Vengeful

“Marcella the Business Major. What do you want to be?”

Marcella twirled her beer. “In charge.”

Marcus laughed. A soft, breathy sound.

“You think I’m joking?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” he said, closing the narrow space between them, “we are a matching set.”

Marcella Renee Morgan was not having fun.

She was nursing a beer in a glass bottle, and she was bored—bored by the music, and the boys who swaggered over every now and then to flirt, and then stormed away, sulking, when she turned them down. She was bored by being called beautiful, and then a bitch. Stunning, and then stuck up. A ten, and then a tease.

Marcella had always been pretty. The kind of pretty people couldn’t ignore. Bright blue eyes and pitch-black hair, a heart-shaped face atop the lean, clean lines of a model. Her father told her she’d never have to work. Her mother said she’d have to work twice as hard. In a way, both of them were right.

“My sister could control people. She had this hold on them. Could make them do anything she wanted, just by saying the words. She was strong, powerful. But . . . she was like Eli. She thought people like us were lost. Broken.”

“Maybe she was right,” said June.

“How can you—” started Sydney.

“Hear me out,” pressed June. “Maybe we are broken. But we put ourselves back together. We survived. That’s what makes us so powerful. And as for family—well, blood is always family, but family doesn’t always have to be blood.”