Vain (The Seven Deadly, #1)(4)

“What?” Casey asked.

“This,” the older man said, gesturing to the lines of coke.

“Uh, yes, she was attempting a line when I found her,” Casey told his superior.

Fuck.

“I’ll bag this up,” the man said and waved Casey on.

“I’m sorry,” Casey said when we were out of the room. “I had to tell him. He’d have known I was lying.”

“It’s okay, Casey,” I said with saccharine ooze. I kissed his mouth, then bit his lip playfully. “It would have been the best ride of your life,” I whispered. His eyes blew wide.

“Wait, what? We can still see each other,” Casey desperately plied.

“Sure we can,” I lied again.

“I wasn’t going to tell him about the drugs,” he said again, his voice quivering. “I had only planned on getting you on the party. That would have only been a ticket, a misdemeanor.”

“I know, sweets,” I told him, “but you still messed up.”

Casey led me down the winding staircase and I felt as if time was standing still. All my friends, cuffed themselves, looked up at me as I descended over them. I smiled down at them bewitchingly and they almost cowered in my presence. I’d been the one who brought the coke, and my smile let them know that if they brought me down, I wouldn’t be going down with the ship on my own. If they squealed like the pigs they were, I would make their lives miserable. There’s a fine line between friend and foe in my world.

Casey placed me into the back of a squad car when we reached the winding drive and buckled me in.

“Tell me,” I said softly against his ear near my mouth, “what exactly am I being charged with?”

“Sarge will probably get you on drugs, but if it’s your first offense, you should be able to get off lightly.”

“And what if it isn’t?”

“Isn’t what?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder.

“My first offense.”

“Shit. If it’s not, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

“Oh, well, there’s nothing I can do for you then either,” I said coldly, the heat in my seduction blasted cold with a bucket of ice water at the flip of a switch. Casey’s mouth grew wide and he could see that he’d been had. I turned my face away from his, done with my pawn.

Casey got into the front seat and I could see through the rearview that his face was painted red with humiliation and obvious disappointment in himself that he fell for my game. He stuck the key in the ignition and drove me to the station.

I was booked, processed and searched. I scoffed at the women who had to search me before placing me in my cell. Stripping naked for anyone of the female persuasion wasn’t exactly what I’d had planned for the evening. They looked down on me, knowing my charges, like they were somehow better than me.

“My lingerie probably costs more than your entire wardrobe,” I spit out at the short, stocky one who eyed me with disdain.

She could only shake her head at me.

“Well, it’ll go nicely with your new wardrobe addition,” the dark-haired one said, handing me a bright orange jumpsuit.

This made both the women laugh. I slipped the disgusting jumpsuit on and they filed me away into a cell.

I shivered in my cell, coming down from my high. I was used to this part though. I only did coke on the weekends. Unlike most others I knew, I had enough self-control to only do it at the Holes. It was just enough to drown out whatever crappy week I’d had from being ignored by my mother and father.

My parents were strangely the only I knew of who married and stayed that way. Of course, my mother was fifteen years younger than my father, so I’m sure that helped and she stayed in incredible shape. If you pitched a pic of her then and now, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and she’d gifted those incredible genes to yours truly. That was about the only thing my mother ever bothered to give me. My mother and father were so absorbed in themselves I don’t think they remembered me some days. I was born for one reason and one reason only. It was expected of my parents to give the impression of a family.

My mom was a “housewife,” and I use that term loosely. My father was the founder and CEO of an electronics conglomerate, namely computers and software. His company was based in Silicon Valley, but when he married my gold-digging mother, she insisted on L.A., so he jetted the company plane there when he needed to. It was safe to say that one, if not two or three, of my father’s products were in every single home in America. I’d had a five-thousand-dollar monthly allowance if I’d kept my grades up during prep school, and that’s about as much acknowledgment I got from my parents.

I’d just graduated, which meant I had four years to earn a degree of some kind then move out. I would retain a monthly allowance of twenty thousand a month, but I had to earn my degree first. That was my father in a nutshell.

“Keep appearances, Sophie Price, and I’ll reward you handsomely,” my father said to me starting at fifteen.

And it was a running mantra in my home once a week, usually before a dinner I was forced to attend when he was entertaining some competitor he was looking to buy out or possibly a political official he was trying to grease up. I would dress modestly, never speak unless spoken to. Timidity was the farce. If I looked sweet and acquiescent, my father gave the impression he knew how to run a home as well as a multinational, multibillion-dollar business. If I did this, I would get a nice little thousand-dollar bonus. I was an employee, not a child.