Red

Bad girls burn hot…

Red is the color of Kia Alcott’s hair.

It’s her temper, which blazes hot and always gets Kia into way too much trouble.

And it’s the color of fire. Fires that Kia can start…just by thinking about them.

When her latest “episode” gets her kicked out of school, Kia is shipped off to her grandmother, who works for the wealthy Blackwoods. It’s an estate shrouded in secrets, surrounded by rules, and presided over by a family that is far from normal…including the gorgeous and insolent Ethan Blackwood.

Ethan knows far more about the dangers of the forest surrounding the estate than Kia can ever imagine. For this forest has teeth, and Ethan is charged with protecting the outside world from its vicious mysteries.

But inside, even the most vibrant shade of red doesn’t stand a chance against the dark secrets of the Blackwood family…

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

Copyright © 2015 by Alexandra Harvey. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 109

Fort Collins, CO 80525

Visit our website at
www.entangledpublishing.com
.

Entangled Teen is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

Edited by Stacy Abrams and Lydia Sharp

Cover design by L.J. Anderson

Cover art by Kevin Carden

ISBN 978-1-63375-173-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition March 2015

Prologue

Kia

There was one reason I regretted setting fire to my old school.

It wasn’t the anger management classes, or getting expelled, or even the scar from the burns on my elbow. It wasn’t knowing I was some kind of freak.

It was being banished to a small hick town north of nowhere to live with Abby, my grandmother.

Abby worked as a housekeeper for some eccentric billionaire. She’d never seemed the type to wear aprons and polish furniture, but what did I know? She only left the house once a year to visit me on my birthday, and until now, she’d forbidden me to return the visit. I guess having your only son-in-law call to tell you your granddaughter is on a downward spiral was a new incentive. Which was lame, since I wasn’t even on a downward spiral. It was way more complicated than that. Okay, I’d beat up that guy that one time. It was totally self-defense, though, and even the principal had finally agreed.

Anyway, here I was, pulling up in a fancy car that cost more than Dad’s apartment in the city. I’d tried to talk him into letting me take my high school equivalency test, but he said I wasn’t mature enough to be on my own like that, since he worked so much.

I was mature enough not to set his eyebrows on fire when he said that. Just saying.

The trees had already turned red and orange, as if the branches were on fire. I looked away uncomfortably. I preferred to watch the dusty road and the pine boughs that scraped the car windows. We hadn’t passed another house in at least ten minutes, and the closest small town was twenty miles away. We left the trees for a gravel lane that climbed a grassy hill and then there it was: the lake house. It was more of a castle, with towers at each corner. I half expected to see severed heads on pikes.

I got out of the car, refusing to be cowed. So what if I was wearing torn jeans, a studded belt, and boots with skulls on them? So what if I was the granddaughter of the help, with dyed cherry-red streaks in my hair and a chip on my shoulder? God, I sounded like a stereotype from some gothic novel. All I needed was to find a dead body in the attic and weep into my pillow every night.

The driver pulled out my suitcases and I took one from him, even though I practically had to arm wrestle him for it. There were cobblestone courtyards and stables, wide green lawns, and an orchard off to one side. The sun glinted off dozens and dozens of diamond-paned windows. “This guy must have a hundred kids.”

“Just the one son, miss. About your age.”

Great. Cue awkward boy-girl expectations now. If he were hot on top of rich, I might as well kill myself now. We’d never get along. At least the house was big enough I could easily avoid him.

My fingertips tingled, as if I’d touched something hot. I abandoned my suitcase to shove my hands in my pockets. My eyes were warm, as if I were getting a fever. Alarm churned in my stomach.
Not now, please, not again.

I looked at the front door to give myself something else to concentrate on. It was massive and arched, with giant iron hinges and a knocker in the shape of a woman’s head with snakes for hair. When it didn’t spontaneously combust, I relaxed slightly.

Abby bustled down the stone steps.

“It’s so good to see you.” She wore jeans and a flannel shirt, with her mostly gray hair in a single braid down her back. Seeing the castle, I’d expected her to be wearing a maid’s uniform or something. She hugged me tightly, but I kept my hands in my pockets.

Abby pulled back. “I smell smoke.” She frowned. “You’re not smoking now, are you?”

“No, Abby.” It was almost funny. “I don’t smoke.”

The driver took my other suitcase and disappeared into the house. The foyer opened up to a great hall with a marble fireplace and a curved double staircase leading to the second floor. I’d walked into a glossy magazine photo. The illusion increased when a man came down the hall, oozing sophistication, from his charcoal suit and silk tie to his sun-streaked hair. “You must be Kia. I’m Holden Blackwood. It’s a pleasure to finally meet Abby’s granddaughter.”

When he smiled at me, his teeth were so straight and white they were distracting. It took me a moment to realize he was holding out his hand. Since my hands weren’t hot anymore, I took them out of my pockets and surreptitiously wiped my palms on my jeans. “Oh, um, hi. Nice to meet you, Mr. Blackwood.”

“Please call me Holden. My son, Ethan, is around here somewhere, so you’ll know at least one person at school. Now, I’ll leave you to settle in.” He smiled again and strode away to what I was sure was a fully equipped office full of antique furniture and leather-bound books. His shoes clicked on the marble floors.

Abby took me down to a huge kitchen, where a woman in an apron was chopping vegetables. “Kia, this is Clare and Sara Day. They run the kitchens.” I noticed she said
kitchens
, not kitchen. “This is my granddaughter, Kia.”

Clare smiled. “We’ve heard so much about you,” she said. “Welcome to the castle.”

Sara had her head in the double-wide refrigerator. She stepped out long enough to narrow crinkly blue eyes at me. “You’re not one of those girls afraid to eat bread, are you?”

“No.”

“Good.” She nodded approvingly and went back to whatever she was doing.

“Sara bakes.” Clare laughed. “So she takes that no-carbs diet very personally.”

“Sara does more than bake,” Abby explained. “She trained as a pastry chef in Paris.” She nudged me to a narrow set of winding stairs tucked inside the entrance behind us.

“Let me guess,” I said. “The servant stairs?”

“Yes.”

“That’s totally archaic.”

“I know it takes some getting used to, but there are rules with families like the Blackwoods. It makes things easier in the long run.” She speared me with those sharp brown eyes that could still make me squirm. “Give it a chance. Because you don’t have a lot of options left, Kia.”

To say I’d heard every variation of every parental speech, both motivational and cautionary, was an understatement. I really didn’t need to hear another one about how I was wasting all my opportunities and nobody got anywhere with an attitude like mine and there were better ways to express my anger, blah, blah, blah.

Everyone thought I’d started the fire on purpose. And there was no use in trying to convince them otherwise. They’d never believe the truth.

Abby’s work boots clomped on the floor. She looked more natural against the plain servant stairs than she had in the fancy great hall. She belonged on a farm, not in a castle. “Mr. Blackwood and his son, Ethan, and Ethan’s cousin Tobias all have suites on this floor,” she explained as we stopped on the landing to the second floor. All I could see were more tasteful carpet runners and oil paintings in ornate frames. “Your room’s up here.”

“I’m in the attic?” I asked as I followed her to the top.

She flashed me a grin. “Trust me, this is unlike any attic you’ve ever seen.”

I hated to admit it, but she was right. The attic was three times the size of my bedroom at home. The walls were whitewashed, with huge pine beams along the slanted ceiling, like the rib cage of a giant beast. The pine sill was hand painted with a folk motif, like a chalet in Switzerland. “I’ll let you settle in,” she said, sounding smug at my hastily repressed awe.

I flipped through the glossy school pamphlet Abby had left on my desk. Havencrest Preparatory Academy. The photos showed roses everywhere and smiling well-groomed students in uniforms. Uniforms. Shoot me now.

I’d stumbled into someone else’s story. I was in a strange house with a strange woman; the fact that she was my grandmother didn’t change that I barely knew her and she definitely didn’t know me. Even my dad didn’t know me anymore, and I was closer to him than anyone. I had secrets now, dangerous ones, so maybe it was best that I was stuck here on a secret lake no one knew about. Even if I already missed Riley and Dad and my tiny cramped bedroom strung with Christmas lights. Kia Alcott didn’t belong in a castle or a prep school. She belonged in a fourth-floor walk-up with hallways that smelled like cabbage rolls. She belonged to litter-choked downtown streets, comic book stores, and doughnut shops that stayed open all night. She didn’t know the first thing about fashion magazines or name-brand clothes.

Mr. Yang, the counselor who ran the anger-management classes I’d had to take, would say I was making snap judgments about people out of fear. I was stereotyping them before they could stereotype me. I was building walls.

Easy for him to say.

Because the truth was, I wasn’t going to fit in at a school full of kids who went horseback riding or had their own sailboats, or whatever it was rich country kids did in their spare time. And while I didn’t actually mind being on the fringes, I did mind having to start from scratch. At my old school I’d already scoped out my territory, I knew where to hang out, who to avoid, and which teachers turned a blind eye to a few skipped classes.

Now I knew nothing. Not even who I was.

And there wasn’t actually much for me to do. My clothes were already unpacked and my books were on the shelves, having been sent ahead. I booted up my laptop and checked my emails for the twentieth time. No messages from my best friend, Riley.

I decided to wander the castle. Because I knew from past experience that, right now, if I let myself, I would be sucked into a pity party, complete with guilt confetti. Getting busted for poking around seemed healthier.

The landing of the second-floor servant stairs turned oddly, offering more of the architectural-magazine view. I wasn’t technically allowed in this part of the house—Abby had already sent me a long email full of antiquated rules: never go into the main part of the house uninvited, don’t ask questions, don’t speak to the Blackwoods unless they speak to you first. Don’t go into the woods.

The silence practically echoed, pinging off marble and crystal chandeliers. I poked my head out cautiously. No one was around. The tower room had an iron gate, like something out of a horror movie. It was open at the moment, but I could see the impressive locks even from here.

I wondered what could possibly need to be contained that carefully. Besides me. A tiny shiver danced over the back of my neck as I peered inside.

Spears with decorative beaded bands, arrows, and swords, were all lined up with military, rather than museum, precision. And a lot of stuffed animal heads. There was a stag with chunks of turquoise stones for eyes, a crane standing on a log, a white bull with gold horns, and a horse head with a horn attached to its forehead to make it look like a unicorn.

I was stepping inside when a hand closed tightly around my arm, jerking me to a stop. I shouted something that was definitely not ladylike enough for this house. My pulse thumped in my ears.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” the person said.

He flexed his hands suddenly, the way people do when they’ve touched something too hot. He wore a silver ring on his thumb. I tried to concentrate on that instead of the spark of panic smoldering in my belly. Burning down a private museum seemed like a really bad introduction to my new life.

Had he seen the tiny spark that ate a hole in my sleeve? I rubbed it, making sure it wouldn’t flare up again. I wasn’t even sure if it was a new spark or a burn from an old one.

I’d learned I didn’t need kindling—I
was
kindling.

My palms itched painfully. I shoved the guy to distract him from the heat coming off of me. “Who the hell are you?”

“Ethan,” he replied.

Ethan Blackwood. Of course. Way to make a first impression.

“You must be Abby’s granddaughter.” He was standing very close. And I’d just known he’d be gorgeous. I assumed he’d have better manners, though. Possibly no one else noticed with that ridiculously beautiful face. His hair was blond, his cheekbones deadly. He was lean and muscular, like someone who knew exactly what his body was capable of. And I was thinking way too much about this.

“Get out of here,” he said softly, intently. His mouth was distracting; it belonged to a villain in a movie full of secrets and temptation. “
Now.
”

I was suddenly embarrassed, as if he could read my mind. A little more aggressive misdirection couldn’t hurt. “Have you considered taking up yoga?” I asked with patently false sweetness. “You’re a little tense.”

“Just go,” he said. “You—”

“Ethan!” Holden Blackwood interrupted us, sounding shocked and annoyed. “Leave the poor girl alone.”

A muscle leaped in Ethan’s jaw as he clenched it. He didn’t look at his father, just kept staring at me. “Ethan!” Holden repeated, annoyance hardening to anger.

Ethan shoved past me so suddenly I toppled into the doorframe. I heard his footsteps stomp down the hall and then the slamming of his bedroom door. “I apologize for my son.” Holden sighed. “I fear I’ve spoiled him.”

Yeah, I couldn’t exactly picture Ethan with an after-school job. Speaking of which, I was going to have to get one as soon as possible. Abby wasn’t the type to give out an allowance, even if she’d been able to afford it. I shrugged awkwardly at Ethan’s dad. “It’s fine.”

“It certainly is not, but it’s gracious of you to say so.” I couldn’t think of a person more opposite to Abby than Holden Blackwood. Or more opposite to my dad, come to think of it. He screamed sophistication and wealth. The Alcotts just screamed. “Perhaps you’ll do him good, Kia.”