Double Crossed by Ally Carter Read Free Book Online Page B

the fake and then I left that for Reagan and his crew just in case. Plan D,” Kat said by way of explanation.
    “Tell you what, Kat, I’ll trade you,” Abby said, taking the necklace and slipping a piece of paper into Kat’s small hand. “It’s my card.”
    “‘The Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women…’” Kat read. “It’s a school?”
    “Part school.” Abby cocked her head, considering. “Part sisterhood.”
    “And you’re a teacher?” Kat didn’t try to hide the skepticism in her voice, but Abby didn’t seem offended.
    She just let her gaze drift across the room, a slow smile spreading across her face. “Something like that.”
    Kat tried to read Abby’s expression, but like so many things about her, it was shrouded in secrets. Still, Kat was certain there was far more to the story. She glanced from Macey to Abby and back again. “Exactly what kind of school is the Gallagher Academy?” Kat asked.
    “The kind that would welcome you in a heartbeat.”
    Abby folded Kat’s fingers over the card and turned to leave. Neither of them spoke again. Neither of them had to. There was a subtle understanding already coursing between them.
    Maybe Macey was right and they would meet again. Then Kat thought about her new friends on the right side of the law and wondered whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing. But in the end she merely shrugged, knowing at the very least it would be interesting.
    Knowing, in her gut, it might just be the beginning.



N o one knew for certain when the trouble started at the Colgan School. Some members of its alumni association blamed the decision to admit girls. Others cited newfangled liberal ideals and a general decline in the respect for elders worldwide. But no matter the theory, no one could deny that, recently, life at the Colgan School was different.
    Oh, its grounds were still perfectly manicured. Three quarters of the senior class were already well on their way to being early-accepted into the Ivy League. Photos of presidents and senators and CEOs still lined the dark-paneled hallway outside the headmaster’s office.
    But in the old days, no one would ever have declined admission to Colgan on the day before classes started, forcing the administration to scramble to fill the slot. Historically, any vacancy would have been met with a waiting list a mile long, but this year, for some reason, there was only one applicant eager to enroll at that late date.
    Most of all, there had been a time when honor meant something at the Colgan School, when school property was respected, when the faculty was revered—when the headmaster’s mint-condition 1958 Porsche Speedster would never have been placed on top of the fountain in the quad with water shooting out of its headlights on an unusually warm evening in November.
    There had been a time when the girl responsible—the very one who had lucked into that last-minute vacancy only a few months before—would have had the decency to admit what she’d done and quietly taken her leave of the school. But unfortunately, that era, much like the headmaster’s car, was finished.
    Two days after Porsche-gate, as the students had taken to calling it, the girl in question had the nerve to sit in the hallway of the administration building beneath the black-and-white stare of three senators, two presidents, and a Supreme Court justice, with her head held high, as if she’d done nothing wrong.
    More students than usual filed down the corridor that day, going out of their way to steal a glance and whisper behind cupped hands.
    “That’s her.”
    “She’s the one I was telling you about.”
    “How do you think she did it?”
    Any other student might have flinched in that bright spotlight, but from the moment Katarina Bishop set foot on the Colgan campus, she’d been something of an enigma. Some said she’d gained her last-minute slot because she was the daughter of an incredibly wealthy European businessman who had