“That one is your fault,” Monroe snarled, jabbing a finger towards the picture in Kyan’s hand. “Why the fuck did you have to do that shit out in the open like that?”
Kyan laughed tauntingly, flipping the picture around to show all of us. “Because I was a dying man, starving for something to eat. And she was a feast too fucking delicious to turn down. And you’d better believe that she was more than happy to let me devour her. A single look at her face in this picture could tell you that.”
“Well, next time, keep it in your fucking pants and save it for behind closed doors. Or better yet, just keep your fucking hands off of her,” Monroe growled.
“You wanna know what she tastes like?” Kyan asked and the look in his eyes said he was hungry for a fight. He wanted Monroe to jump at him, wanted the therapy of violence to take the edge off of whatever demons he was currently battling.
He had his shirt off as he sat on the couch beside me and it was pretty hard to miss the angry cigarette burn on his upper chest.
Tatum had been tending to it twice daily, checking it for signs of infection and administering some burn cream. I wondered if she knew he wouldn’t look after it himself? Or that aside from me and Saint, he’d never really had anyone to look after him at all?
Whenever she cornered him and applied the cream, he took the opportunity to goad her, telling her that he’d heal up faster if she sucked his dick twice a day. Or refusing to move from his position on the couch and dragging her down to straddle his lap while she worked and offered to let her ride him properly if she begged. She cussed him out, delicately applied the cream to his burn and then walked away while tossing a few choice insults back at him.
I wondered if she’d ever caught sight of the way he watched her when she walked away from him. Or of the way his brow crumpled when she left a room. Hell, I didn’t even really know what to make of it myself. Sure, I’d shared her with him that time, or tried to at least. But that was about sex not…anything else. At least I didn’t think so. What if he wanted more than that from her? And what if I did too? The idea of me ever fighting one of my brothers over a girl was completely fucking insane.
But… Tatum Rivers wasn’t just some girl.
I blew out a breath as I banished those thoughts. It was never going to come to that anyway. She hated us both with enough ferocity to eclipse the idea of something more with her. In fact, I felt like we were all just treading water here. It was our senior year and the country was in lockdown. We might have been able to keep her while we were here, but then what?
When the world went back to normal, it would become impossible to watch her at all times. To make sure she didn’t run. And she would run. She’d run hard and fast and far. So this time we had with her now was precious.
“I might get this one framed,” Kyan mused, trying to bait Monroe again.
“I think it rather spoils the art to know that it was taken by some little rat who was jerking off in the bushes while he watched you with her,” Saint drawled. “Imagining your fingers inside her were his tiny cock instead and trying to convince himself that he could make her scream even louder than you were. In fact, you’re most likely holding something out of his handmade porno collection. How many times do you think he’s ejaculated all over a copy of that image?
“Jesus Christ,” Monroe snarled as Kyan dropped the photo, rubbing his fingers together like he wanted to be sure they weren’t left sticky from touching it. “Why the fuck would you say that?”
“Because it’s the truth,” Saint said in a bored tone, but his eyes flashed with rage. “Some little fucker has been trailing our girl, photographing her in her most intimate moments. Stealing her panties to get the scent of her for himself. Following her in the dark and fantasising about doing god knows what to her.”
“We could inform the police,” I suggested half-heartedly.
“They are notoriously fucking useless when it comes to stalking,” Monroe muttered. “Unless this asshole actually attacks her, there’s fuck all they can do. And by then it could be too late.”
“Besides,” Saint added. “We have this campus locked down. We don’t need police officers coming in here and risking them bringing the Hades Virus with them.”
“And I want to catch this panty thieving asshole for myself,” Kyan said darkly, lifting his hunting knife from his belt and twisting it between his fingers. “And when I do, I’m going to beat the shit out of him and cut his fucking balls off for good measure.”
I instinctively cupped my balls as I eyed the sharp point of the blade, but no one disagreed with his idea.
“We do it slow, though,” Saint said, his eyes riveted to the hunting knife which we’d all used to kill a man. “The same way he stalked our girl. We catch him, beat him shitless and then we start up a tireless mission of pain and misery. We turn up wherever he is at random times and punish him for what he did in a new and torturous way every day.”
“You’re assuming we can hold back on killing him when we find him,” Monroe growled.
“Well,” Saint said slowly, leaning back in his wing backed chair. “Accidents happen of course.”
“So we all know the plan, then?” Kyan questioned.
“We move as soon as I’ve confirmed a few things,” Saint said and I knew he wouldn’t be pushed into deciding exactly when now, but it would be within a few days, I could feel it. None of us wanted to leave this much longer. This stalker needed to be dealt with. Savagely.
“I can’t fucking wait,” I said with a grin.
“I’m going to get some homework done,” Saint said, rising to his feet and heading over to the dining table where his new laptop lay waiting for him.
“You’re seriously going to do some fucking studying?” Monroe asked incredulously. “When we’re all hyped up to go hunt down a stalker?”
“If you have excess testosterone to vent then I suggest you and Kyan go and beat each other up until you exhaust it,” Saint replied mildly. “I can collect Barbie from her study date while you go get sweaty together.”
“Only if you’re prepared for me to beat the living shit out of you,” Kyan warned as he pushed himself to his feet and Monroe grinned at the challenge.
“I’m going to enjoy wiping the floor with you,” he replied and the two of them headed off together, continuing their posturing as they began shoving each other and dicking around, hurrying to get to the gym and the boxing ring where they could play their little fighting games to their hearts’ content.
I leaned back in my seat with a sigh and snatched the Xbox control into my grip as I prepared to settle myself in for the evening.
But before it had even booted up, I was tossing the control aside again. All of this stalker shit was putting me on edge. I’d made the absolutely terrible mistake of Googling famous stalking cases last night, meaning to get an idea about the kinds of things we could expect this sicko to do next so that we might be able to get ahead of him. There were lots of different accounts of all kinds of fucked up things. But there was a theme. Boy meets girl. Girl is waaaay out of his league. Boy won’t take no for an answer. Boy starts following her, photographing her, turning up everywhere she goes, stealing her things, her underwear, feeding his obsession. Then…well, then it just gets darker and darker. Boy can’t take the idea of her rejecting him anymore, confronts her, demands her love, her body. And then, when she refuses again…
Nope. Zombie deaths weren’t going to cut it tonight. I was too amped up. And I didn’t like the idea of Tatum being over in the library while this pervert was around even if there were a bunch of other students there and she’d promised to wait for one of us to come get her before putting so much as a single toe outside the building. I’d wanted to stay in the library with her. But she’d thrown a fucking fit about us breaking the rules and taking away her only bit of private time. And of course, because to Saint the rules may as well have been etched in stone like the ten goddamn commandments, he’d weighed in on her side of the argume
nt. Even though he wasn’t any happier about her being over there than me.
I shot her what must have been the twentieth text of the night, checking in to see if she was okay and waited for her answer to come in and soothe my concerns.
Tatum:
*squid emoji*
Saint looked up as the messages came through on the group text for him too and he slammed his palm down on the table with enough force to make his laptop leap off of it for a second before clattering back down.
“I swear to Christ, if someone doesn’t tell me what the fucking squid emoji means soon, I’m going to lose my shit.”
“You lost it a long time ago, bro,” I joked, trying to shrug it off, but I had to admit, the damn squids had me stumped too.
The most infuriating thing about them was the fact that Kyan seemed to know exactly what she meant by them as well. But he wouldn’t fucking tell us. Just smirked like a knowing little dickhead whenever she sent one and told us that we really needed to work on keeping up to date with the kids. Fucking asshole.
Blake:
Be serious, a minute. We just wanna know you’re alright.
Tatum:
Gah, wasn’t my last message clear enough? *squid emoji* *otter emoji* ¿
Saint:
No, it isn’t clear enough and if you don’t explain your answer, I’ll be punishing you for it later tonight.
Tatum:
I don’t know why you’re getting so angry at me. I answered the question. You can’t punish me for shit. Unless you found out about the thing I did to your cufflinks. In which case, I’m sure you’ll find a suitable way to make me pay, master ;)
Saint slapped his phone down on the table and got to his feet suddenly. He stalked away from me and headed up to his room to check the truth of that. I relaxed a little as I waited for him to return. Clearly she was fine if she was wasting time baiting the demon in him, but I still felt uneasy about her being way over on the other side of campus.
I shot a quick message to Danny, telling him to come meet me outside ASAP. I needed something to do to pass the time and I wanted to be closer to her too.
Saint stomped back down the stairs with his fists tight, but there was an excited light in his eyes which seemed to counter his rage.
“What did she do?” I asked curiously.
“She replaced a set of my cufflinks with two raisins,” he explained, his teeth gritting around the word. I knew well how he felt about dehydrated fruit, but I wondered if Tatum had known that she was striking him with a double blow when she’d selected the raisins as her weapon of choice.
“Who the fuck ever thought it was a good idea to su-”
“Suck all of the vitamin C out of a perfectly good grape and make it look like a shrivelled old ball sack to boot?” I finished for him with a grin. The raisin rant was a classic.
Saint smirked at me as he acknowledged his OCD was showing and adjusted his belt buckle thoughtfully before heading back to his laptop.
“Why don’t you seem all that pissed about this?” I asked him curiously. When Kyan fucked with his shit like that, he always lost the plot.
“Because she knows she’s been bad and is willing to accept her punishment.”
“Which will be…?”
His dark eyes flicked up to meet mine again and the hint of a smile toyed around his lips. “Utterly satisfactory for both of us,” he said cryptically.
I opened my mouth to ask him what the hell that meant, but the group text sounded again as another message came through.
Kyan:
We need to *onion emoji* tomorrow like you promised, baby. Don’t forget.
Tatum:
*squid emoji*
Kyan:
*octopus emoji*
“This shit has to stop,” Saint snarled.
Saint:
I’ll fucking *squid emoji* you until you’re begging me to stop, unless you quit it with this bullshit.
Tatum:
What?
Kyan:
That makes, literally no sense, dude…
“Gah.” Saint slammed his fist down on the table again and started frantically typing something on his laptop.
A horn blasted outside somewhere beyond The Temple and a message came through on my phone from Danny a beat later, telling me he was waiting for me.
“I’m going out,” I said, grabbing my letterman jacket and shrugging it on as I headed for the door.
Saint didn’t reply but I caught sight of his Google results as he scanned responses for what the squid emoji meant in current culture. His jaw was tight and his eyes narrowed and I was willing to bet Tatum’s punishment for riling him up was going to be pretty savage unless he managed to figure it out.
He didn’t even say goodbye to me as I walked out and I rolled my eyes at him. He was going to sit there trying to figure out that squid emoji right up until he had to go get Tatum from the library.
I tossed the door closed behind me and rubbed my hands together as the icy bite of winter nipped at my exposed skin. My breath billowed between my lips and the frost we’d woken up to this morning still coated the trees all around campus.
I kinda wished it would snow. I’d always loved the snow as a kid. And not just because I could go sledding and build snowmen and have snowball fights. I just loved the way snow made the world look so clean. Especially when it had just fallen and nothing had corrupted it yet. Inevitably it ended up thawing and got trampled and churned up with the mud and dirt of the real world and actually looked worse than ever. But for a little while I could pretend everything was pure. A fresh start. A new beginning. A do over. And I could use more than a few of those. Especially during this last year.
It was strange to me really, to think of the boy I’d been being such good friends with Kyan and Saint before this grief truly corrupted me. We’d always joked about the darkness in us being the thing that drew us together, but for me, back before my mom died, I couldn’t really claim to have held an inch of the torment in my soul that they’d been raised with.
Kyan’s family were…well I knew for a fact that I still didn’t understand half of what they were. They were dangerous in all the most terrifying ways. The most brutal, violent, blood soaked ways. He’d once told me that the O’Briens sacrificed the souls of their babies to the devil the moment they were born, bathing them in the blood of their enemies and mixing their milk with it too to make sure they were bloodthirsty from their very first breath. I mean, that was clearly bullshit, but the haunted look he got in his eyes when he talked about them sometimes made me hold my tongue on a lot of the questions I wanted to ask.
Saint’s upbringing was a lot less violent. He hadn’t been beaten or subjected to brutality in the ways Kyan had. He hadn’t been made to bear witness to unspeakable things or assist in crimes when he was so young that there was no way he could have even thought of refusing. No. Saint had been crafted in a much more refined way. He’d been conditioned by his father. Subjected to various stressers time and again and forced to find a way to cope with them. He’d been denied consistency, control, routine. Which was why he was so damn obsessed with it now of course. It was also why I didn’t fight him too hard on it. I mean, sure, sometimes I found it funny to fuck with his stuff like Kyan did, but I usually felt kinda shitty for it when I saw the panic in his eyes. He needed control even more than I needed to win. And I was happy enough to let him have it most of the time.
But for both of them, with their upbringings and the shit they’d had to deal with from such a young age, their darkness made a sick kind of sense. And I liked to believe that they did as well with it as they could.
I, on the other hand, had no trauma to blame for my darker tendencies until recently. Before my mom died, I’d had a pretty fucking perfect life. Not that I’d really appreciated it at the time. And sure my dad was pushy, always wanting me to be the damn best at everything and getting way too invested in any competitions I entered. But that wasn’t exactly comparable to Kyan and
Saint’s family. No. I was just…cruel. I guessed I’d always had it so easy that I’d found life boring. And I’d found my calling in punishing people who stepped out of line. In forcing them beneath my heel. But I had the feeling that made me the biggest asshole out of all of us. Especially as I didn’t regret it. Every single thing I’d done to the Unspeakables…I just didn’t have it in me to give a single shit about it.
But Tatum…I’d fucked up royally there. My grief and blind fucking rage had pushed me into breaking my own damn rules. We only punished the guilty. And blaming her for something her dad had done was just fucked up. It wasn’t like I blamed Kyan for the shit his family had done.
Fuck, I’m such a piece of shit.
I reached the end of the path and forced a smirk onto my lips as I found Danny and Chad driving a couple of the golf carts used to transport shit around campus and beckoning me over with excitement. Punch -Toby- was riding shotgun in Chad’s cart and all of them looked seriously excited to see me. Like they could only have any real fun when I was there. And I didn’t mind the idea of that.
We’d been meeting up pretty often, doing stupid stuff which was definitely going to end up in one of us getting hurt or worse eventually and finding some level of relief from the boredom of lockdown in the adrenaline rush we took from our stupidity. I was quite literally living up to the delinquent teen dream and I was okay with that.
I needed the rush I got from playing these games. Needed to forget for a little while that I was a total sonofabitch and just do something fun and dumb and exciting.
“I thought we could race them!” Danny beckoned me to climb in beside him in the cart but as I looked at the thing, I had a better idea.
Kings of Lockdown: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep Book 2) Page 52
