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Prologue
~REED~
Sitting on the coffee table,Jonah’s phone lit up and buzzed with a text for the third time that night. Probably one of his many girlfriends doing a booty call. He was into his second hour losing at beer pong, so I doubted he’d be much use to any of them tonight.
I frowned when his phone vibrated again with an incoming call. Weird. It was after midnight on a Friday. That couldn’t be good. The second I picked up his phone and saw the name, my heart plunged into my stomach.
Anna was calling.
Immediately, I punched in Jonah’s code and answered, walking out onto our patio away from the blaring music and the guys laughing.
“Anna, what’s wrong?”
Because there was definitely something wrong for his fifteen-year-old sister to be calling at nearly one a.m.
“Jonah?” Her voice wobbled with tension.
I slammed the sliding patio door closed because I couldn’t hear. But it wasn’t the drunken backdrop of our apartment that was drowning her out. It was a similar noise coming from her end.
“Anna, it’s Reed. Where are you?”
Because she sure as fuck shouldn’t be at a party. Jonah’s parents kept a strict curfew on their only daughter.
“Reed?” She heaved a shaky sigh. “I need Jonah to come get me,” she whispered, fear in her voice.
I didn’t even have to glance through the patio door to know Jonah wasn’t driving anywhere.
“Give me your address.”
“Um…” She sucked in a quick breath like she was trying not to cry. “I don’t know.”
Goddamn it.
I had already moved back inside, grabbed my keys, and was out the door before I asked, “You’re in Beauville?”
“Yeah. It’s a house on a cul-de-sac across from City Park.” She was moving, then it got quiet as though she’d closed herself in a room. “It’s Hyacinth or Elm Street. One of those.”
Jonah and I lived thirty minutes away from Beauville in Lafayette.
“Are you hurt?”
I started my truck and pulled out of the apartment complex. She hesitated long enough to turn my hair gray at twenty-one.
“I came with my friend on the cheer team. I just… I didn’t know it would be like this. I shouldn’t have come.”
No shit. Jonah would lose his goddamn mind if he knew his sweet baby sister was at an unchaperoned rager.
Anna was a shy, straight-A student who spent her free time practicing ballet and reading fantasy books. She was also a strikingly beautiful young girl with dark blond hair, huge brown eyes and the sweetest, loveliest smile.
When I helped Jonah and his dad put up a new fence in their yard this past summer, it hadn’t escaped my notice that Anna—reading by the pool in a baby-pink bikini—was growing up fast. After I’d chastised myself for being a pervert, I’d told Jonah he’d better get a big stick to beat the boys off now that Anna was in high school.
“Don’t worry,” he’d said. “I’ll kick the shit out of anyone who dares to try.”
“Where’s your friend now?” I asked Anna, pulling onto the highway, heading to Beauville. I didn’t like the idea of her alone in some back bedroom with a bunch of drunk teenage boys wandering around.
“She’s outside, talking to Blake and them.”
I clenched my fingers tight around the steering wheel. “Blake Guidry?”
