Sweet Like Revenge

47 - Consolidation of Power

A short brunette with a serious addiction to the color pink greeted me as soon as I stepped foot in the cafeteria. Her smile was brighter than the sun at the height of summer, her arms waving me down with a cup of coffee in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other.

I threw her a friendly (albeit puzzled) glance as she fell into step beside me.

"Elle! Hi!" She thrust the items into my chest so fast that I had to lurch for the drink before it fell to the floor. "Cappuccino. I heard it's your favorite."

"Oh, wow. Um, thanks—"

"Willa."

"Thanks, Willa. You didn't have to—"

"We have English together. But I'm a junior."

I didn't really know what to say to that, so I tried to smile. "Okay."

She continued talking a mile a minute while she walked beside me, giving Kat a run for her money. She was chatting to me animatedly as if we were best friends, but her face didn't register in my brain. I cast my eyes over her to find a semblance of familiarity, only finding that she, like the girl who had spoken to me that morning, had adopted a similar hairstyle to mine.

"It's half-sugar." Her grin grew wider. "I know you're very specific about that."

I smiled back, wondering where that piece of fabricated information had come from. "Not really. As long as it's lactose-free, I'm pretty easy."

Willa's hot pink lips twitched. Her warm brown eyes dimmed. Within a second, she had ripped the cup from my grasp.

"Gosh, I'm so stupid!"

I turned to reassure her, my hand hovering awkwardly around her shoulders. "No! No, you're not—"

"It's like I'm trying to kill you or something!"

I reclaimed my hand quickly. Wow.

"God, I don't know why I said that. What's wrong with me?" She started to laugh. Manically. And then she completely froze.

Maybe she was trying to kill me.

"I'll go get you another one, okay?" She bounced away in the direction of the counter, leaving me to stare after her in a mixture of shock and concern.

"Oh, no," I called after her, "you don't need to..."

But she'd walked too far for my voice to reach her.

I could only blink dumbly, wondering what the hell that was about.

But my smile returned as I spun around, my gaze falling on the high table. Cameron was deep in conversation with Jeremy, a handful of other unfamiliar faces inhabiting the seats beside them—their other friends, I assumed. Even though I breathed a sigh of relief at the sight, and even though I was the one who'd invited them in the first place, I found the whole thing a lot stranger than I thought I would. Seeing students other than would-be supermodels and Panthers sitting at the Elites' table certainly was different.

It was empowering, too.

Because if I wanted more than an interim crown, then I needed the manpower to back it up. I'd already weakened Sienna's army—there was only a sprinkling of Panthers left who dared to show their faces in the cafeteria, and Kat and Chontelle would likely fall on whatever side they needed to in order to protect themselves. Now, it was time to build my own.

But it wasn't just the sight of Cameron's friends that sent an excited tingle shooting up my spine. Rather, it was an absence that injected me with a fresh shot of adrenaline.