ampbell’s party wasn’t what I’d come to expect of the Debutante set. There were no hors d’oeuvres. The music was not instrumental. The alcohol—and there was plenty—was served in kegs.

“Let me guess,” I said over the sound of three dozen teenagers in various stages of inebriation and the bass line emanating from a very expensive sound system, “Campbell’s parents aren’t home.”

“This isn’t Campbell’s house.” Lily somehow managed to make herself heard without yelling as we pushed our way through the foyer. “It’s Katharine Riley’s.”

“Let me guess,” I said, modifying my previous statement, ­“Katharine Riley’s parents aren’t home.”

Lily herded me toward a breakfast nook off the kitchen, ­Sadie-Grace following in our wake.

“Katharine’s parents are out of town,” Lily confirmed, the acoustics providing a break from the bass line. “So is Katharine.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “What?”

“Katharine and her family left yesterday for an out-of-town wedding. Today, Campbell just started asking people if they were coming to Katharine’s party.” Lily shook her head. “Within an hour or two, everyone else was doing the same thing. Half the people here probably don’t even realize that Katharine’s not.”

I glanced back toward the kegs. “Campbell’s version of throwing a party involves breaking and entering?”

“Oh, you make it all sound so sordid.” Campbell Ames strolled over to stand in the midst of our group. “So glad that you three could make it.”

Lily allowed her chin to jut forward. “I don’t recall being given a choice.”

“Relax, Lilypad, I’m doing you a favor. What exactly has a life of propriety and rule-following gotten you? A reputation for being boring and self-righteous, a boyfriend who got bored and self-­righteously dumped you, and so much pent-up sexual frustration that you spontaneously decided to self-destruct.” Campbell laid a hand lightly on my cousin’s cheek and then gave it a solid pat. “Live a little.”

Her tone left very little question that it was an order.

“In fact,” Campbell continued, “live a lot. I, personally, would love to see you making friends and influencing people. Have a beverage or two. Dance on the table.”

“I will do no such—”

“You will,” Campbell said sweetly. “And you’ll like it. And you…” She turned to Sadie-Grace. “You’ll stay busy picking up after my guests. We can’t have the Rileys coming home to a mess, now can we?”

Sadie-Grace flushed. Like everything else, it was a good look for her. I deeply suspected her vulnerability wouldn’t have been quite so enticing to Campbell if she’d been less of a knockout.

“Put that down,” I told Sadie-Grace when she tentatively picked up a Solo cup someone had abandoned on the ground.

“Sawyer,” Lily said, her voice low.

“You,” Campbell barked back at her, “dancing on the table.” She narrowed her eyes at Sadie-Grace. “You, trash. Unless you two want me to publish a new entry to Secrets? One that includes our lovely model’s face.”

Lily paled. Sadie-Grace picked up another cup. Satisfied that the two of them had no choice but to jump at her command, Campbell allowed her full attention to land on me.

“Let’s you and I take a little walk,” she said. “Shall we?”

Our walk took us to the second story of the Rileys’ home. A marble balcony overlooked the open floor plan below. Campbell leaned her elbows lightly against the wrought-iron railing.

“I suppose that Lily mentioned the darling memento I have of our girls’ weekend?” She angled the cell phone in her hands toward me. “I especially like this shot of you tying my hands behind my back.”

The photo had obviously been captured from a video. I’d held out some hope that Campbell had been lying about the security footage, but clearly, she hadn’t been.

“If you were going to do something with that footage, you would have already,” I said.

I’d been willing to bet against Campbell going to the police two weeks ago. The fact that she’d waited this long to make a move had done little to change my mind.

I leaned against the railing next to her. “I’m guessing at least one of your parents would find a way to blame the whole sordid ordeal on you.”

That was a stab in the dark, but my metaphorical blade drew blood.

“You don’t know anything about my parents,” Campbell snapped.

“I know that Walker bought the story that you took off for an entire weekend because you needed breathing room from your mother.” I let that sink in. “I know your father’s a politican.”

I know that your family is, in Boone’s words, a merciless lot.

“Daddy would never want me to go public with this nonsense,” Campbell admitted, then turned wide, innocent eyes on me, the edges of her lips flicking upward like a serpent’s tongue. “But if the security footage leaked to the media, through no fault of my own…” She gave a helpless little shrug. “The senator would want to get out in front of the scandal, control the narrative. I’m sure the police would understand why I was reluctant to report my friends. Fragile young flowers such as myself are just so vulnerable to bullying from their peers.”

Campbell was about as fragile as a cement truck. She was also, I suspected, fully capable of leaking the footage herself and pretending to be horrified that it had come out.

“You’d get the lion’s share of the blame, you know,” Campbell said casually. “Not perfect Lily. No matter what she says, everyone—­your family included—will think that the cousin with the unfortunate background was the ringleader of the whole kidnapping fiasco.”

If the police did get involved, if the blame fell on me—per the terms of Lillian’s contract, I could kiss my college fund good-bye.

“Let them think what they want,” I retorted. “I can handle it.” I hoped that Campbell could hear the promise in my tone: I can handle you.

Undeterred, she turned her attention to the party below. Lily was standing near the edge of a mahogany table, a drink held in a death grip in her right hand.

“She’s going to do it,” Campbell told me. “If I say dance, she’ll dance. She might need a little more liquid courage first, but she won’t risk that security footage coming out, and she definitely won’t risk me getting bored enough to upload a few uncropped photos to Secrets.”

I gritted my teeth. “Why are you doing this?”

“Petty revenge?” Campbell suggested pertly. “You do remember the whole kidnapping thing, right?”

“The blackmail predated the kidnapping.” I gave her a hard look. “Seriously—what did Lily ever do to you?”

“Who says she did anything?” Campbell pushed her ponytail back over her shoulder. “Maybe I’m just evil incarnate.”

I stared at her for a moment. “Maybe you feel helpless more often than you’d like to admit.”

I might not have known her, but I knew that people didn’t play games like this one because they already felt powerful.

Campbell stared down at Lily below, her expression impossible to decipher. “I love my brother,” she said. “Everyone does. They always have.”

Given the way Campbell had reacted earlier when I’d mentioned her parents, I was betting everyone started with the senator and his wife.

“But once upon a time…” Campbell’s gaze flicked back toward mine. “Lily was my friend.”

I took that to mean that Campbell hadn’t been a fan of the romance between my cousin and her brother. She was supposed to choose you.

Down below, Lily sipped at the drink in her hand. Again. And again. And again.

“I wonder how Walker would react if I released those pictures,” Campbell mused, signaling that this little heart-to-heart was over.

“If you even think about posting a picture with her face in it…” I said lowly.

“You’ll what?” Campbell returned. “Precious, proper little Lily made her own bed the moment she launched that site. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Sawyer: What girls like us do behind closed doors? As long as the person we do it with keeps his mouth shut, that’s our business. But you don’t flaunt it. You don’t do a striptease in the middle of a country club, you don’t lose it under the high school bleachers, and you do not give the gossiping mamas anything to talk about.”

The mention of bleachers hit me harder than it should have.

“People talk about you all the time,” I countered. Walker had told me that much.

“They talk because I want them to.” Campbell gave a graceful little shrug of her shoulders. “And I don’t give them anything quite so… intimate… to talk about.”

“It’s not like Secrets is pornographic,” I shot back. “The important bits are covered.”

“Barely,” Campbell said cheerfully.

“It’s PG-13,” I insisted. “Not R. Even if you do release the photos, people will find something else to gossip about soon enough.”

“You think so?”

Down on the first floor, Lily had finally finished her drink. She glanced up and caught the two of us looking down at her. Campbell lifted a hand to wave, one finger at a time.

“Dance,” she mouthed.

Lily bowed her head for a moment, and then she carefully hauled herself up onto the table. Slowly, the people around her caught on to the fact that something was happening and turned to look.

Lily moved her hips from one side to the other. Her hands raised themselves robotically over her head.

Campbell watched with no small amount of self-satisfaction. “There are two kinds of scandals, Sawyer.” Down below, Lily had fallen into the rhythm of the music, and the crowd around her had grown substantially. “Those that ruin you, and those that don’t. And if you think the difference between the two is in what someone does and not who does it, you’re even more naive than I thought.”

Even from a distance, I could see the flush on Lily’s cheeks when a boy hopped up on the table to dance beside her. She stepped back, and Campbell started clapping.

Loudly.

“What do you want, Campbell?” I bit out as other partygoers joined in on the applause and someone yelled for Lily to take it off.

“Right now?” Campbell turned her back on the scene below and walked toward me. “I want to enjoy the party, knowing that you and Sadie-Grace and your darling cousin will be handling the cleanup. I also want you to bring me the key you stole from my locker at the club.”

She brushed past me, but turned back to speak over her shoulder.

“After that?” she said. “I’ll let you know.”