Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(67)

Because sometimes you’re fooled not once, not twice, but three times by a selfish asshole who thinks that you leaked that footage. I wouldn’t even know how to leak it—who would I send the video to? How would I do it? With a sassy subject line reading I REIGNED VANCE IN? It’s ridiculous.

I thought he knew me—or at least trusted me.

But apparently not.

“Oh, Rosebud, I’m so sorry. I would stay home with you, but…I can’t. They’re expecting me to chaperone.”

“It’s okay, Dad. You can go and tell me how it is,” I reply.

He finishes tying his bow tie and comes to sit on the coffee table in front of me. “Okay, but I just want to give you a little piece of advice first.”

“I really don’t need any.”

“I know, but humor me?”

“Ooh, Space Dad has advice!” Annie says, clapping her hands. “This has to be good!”

“Speak wisdom to us,” Quinn agrees.

Why are my friends like this?

Dad leans forward, his elbows on his knees, and says, “Amara up, Rosebud.” Then he stands, grabs his keys from the bowl on the end table, and leaves. When he’s gone, the apartment is quiet, until he starts up his beat-up Ford and it chugs out of the complex. Quinn and Annie exchange a confused look. “Amara up?”

“Princess Amara, maybe?”

Amara up, Rosebud.

Mom used to say that to me all the time when I was afraid to do something. She would kneel down to me, tap me on the nose, and say in that gravelly voice of hers, “Amara up,” every time I tried to let my what-ifs and anxieties get in the way.

Amara wouldn’t sit at home, dateless and alone, instead of going to a dance. She’s the princess of the Noxian Empire, the purveyor of justice, the hope of a dying star. She wouldn’t cower, and she wouldn’t hide. She would go—alone, if she had to.

What am I doing, letting Vance Reigns dictate how I live my life? So he pissed me off, so he blames me, so he’s making me go to this dance alone—this is my Homecoming Dance. And my best friend is going to be crowned Homecoming Overlord and they’re thinking of staying home with my sorry ass and— I push myself to my feet and turn back to my two friends on the couch. “We’re going.” I force the words out.

Annie and Quinn blink up at me.

“Wait, what?” Annie asks. “But I thought—”

“We were going to stay here and watch Starfield reruns,” Quinn finishes.

“Sure, we can do that—after I see Garrett’s face when you take the crown from him,” I reply, and march off toward my room to squeeze into my dress and sharpen my eyeliner to kill—because I’m going out.





I TIE MY TIE—THE PERFECT SHADE OF BLUE, reminding me too much of Darien’s Carmindor uniform—at my throat in the car mirror. My hands are shaking. The night is cool but I am sweating so badly I keep tugging at my collar to make sure it’s not sticking. “I don’t even know if she’s going to be there. What if she doesn’t come?”

“She’ll be there,” Imogen replies, and resituates herself in the car. “It’s us who might not get there,” she adds under her breath, and slams on the horn again. We’re stuck in traffic a mile from the gymnasium, at least per Google, and it doesn’t seem to be moving at all. We’re sitting, at a standstill, in the middle of town, to the point where people are beginning to park and walk to Homecoming from here. In the back seat, her boyfriend, Ethan, is lying down over the seats, tapping his phone mercilessly because the gas station beside us is a Pokémon gym and he is relentless, if not predictable.

I give her a sidelong look. “But how do you know?”

“That we won’t get there? Well, the traffic—”

“No, Rosie.”

“I have it on good faith.”

“Good faith?” I frown. “Is this the same good faith that told you where I lived?”

“No, that was TMZ,” she replies, and mutters something heated under her breath. She lays on the horn again. “C’mon! What’s the holdup?”

I would rather wait in this traffic for eternity, but I know that’s only an option for cowards and Vance-of-a-month-ago, which in a Venn diagram is a circle. I smooth out the front of my tuxedo, trying to keep my patience.

Rosie won’t stay at the dance the whole night. She hates dances.

This feels like another choice in my dating sim app—

You are stuck on the main road in and out of town, and time is of the essence. The girl who has made you feel more human than anyone else you’ve ever met is waiting there, but she may be gone by the time you arrive. What do you do?

→ See what the traffic jam is.

→ Wait. Because if you miss her at Homecoming, then it was fate that you didn’t deserve her to begin with.

→ Get out of the car and run to her, you bloody prat!



“Maybe if I—Vance, where are you going?” Imogen asks as I open the door and get out. The autos aren’t moving, and I doubt they will for a while. I don’t have time to sit here in this traffic, on the only road in and out of town.

I loosen my tie. “I’ll get there from here,” I say, and lean back into the car to add, “Thanks—for everything.”