“I’ve known plenty of boys like you, Chase. You’re all sluts.”
“How well?”
“How well have I known them?” I ask in surprise.
He nods, his eyes smoking with lust.
“That’s none of your business!” I hiss. “Would you go! I’m busy!” I give him a shove.
“Go to the winter formal with me.”
“Work-study girls aren’t allowed.” Ever since Thanksgiving, I’ve been hearing the work-study girls grumbling about the winter formal because they’re not allowed to go. Are they jealous the Fundy girls get to go and we don’t? Of course they are. Nobody likes living on the bottom rung of a classist society run by elitist assholes. Me, I’ve tried to tune it out and not worry about it. Who needs to go to a stupid dance with snooty Fundies? Knowing them, it would be a repeat of Halloween, except the iron maiden would have spikes this time to actually stab me.
“If you’re my date, it won’t be a problem getting you in. Go with me.”
“No-a! You know what happened Halloween.”
He smirks, “I kissed the fuck out of you.”
“Not that, ass! The thing! With the—!” I don’t want to say iron maiden. “With me getting assaulted! Locked in the stabby-stabbing cage?! Duh! Remember? I don’t want that happening again! No stupid dance is worth that!”
“If we’re joined at the hip the whole night,” he says it like he’s implying a long lusty night of sex, “there is zero chance of that happening. I’ll protect you, mugshot. I won’t let those bitches get you down. But I will be more than glad to go down all damn night, if that’s what it takes.” He offers a sly grin. “Go with me, mugshot. I’ll make it worth your while.”
On paper, Chase’s manwhoring words make him sound like a complete prick. Looking at him, it’s like, honestly, it’s like he’s effing mesmerizing, okay? Men don’t get any hotter than this one.
“Go with me,” he says gently.
I sigh, “Is that how you ask?” I purse my lips and fold my arms across my school jacket.
“Is that how you say yes?” He glimmers a grin.
“No-a!” I laugh.
“Your laugh says yes.”
He’s right about that, but I am not going to get myself caught up in more drama. I’ve had too much already. If I wasn’t living with Prince, who has not mentioned any winter formal and certainly not asked me to go, I would definitely say yes to Chase. It’s just a dance. Not a wedding proposal. What’s wrong with going to a dance? But I am living with Prince, and now I’m embroiled in Rob’s spying drama. Going with Chase sounds like a terrible idea.
I sigh, “No, Chase. I can’t go. I need to focus on studying and my job, not some stupid dance.”
His disappointed eyes search mine. He sighs and sits back in his chair. Runs his hand through his hair. He slides out of his chair onto one knee, takes my hand in his, and says, “Mary, will you please go to the winter formal with me? I’d be honored if you said yes.”
I giggle gleefully. All of a sudden, it is like an effing wedding proposal. Nobody has ever gotten down on one knee for me for any reason. Okay, Prince kissed my shoes the other night, but he owed me for that. For what he did. That was payback. This is, it’s magical.
Whispers and tittering erupt around us.
I distinctly hear work-study girls gushing about Chase, saying he’s never done anything like this. I wouldn’t know, but I suspect they’re correct. Chase never bows to anybody that I’ve seen, least of all women.
Maybe I should say yes.
He’s asking so nicely.
Then I remember Mimi.
I’ve known her long enough to know she’s always talking about Chase. Always. It’s still unclear if they’ve ever hooked up, or if he’s interested in her or not. No, he has to be. She’s way better looking than I’ll ever be. He must’ve noticed her at the very least. She would kill me if I said yes to him. I would never do that to her. Chase is her thing, not mine.
I sigh, “Forget it, Chase. Dances aren’t my thing. Sorry.”
There are gasps from the surrounding work-study kids. I forgot we had an audience. They’re mumbling about Chase getting shot down. Some of the girls are catty about it, like they’re glad I said no because Chase is getting what he deserves. Others sound hopeful he’ll ask them out.
Chase hears them, but he’s ignoring them, his topaz eyes locked on mine.
I say, “Why don’t you ask Mimi? I’m sure she’d love to go with you.”
Chase’s face is blank. He’s completely unreadable. He stands up and arches a thoughtful eyebrow. “Your loss, mugshot.” He suddenly turns and goes, hands stuffed in the pockets of his slacks.
Did I piss him off?
Or hurt his feelings?
Hard to say either way.
We did kiss.
Then again, he kisses everybody.
I’m not going to worry about it. I have bigger fish to spy. I mean fry. No, both.
I open a browser window and search online for dirt on Prince’s family.
Surprise, surprise.
Prince J. Lancaster II, aka Prince’s dad because duh, how many can there possibly be, is named in a number of criminal cases for white collar
crimes in the 80s and 90s. Securities & Exchange Commission violations. Insider trading on the stock market. Business fraud. He sure was a busy little thief.
According to the article in The Wall Street Journal, the biggest case was about Dad Lancaster getting insider information from his mistress, a woman married to some oil executive whose petroleum company was about to go belly up. Dad Lancaster used this information to sell a shit-ton of oil shares before the stock price collapsed, saving himself from losing tens of millions of dollars back in the day.
The SEC didn’t like that and took civil action against Dad Lancaster. His team of lawyers negotiated a sweetheart deal of six months in a country club jail, but they slapped him with a hefty fine of $2.5 million dollars, which must’ve been a ton of money back then. I mean, it’s a ton of money now, I can’t imagine having that much, but it was more then.
Anyway, six months later, Dad Lancaster walked out of prison a free man and married his mistress. Her husband, the old oil tycoon, had died of a stroke immediately after his oil company went bust, which was long before Dad Lancaster even went to trial.
Shortly after being set free, Dad Lancaster started a family. They had four kids.
Gosh, does that mean Prince’s mom is a cheater?
An ex-mistress?
That’s weird.
It’s also completely normal.
People cheat. What else is new?
After another hour of searching, it’s time for me to get changed and head over to the West Wing to clean rooms.
I couldn’t find anything worse about the Lancaster family than cheating the system and cheating on husbands. They aren’t half as bad as the Morgan-Hearsts, but they aren’t exactly model citizens. I’m not sure what Rob has planned with all these cameras I’m supposed to plant on Prince. Maybe it has something to do with money?
Who knows.
If I had more time, I’d search for dirt on Chase’s family, and Duke’s, and Victoria and Jacqueline’s, but I don’t. I’m sure they’re terrible and I have toilets to scrub.
<(—)>
That night, I’m studying in Prince’s guest bedroom by myself when he knocks on the open door frame.
Rich Boys vs. Poor Boys (The Cruel Kings of Castle Hill Academy, Book 1) by Devon Hartford kd103 Page 30