And I had always been the kind of ambitious that demanded the culmination of becoming Someone. I craved the validation of high achievement, the sense of wielding control over your own life. The fulfillment you could find only through setting up lofty goals for yourself, then knocking them down one by one.

“Fuck,” Talia said grimly, intuiting the trajectory of my sorry tale. “And then the bastard dumped you.”

“That, he did. He said he needed to start thinking about his future, and he just ‘couldn’t see himself with a Harlow long-term.’ I think he actually meant for it to be an easy letdown, like, ‘It’s not you, babe, it’s your last name.’ ”

My face burned with remembered humiliation at the blithely casual way in which he’d delivered this gut-wrenching line. As if we hadn’t spent every waking moment of that summer tangled together by the picturesque ponds that lined his family estate. As if he hadn’t called me pet names, bought me a million little presents, even told me that he almost, nearly, all but loved me.

Apparently, when stacked up against the unfortunate accident of my birthright—or lack thereof—none of that mattered in the end.

“When I asked him who he could see himself with, he was all, ‘I don’t know, a normie heiress or something?’ ” My fists clenched in my lap at the memory of his bewildered expression. Unclear as to what sort of future partner might be on his level, while simultaneously certain that she would be superior to me. “Not me, in any event. That much he knew for sure.”

Talia let out a humorless bark of laughter, looking so venomous on my behalf I could believe that a vengeful witch queen’s blood ran through her veins.

“So, anyway,” I said flatly, reaching for my Demonic Decadence, because I badly needed to be even drunker than I already was. It tasted like dark chocolate shavings and a warm dash of cayenne pepper, and under any other circumstances would have solved most of my problems. “I wasn’t about to tell anyone what happened, because I’m pretty sure the embarrassment would have finished me off. And I definitely wasn’t going to stay here after that.”

Before Gareth, I was still envisioning a place, a future for myself in Thistle Grove. After Gareth, I realized that if I stayed, I would never amount to anything more than a Harlow. The inconsequential no one he already thought I was.

“So senior year, I took the SAT, applied to a bunch of colleges, and vowed to never come back here again. Or, alternatively, only to return once I was accomplished as fuck, enough to make Gareth eat crow for not choosing me,” I finished. “As you saw, that backfired kind of spectacularly.”

Talia stayed silent for a long moment, a muscle in her jaw ticking. Then she reached over and slipped her hand over mine, her smooth palm whispering over my skin.

“Let it be known that if I hadn’t already decided that the Prince of Bastards should suffer a thousand hells,” she said, with a surprising gentleness at odds with the biting words, “this would have been the exact moment I knew I wanted him to burn.”