When Sinners Play: An Enemies to Lovers College Bully Romance (Sinners of Hawthorne University Book 1) Read online

  When Sinners Play

  Sinners of Hawthorne University #1

  Eva Ashwood

  Copyright © 2020 by Eva Ashwood

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Books by Eva Ashwood

  1

  They call Los Angeles the City of Angels. They being people who’ve never actually been here, lived here, and seen the truth in LA’s bones that its beautiful skin does a good job of hiding.

  But people like me, people who live in the underbelly of the beautiful beast, know there are no angels in Los Angeles.

  Here, there are only people.

  And people are closer to being devils than anything holy.

  I find myself on unholy grounds now. The Medical Examiner’s Office is an unassuming brick building that stands calm and quiet, as if that might somehow soften the realities of what lies inside. I wonder if that’s intentional. If it’s meant to soothe those called here like I’ve been called.

  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Calm or not, soothed or not, I have to go inside. So I take a deep breath, ignore the woman and her daughter who step outside—eyes rimmed red, dead in the center—and enter to find my own source of agony.

  Or at least I would feel agony, if I allowed myself to feel much of anything.

  Instead, I crush my emotions into a ball so dense it’s like a black hole. I shove them down and keep them buried.

  As unassuming as its exterior, the interior of the Medical Examiner’s Office is downright welcoming. Warm. I feel almost like I’ve walked into someone’s home, kept pristine for guests, rather than a place where the dead go when their lives have come to gruesome ends.

  Jared’s corpse is inside this building.

  The bitterness, or sadness, or whatever-the-fuckness that I feel bubbling in my chest gurgles up into my throat. The bile of emotion is acidic, and I swallow it back as a man approaches me. He’s young, barely older than I am, with an impressively clean lab coat and rectangular glasses that do little to keep his shaggy blonde bangs out of his face.

  “Hello,” he says, dipping his head in greeting. “Sophie, yes?”

  I raise a brow, instantly wary.

  “Sorry.” He chuckles, somewhat awkwardly. “I recognize you. The deceased had a picture of you in the contact on his phone. I figured properly greeting you might make the situation a little less awkward for you.” His smile falters a little as he takes in my blank stare. “Uh, anyway. I’m Max Alders. Shall we? Or do you need anything? A little more time to prepare, or—”

  “No. I’d rather just get this over with.”

  Max nods, taking the lead through a corridor that brings us deeper into the building. I pay little attention to my surroundings, keeping my gaze glued to the back of Max’s white lab coat. I just want to get in and out. As quickly as possible, the way you’re supposed to remove a band-aid: swift, with a sharp sting that doesn’t linger past its welcome.

  “Here we are,” Max says after another minute. He stops in front of a large, stainless steel door—the first indication of coldness since stepping foot in the building. Wide, crystal clear windows allow me to look in and see walls lined with more stainless steel, freezer-like doors in three neat rows from the floor to the ceiling. There’s a matching table in the middle where I know a body lays, shrouded beneath a white cloth.

  “I can give you a moment,” Max offers, shooting me a sympathetic look.

  “No. No point in waiting.”

  I lead the way in, confident for a girl who’s about to identify a dead body. I’m the first to stand before the shrouded corpse, the ghostly outline of a skinny man showing through. I think back to the dead-eyed woman and her daughter who were leaving as I came in. I wonder who it was they came to see.

  Who was it that they lost? Who made them so dead-eyed?

  I reach for the shroud, but before I can touch it, a hand settles on mine. I look to Max, shaggy haired coroner that he is, and think he looks more like a stoner than someone with a legitimate degree.

  “Some people get a shock,” he warns, “seeing their first dead body.”

  “Good thing it’s not my first time, then, huh? That’d make it messy.”

  I pull back the shroud to reveal the face before Max can stop me again, before he can even tell me what I should be preparing myself for or warn me that what I find might be disturbing.

  After all, I haven’t even been told yet how my friend died.

  Jared lies on the stainless steel slab, his blonde hair like straw atop his head and his skin a waxy mockery of flesh. His eyes are closed, but I can’t even pretend he’s sleeping; the once-naïve part of me doesn’t exist anymore. The young girl who could kid herself into thinking that angels do exist is nowhere to be found in the woman I am now.

  That woman, standing over the corpse of someone she used to love, remembers Jared at seventeen, a lanky, troubled boy who shared a room with her in their foster parents’ house. Jared was a year older than me, and people always thought it was strange we shared a room from the moment he was taken in to the day he turned eighteen—when instead of getting a birthday party, he got an eviction notice.

  He was what the state likes to call a “problem youth.” Always got into trouble one way or another, didn’t respect authority, had a bit of a crutch for drugs when the going got tough. But he was always sweet to me. Tender. Nothing ever happened between us, but when I was sixteen and lonely and dumb, I thought maybe something could.

  As I pull down the shroud lower, or try to, Max stops my hand again. My chest squeezes. I can’t help but wonder if things would’ve gone differently for Jared had we become something more than a pair of wayward orphans brought together in a temporary home.

  “What’s the sheet hiding?” I ask Max when he doesn’t let go of my hand. It occurs to me that he still hasn’t told me how Jared died.

  “All you have to do is confirm whether or not this is Jared Masters,” he says. Slow. Deliberate. As if he’s trying to convince me not to do this to myself.

  I ignore him, lowering the shroud just a little more until the bruises around Jared’s neck show.

  Fuck.

  My fingers tighten on the sheet as I stare down at the bruises. Ugly purple and black markings that leave the phant
om imprint of a rope behind. Or maybe chorded bedsheets or electric wire—

  Fuck. Fuck, fuck.

  The black hole in my chest pulses dangerously, as if threatening to explode like a dying star. To spew forth all the emotions I’ve kept locked inside for years.

  My hand is shaking, and even though I can see it happening, I can’t get it to stop.

  How long until this is me, cold and dead on a coroner’s slab? The thought is invasive, pervasive, and unavoidable as I look down at Jared, seeing in his stead my own corpse—my blue-streaked blonde hair fanned out on the slab, my eyes sunken and closed in an endless sleep, and that waxy, ashen skin replacing all semblance of life.

  One of the only people I’ve ever cared about is dead. How much longer until I go that way too?

  There isn’t much difference between Jared and me, really. The system that raised us both is the same system that delivered Jared to his demise. And I’m the only person who’s come to identify him. To mourn him.

  When it’s me and not Jared on this cold, hard slab, who will be there to pull back my shroud?

  Who will mourn me?

  “Yes. That’s Jared Masters.” I choke the words out as I cover his face, trying to forget I can still see my own in its place.

  When Jared was alive, he loved a good whiskey. Or even a shitty one.

  He would sneak from our shared room in the middle of the night to get into our foster father Brody’s stash. We would drink and talk about stupid bullshit, and when we were thoroughly tipsy, when we dared to feel something other than the numbness of alcohol, we sometimes almost kissed.

  Going back to that room, even though it’s been a long time since Jared and I shared it, sounds like a bad idea while sober. An even worse idea knowing Brody will be home and would probably be more than willing to try to “comfort” me in my time of grief. His wandering hands and leering eyes sound like too much to deal with right now.

  Right now, it’s time for a drink. A final send-off for Jared.

  The Silent Hour is a bar about an hour’s walk from the Medical Examiner’s Office. The sun’s nearly down and the streets are getting dark. I could take a cab, but I don’t have a lot of money to burn, and I don’t have anywhere else I need to be.

  I’m not in a hurry. I’ve got all goddamn night.

  A cool breeze stirs the hair around my face as I walk, and I focus on nothing but the rhythm of my feet on the pavement, barely noticing the time pass before The Silent Hour’s blinking neon lights appear in front of me.

  It’s a shitty as fuck bar, but it’s a haven for people like me—or maybe a better description is that it’s the waiting room we all hang out in before we become like Jared. Either way, they let me drink despite the fact that I’m more than three years too young, and most of the time I don’t even need to put out for it.

  So I sit at my usual spot—left side of the bar, three stools deep. I order a whiskey from Milo, a new hire who nods when I tell him I don’t want too much ice watering down my drink. Milo is cute, but I don’t think he’ll last long here. Not because he’s cute, but because he’s soft, and softness in The Silent Hour is either destroyed or run off elsewhere. It’s why the men here are rough and the women are on par, and why this place is my favorite haunt.

  It used to be Jared’s too.

  Fuck.

  With every sip, my whiskey takes me further and further from my thoughts of him, but not far enough. Jared wasn’t one for wallowing, even after all the shit that we ended up going through. He never liked dwelling too hard on his feelings, and he liked others dwelling on their feelings about him even less.

  Yet I can’t help but dwell.

  I can’t help but feel. I hate it, and I know he’d hate it even more.

  So I drink more. I watch the people mill in and out of the bar. I stop feeling the whiskey’s burn, and soon I feel closer to that nothingness I’m craving. As I finish my second drink, I ask Milo for another. I need to push myself over the edge into proper, numb bliss, and I’ll keep downing booze until I get there.

  The door opens, and my gaze flicks in that direction as a man enters.

  He’s got a haunted look on his face too, just like the mother and her daughter. If I had a mirror to look into, I’m sure I’d see the same thing in my own face. There’s something about his dead-eyed look that keeps me staring, even when those dead eyes lock on mine. His gaze lingers, and something livens up that numb, lost look before he approaches the bar and takes the seat beside the empty one on my left.

  “Macallan, neat.”

  His voice is smooth and dark, like a good bourbon. I’m quiet as Milo makes his drink, although I watch the man from beneath my eyelashes as I rest my elbows on the bar, cradling my glass between my fingers.

  Milo takes the cash the man tosses down then goes back to washing up the glassware, and I go back to my own drink. The man beside me isn’t the first to walk into The Silent Hour with that look in his eyes. He won’t be the last.

  “Special occasion?”

  His voice comes again in that deep burn, but this time it’s directed my way. I look over at him.

  Deep shadows sit beneath a pair of gorgeous green-blue eyes. His chestnut hair is on the right side of disheveled, like it’s been messed up during sex or a good brawl. The cut of his jaw could make a Hollywood heartthrob cry, and a shadow of stubble contours the sharp lines.

  “No. It’s not an occasion and it sure as shit isn’t special.” I let out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “I’m just here to drink.”

  A beat of silence. Then, “Same.”

  I look back over, and his eyes are on his drink, the corners of his full lips turned down. There's something in the way he looks that gives me pause, something all too familiar. A pain like the kind I’m trying to tear free of.

  I drag my gaze away from the man. A dizziness comes over me, and I can’t tell if it’s the thoughts of Jared that’ve forced their way back into my mind, seeing too much of Jared in this fucking stranger, or… or the other shit wrong with me that I don’t have the time to deal with right now.

  My stomach twists as I chew my lip. I need a distraction.

  So I do something stupid.

  I finish off my whiskey in one swallow and move closer to the stranger, closing the space the empty bar stool between us created.

  Pain… sorrow… the deep, wrenching anguish that keeps trying to bubble up my throat—I don’t want it, yet I see it in his face too. Sometimes it’s a suffering you can blow away on some booze or a decent blunt.

  Sometimes, when that fails… sometimes you just need to fuck it out. Let someone else bury your feelings deep down where pleasure drowns and kills them. Those synapses that fire during a hot fuck are a thousand times better than any anti-depressant could ever be.

  When you know what emptiness feels like, you’re able to spot it in others too. And I can spot it in this guy like I’m looking in a mirror. It makes it easy to approach him, to slide my fingers along his arm.

  “Of course, we can make it a special occasion,” I say. “If you want.”

  I don’t elaborate, because things like this don’t need elaboration, just an invitation and a good enough reason to accept it. I pull away from him, leaving that invitation open as I make my way to the bathroom, which is conveniently within the sight-line of where pretty boy sits.

  When I look back just before I close the bathroom door behind me, I see him down the last of his whiskey and stand up.

  2

  The door has barely shut behind me before a large hand slaps against it, pushing it open. The man with the gorgeous blue-green eyes steps inside after me and shoves the door closed with his foot before turning the lock.

  It’s a single-occupancy room that’s seen better days. Graffiti is scrawled on all the walls, and even across the ceiling and the mirror above the sink. But I barely notice any of that. My gaze is locked on the man’s as he stares right back at me.

  I noticed his striking features the second
he sat down next to me at the bar, but now that we’re standing face to face in the intimate confines of the bathroom, I have a chance to appreciate how truly fucking gorgeous he is, despite the circles under his eyes and the haunted look that lingers behind his irises even now.

  Honestly, with the mood I’m in? I wouldn’t have been picky tonight. As long as the guy had a decent cock and wasn’t missing any teeth, I would’ve dragged him back here for a quick fuck.

  But I’m not sorry that my random hookup is hot as hell.

  He must like what he sees too, because his gaze rakes over me appreciatively. He tugs his full bottom lip between his teeth, his head tilting slightly to one side. Then he strides across the small room, moving so fast he reaches me almost before I’ve realized he’s moving.

  His hand delves into my hair, grabbing it by the roots and tilting my head back as his lips crash down on mine. His other hand is at my back, pinning me to him as his tongue invades my mouth. The kiss is deep and hard, forceful and hungry, as if he’s laying down the ground rules for this hookup—and the only rule is, keep the fuck up.

  A flicker of something hot and bright lights inside my belly, something I haven’t felt in so long I’ve almost forgotten I could feel it.

  I grab on to his shoulders, my fingers digging into his firm, warm muscles as a hint of something spicy teases my nose. My tongue meets his hard strokes, clashing with his as I kiss him back with the same vicious ferocity as he’s kissing me.

  His grip on my hair makes my eyes water, but he makes no move to loosen his grip, keeping my head angled just how he wants it as he drags my bottom lip between his teeth just like he did to his own earlier.