“I’ll keep being like this, so long as you keep being like that.”
I look up at him, leaning into his solid body. “Like what?”
He tips forward to answer, voice deep and low in my ear. “Mine.” It sends a spatter of goosebumps down my neck and arms, prickling my damp skin.
I laugh at myself, because it takes almost nothing from these guys to electrify my blood. “Okay,” I agree, fighting back a shiver as I strain up to brush my lips against his. “Can I be yours while I’m wearing underwear?” And possibly a sweater…
His chest expands with an inhale and then caves with a long sigh. “Can I take them off later?”
“If Dimitri doesn’t get to them first.” I bury a laugh into my hand as I cross his bedroom, and then the hall. I can’t help but wonder if this is what every night will be like from now on. Not the worst way to live, getting constantly fucked by the three incredible men in my life. But, if that’s the case, I’m going to need a tutor, because staying up all night is going to destroy my grades. A couple weeks ago, I probably wouldn’t have cared about that. But now?
I love these men, and I fully plan on being part of what they’re building in South Side. Part of that is knowing that I can’t rely on men alone. I’ve seen it with my mom, Ms. Crane, and even the other Royal women. It’s going to be important—essential—to have something of my own. Something useful.
When I first came to Forsyth, studying for a career in social work was little more than an indistinct ambition. It made sense to me, but I’d be lying to myself if I claimed to have felt any genuine passion for it. Ever since I enrolled, I’ve had trouble finding any excitement or drive about it.
Until this week.
Now social work is something I can see myself doing—down in South Side, with kids like me and Dimitri. It’s how I fit, I’ve come to realize. It’s what I’m going to bring to Killian’s rule. If the four of us are going to change this tiny part of the world, then this is how I’m going to contribute.
Suddenly, I can’t wait to really sink my teeth in. I’m engrossed in my lectures. I’m hungrily soaking up every word and meeting my professors to go over my notes. I’m signing up for study groups, just like the one Marcus drove me home from earlier in the day. It’s this strange, fresh energy that’s had me buzzing ever since Daniel died.
I’ve never felt a purpose before.
I step into my bedroom, opening my dresser. I snag a pair of panties from the top drawer and slip them on before grabbing a plain white tee from the bottom drawer. It’s halfway over my head when I hear the soft snick of my door closing.
My mouth curves into a grin. “Tell me you found the pasta.” I pull the shirt down before turning to Killian. “If we keep this up, I’m going to need so many calories to—”
But my words get lodged in my throat, caught in a tangle of fear, because I might turn to face someone, but it’s not Killian.
The person standing in front of my door is motionless, masked, and dressed head-to-toe in black. My heart stampedes in my chest as I jerk back, noticing the gun. Not just any gun. My gun. I’d know the shape of it, the silver glint against the moonlight coming in through the window, anywhere. The hand wrapped around it is small—as small as my own—and the silhouette of the body has curves. Womanly.
“Sutton?” My voice emerges in a sandpaper-rough whisper. “This isn’t cool.”
The woman doesn’t move, just standing there in the dark, watching me blindly flail for something to use as a weapon. My hand fumbles over perfume bottles and a picture frame, a Forsyth teddy bear, and then the round top of the sparkly LDZ skull. There’s nothing that’ll help against a gun.
“What do you want?” I try to make my voice strong, but I feel anything but, standing here in a T-shirt and panties with an intruder in the house. I know firsthand just how dangerous these Royal women can be. I pitch my voice low and threatening. “They’ll kill you this time. Killian’s not a Lord anymore. He’s a King now. He’ll kill you, and no one will blink an eye.”
The intruder tucks the gun in her waistband and holds up her hands in a non-threatening manner. My heart pounds as she reaches for the bottom edge of the mask and pushes it up. I take a minute to process what I’m seeing—who I’m seeing.
When I do, the tension drains out of my body with a swiftness that takes my breath away. “What are you doing here?! You scared the crap out of me, Mom!”
She thrusts her finger against her lips, giving me a warning look, which is when my door knob rattles. Both of our gazes dart to the movement, but she holds out her hand, giving me a sharp look.
There’s a soft, hesitant knock, and then Killian’s muffled voice. “Come on. Seriously?” The doorknob gives another rattle. “Story? We’re doing this shit again?” His voice is pitched in that flat, harsh way that makes me imagine his nostrils are flaring in annoyance.
I open my mouth to answer him, but the look in my mom’s eyes stops me short, and by the time I realize something is seriously wrong here, his heavy footsteps are already retreating. “What the hell is going on?!” I try to keep my shout to a whisper, because none of this looks good. My mother, hiding in my room, holding my gun.
The Lords would get the wrong idea.
“We need to have a talk,” she says, holding her palms out in a placating gesture. “Just have a—”
There’s a crashing bang, the thud so powerful that the walls rattle with the force of it. I jump violently, every nerve ending in my body coiled tight and frantic at the sound of an angry, pained roar muffled through the thickness of the walls.
“Killian,” I breathe, lunging for the door.
But my mom gets there first, blocking me. “Wait!” she insists, grabbing my shoulders. From this vantage, I get a good look at her eyes—wide, filled with a strange mania. “Just wait, my little storybook.” She looks to the side, as if she’s waiting to hear something.
But there’s nothing.
No angry noises.
No sound of struggle.
The ensuing silence might be the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
“There it is.” It makes her face split into a slow, relieved grin. “I’m here to fix everything.” She reaches for the gun again, sliding her finger over the curve of the trigger.
I stumble back, horror rising thick in my chest. “What are you doing?”
She gives me a patient look, following me further into the room. “Baby, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to save you.” Her eyes hold mine, swimming with some unfathomable intensity. “That happy ending we’ve been looking for? It’s finally here.”
“Oh my god,” I breathe, clutching my stomach. She’s losing it. “Mom, I know you’ve had a hard week. Losing Daniel was devastating, but—”
She darts toward me, eyes wild. “It wasn’t devastating. It went off without a hitch!” Her sharp laugh sends a chill up my spine. “I wasn’t even expecting that fire. Can you believe the luck?”
My face falls as I stumble back, claves bumping into the chair at my vanity. “Mom. Mom. What are you saying?”
She dips her chin, staring at me. “You know what I’m saying, Story.”
Of course I know what she’s saying. I just wish I didn’t. “You killed him.” I whisper the words, as if I’m afraid to put form to them.
She sets the gun on the edge of my dresser, removing a black glove. “It was supposed to land on Killian, you know. But then the two of you went to that goddamn awards show.” Her mouth curves into an irritated slant. “Don’t worry, I don’t blame you for that. That’s why it’s always important to have a plan B.”
“This is plan B?” I exclaim, making a wide, expansive gesture. “Breaking into the Lords’ house in the middle of the night? Mom, this is crazy! The guys will be here soon.” But even as I say it, I know it’s not true. It’s been too long. Dimitri leaving the room and not coming back. Tristian vanishing when I need something. And Killian…I know that was his yell out in the hall. “I need you to stop and explain what’s going on. Now.”
“I’ve been wanting to,” she says, eyes pleading as she removes her other glove. “Every day, I’d have to talk myself down from spilling it all. It’s been killing me to keep so many secrets from you.” Her eyes roam over my dresser, hand reaching out to straighten the objects I’d knocked over a few minutes before. Her fingers linger over the glittery skull, a darkness crossing her features. “But you know all about secrets, don’t you?”
Swallowing, I look toward the window, wondering if I’m really doing this. Am I really looking for a way to escape my own mother? “What do you mean?”
“I know about everything, Story.” Her voice is ominously one-note, and when she lifts her gaze to mine, I find an awareness there that chills me. It’d be so much easier if she were truly losing it, crazed and broken, but she’s completely lucid. This is a woman who knows exactly what she’s done. “I know what Daniel wanted with you. I know what you did on the internet when you were younger. I even know about all the things your brother’s done to you.” Her voice drops. “And his friends.”
A tightness clutches my lungs, making it painful to breathe through. “How?”
She flicks the glitter off her fingertips. “A mother always knows, but it makes it easier when your husband has the entire house fitted with security cameras.” A weariness crosses her face as she edges closer, propping her hip against the dresser. “It’s like I told you before. I blame myself. I put you into that home, with those…” Her mouth contorts, but she doesn’t finish—doesn’t put a word to what the Paynes are. There’s a strange appeal in the way she looks at me. “I had to stay, though. Daniel was our way out, but he was also a part of this…sickness. I had to find a way to protect you while still being his wife, so that’s what I tried to do. You understand, don’t you?”
I shake my head, at a complete loss. “I don’t.”
Frustration sparks in her eyes, but she visibly bats it down. “You wanted to go away, so we sent you to the boarding school. That might have worked, but Daniel…” Her jaw goes tight and she looks away. “He knew where you were, and he never stopped. Not once. He was still talking to those monsters about you. The Kings.” She spits the word like it’s bitter. “He said he was keeping you whole for them. That you could still belong to them. That he could call you back whenever they wanted, their little Royal virgin whore.” She raises her eyes, pinning me with a fierce stare. “So I sent you some letters and made you run.”
Every cell in my body turns to ice, and I fall back into the chair without really experiencing it. “You?” It’s as though I’ve left my body and I’m nothing more than what Killian had described that day out back. Meat. Flesh and bone, and nothing more. “It was you?”
She reaches for the hairbrush on the vanity, raising her chin. “The Executive Daddy. Not very inspired, was it? Daniel rarely was.” I don’t move as she gathers my hair into her hand, her knuckles cold as they brush against the back of my neck. “I knew what it was like at that age, having creepy old men lusting after you. I knew the fears. The panic. The constant worry that they might find you, corner you.” She runs the brush through my hair, bristles tickling my scalp. “I also knew the power that attention could wield, how it sucked you in. I just needed you to be hidden—just for a while. Just until I found my opportunity.”
“You’re Ted.” It feels like there’s a cost in saying it aloud. I pay it with the shattered pieces of my heart as I struggle to grasp the magnitude of this knowledge. “You killed Jack.”
The brush snags in a knot, and she carefully frees the bristles. “Not me. Not directly.” Sighing, she parts my hair down the middle, just like she always used to do when I was small. “I found you before Daniel did, but then I saw how you were living. With those…criminals.” I can hear the displeased moue of her mouth. “When you were smaller, I used to think to myself…this child is going to be easy. Oh, you were so polite and well-mannered. All the other mothers I knew used to tell me how lucky I was to have a good one. And that’s what you were. You were honest and open. You were so good.” This time, when the brush snags a knot, she yanks. “Then all these men came along, hell bent on turning you into something twisted and wrong.”
“You killed him,” I repeat, stuck in the memory of his blood. His blank, vacant eyes. “You murdered him.”
“Ugly Nick killed him,” she snaps, giving my hair a rough tug. “And I wouldn’t have had to if you’d just stayed on a straight path, Story. Honestly! Burglars and degenerates?” She emits a hard huff of breath, separating my hair. “He was just another in the long line of men who were using you. Can’t you see that now? I know you’re young, but you must see that.” Flippantly, she adds, “It doesn’t matter. By the time I realized how you were living, Daniel had already tracked you down again, so that degenerate served a purpose. I needed just a little more time.”
The tickle of the tear tracking down my cheek barely penetrates. “You tormented me.”
She pauses at this, fingers stilling in my hair. Softly, she says, “That’s not fair.”
“Not fair?” I try to turn to look at her, but the grip on my hair, already half braided, snaps me back. “Not fair?!”
“Enough,” she begins, voice full of indignation, “I knew the second you stepped foot back in this town that you were too much like me. Did you ever stop to wonder why you never went to the police? Oh, it’d be useless to do it here, but in California? In Colorado? You had multiple chances to get away from this, Story, and what did you do?” She roots around my vanity for a hair tie, sounding more and more angry. “You came right back to their fucking doorstep because you can’t stay away. A part of you craves it—the pain and humiliation you feel when they defile you like a little pet, even when I try so hard to—”
“Ah!” I cry out when she pulls my hair, snapping my head back.
Suddenly, she’s in front of me, taking my hands in hers. “Listen to me, my little storybook.” Her eyes bore beseechingly into me. They’re eyes just like mine. The same color. The same shape. Probably even the same vibrant edge of desperation. “I’ve been down this road, and I know where it leads. You’ll spend a few years being the scum on the bottom of their shoes. They’ll pull you out when they want some excitement. They’ll use you. Debase you. Soil you. One of them will eventually put a baby into you.” At this, she smiles, but it’s a broken, jagged thing. “You’ll give birth to her after seven hours of excruciating labor. You’ll hold her in your arms for the first time, and she’ll be so beautiful and lovely and good. You’ll be amazed that something so perfect could come from such an ugly person.” She reaches up to thumb my tear away. “You’ll look into the eyes of this marvelous thing you’ve made, and it’ll change you. You’ll make a promise to her that it’ll be different. That she’ll never have to know a life on her knees. That you’ll do whatever it takes. You’ll beg, borrow, steal—and yes, if it means keeping that promise, you’ll kill, too.”
A sad, mangled laugh claws its way from my throat at the idea of it—this dream of hers. As if she’s sacrificed and worked so hard to save me from the very fate I’ve been subjected to for years. “Like Vivienne?” I ask, stomach roiling at the magnitude of her sins. “Was that for me, too? How did slitting her throat and leaving me her finger help me in any fucking way.”
Her mouth presses into a tense line. “Vivienne was getting in the way of my plans for you.”
“Vivienne was getting in the way of your marriage,” I correct, snatching my hands from her grip.
My mother sits back on her heels, eyes hardening. “You’re right. She was servicing my husband. Regularly. You know why that was a problem, don’t you?” She snorts at my blank expression, rising to her feet. “Jealousy is above me, Story. Otherwise the Velvet Hideaway’s payroll would be a hell of a lot smaller.” She walks to my dresser and begins going through the drawers. “She knew too much. Had too much access. She was beginning to notice the money missing.” Glancing at me over her shoulder, she explains, “Money that I used to pay Ugly Nick to take Killian out.” She pauses, pulling out a pair of my old jeans. “Or try, at least. He’s a slippery one, isn’t he?”
“You were wrong before,” I say, my voice just as perfectly controlled as Tristian’s taught me. “I didn’t come back here because I craved humiliation. I came back to get revenge.”
She drops the jeans in my lap and lingers, hands on her hips. “By spreading your legs over and over again?”
My brain spins, my heart aches, and the rage in the pit of my belly—all that fire I thought I’d buried from all the years of abuse—flickers back to life. “I did what I had to do. Don’t tell me you don’t understand that.” I look up and hold her eye. “And I won. I beat them. They don’t own me.”
“That bracelet.” She jerks her chin at my wrist, sneering. “Those scars on your chest. The tracker in your neck. They’re the mark of a pet.”
My back straightens, eyes flashing. “Right now, they’re the mark of a Queen.”
My mother’s face pinches at the word, like she’s tasted something bitter. “Have you been listening to anything I’ve said?” She takes the jeans from me, crouching down to slip the legs over my feet, motions jerky and stiff. “I was married to Daniel for years. I was his confidante. I single-handedly formed the foundation for one of his most successful businesses. I advised him, elevated him, fucked him, and even I wasn’t a Queen. Women like us?” She shakes her head, letting out a resentful laugh. “We’ll never be Queens.” When I tear my jeans from her hands, working them up over my thighs and hips myself, she raises her eyes to mine. “Not unless we take it.”
“So that’s what this is about,” I stall, seeing the gleam of the gun in my periphery. If I lunged for it, I could turn it on her. But could I use it? Could I kill her? If I bluffed, would she believe me? “You just want the power. The control.”
Her expression softens as she stands. “Not me. Us.” She curls a wisp of hair over my ear, eyes wistful. “We’ll rule this place together. The right way. And we’ll never have to get on our knees again.” Her smooth hand cups my cheek. “You’re my world. My sweet little fairytale. I made you a promise, and I’m going to kill them for what they’ve done to you.” Her lips curve. “I’ll start with Tristian Mercer, for shoving his cock in your mouth all those years ago. Then that little street urchin for thinking he can carve you up like a piece of meat.” Sighing, she lifts my wrist, thumbing at the bronze skull. “And then I’m going to kill your brother, because he’s the one that let them do it to you.”
I see the lie for what it is now. Killian is the heir. He’s the King. She’ll kill him because he’s what’s standing between her and the life she wants. None of this is really about me. It’s about her desire for power.
“No, you won’t.” I pull my wrist away easily, remembering how Dimitri sounded in the parlor earlier when I walked in on the meeting with the Kings. So blasé and cold and vicious. It’s as embedded into my flesh as his knife once was, because that’s what they are to me now. A part of me. “I came here for a reason. They’re not yours to kill.”
She watches me, eyes searching my face. For a long stretch, there’s nothing but silence. And then she grabs the gun, tucking it into her waistband. “You don’t need to bloody your hands with this. You’re not capable of such a thing. It’s what makes you so special, Story.”
“Show me where they are,” is my bland reply, “and I’ll show you exactly what a Lady is capable of.”
