Wild Fury (Fallen Royals #6)

by S. Massery

  Skylar and Liam follow, then Eli and Riley. I know those two girls better, having been around the Emery-Rose Elite cheerleading team when both of them were on it. They were both friends with my sister at one point, too.

  “Lucy!” Skylar calls, striding toward me. “Welcome back.”

  She wraps her arms around me. I tense, forgetting that this is normal. Normal people hug, Luce.

  She’s got a bandage on her head, a black eye, and Liam won’t take his eyes off her. I look her over, wincing on her behalf when she releases me.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. “I heard…”

  She frowns. “Traumatic, yes. But we’re working on it.” Skylar glances back at Liam, and the two share a private expression.

  The investigator in me wants to know what it means, but I don’t have time to ask, because Riley and Margo are upon me.

  “Margo Asher.” The latter extends her hand. “I don’t think we officially met, although I saw you at a few football games in high school.”

  I suck my lower lip between my teeth, then quickly release it. “Right. Probably wondered what I did to make Theo hate me, huh?”

  She drops her hand. “Not at all.”

  My attention flips to Riley. “I’m glad you escaped my sister’s clutches,” I say.

  Riley forces a smile. “You sure do know exactly what to say to make things awkward, huh?”

  I shrug and glance away. “What’s the point?”

  Margo and Riley are best friends, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Skylar seems chummy with them, but not altogether comfortable. Where does that leave me?

  Nowhere.

  “Why did you guys come by?” I ask.

  Theo’s watching me from across the room. His friends are investigating the fridge, and when Eli sits on the couch, I try to control the fire in my cheeks.

  Riley follows my gaze and chuckles. “Hey, babe?”

  Eli’s attention swings back to her.

  “Maybe sit on a towel?”

  It takes him a second, then he leaps from the couch like it bit him. He hops around for a moment, swearing, and stops just in front of us.

  Margo and Riley both burst into laughter.

  “You should put a sign on the couch next time,” he advises me. “Slippery when—”

  “Enough,” Theo growls from across the room.

  Eli winks at me. “About time he got some action, if you ask me. He’s been a miserable prick for the last—hey!”

  Theo has him by the ear and tows him back toward Caleb and Liam.

  “We’re visiting to meet you,” Skylar says. “And I think they want to do dinner.”

  Dinner. Right.

  Everyone seems to get the memo at the same time. Theo and I go into the bedroom to grab our jackets, and he stops me from leaving with a hand on my wrist.

  “You seem quiet.”

  “I…” I sigh. “Am I supposed to be friends with them? Because I don’t really know how to do that.”

  He nods. “Just stick with me, kid. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  Great. Still, I don’t resist his arm around my shoulder. We walk in a group down the street, away from the LBU campus. Liam and Skylar drop back, closer to us, and the two boys talk about Howl. A fight club, I guess, under new management.

  “It was wild,” Skylar whispers. “Theo was there the night I got drugged.”

  I stare at her. “What happened?”

  She rolls her eyes. “The old organizer was pissed that Liam wouldn’t fight, so he wanted to offer a bigger incentive. Drugged me and held me in a side room… it didn’t work out very well. But the twins are gone.”

  “Who runs it now?” I wouldn’t mind a girls’ division. Of course, I know nothing about it, but a fight could be fun.

  “I do,” Theo says.

  My mouth drops open. “What?”

  “Colt and RJ were getting out of hand. I was an initial investor—I backed their bets, and they gave me a royalty on what they made. Easy enough to buy them out and force them to get the fuck out of town.”

  “And then he brought me in on it, too,” Liam says. He leans forward so he can see me. “I’ve mostly given up my fighting ways, but it’s fun to collect money from assholes. And keep it, too, regardless of whether I come home with a win.”

  Skylar scoffs. “It’s also nice to have a boyfriend who doesn’t have a bloody face all the time.”

  I chuckle. “I’d bet.”

  Theo pulls me closer.

  We follow Caleb and Eli into a restaurant, to a curved booth in the back. We all file in, Theo and I somehow managing to get squeezed into the middle. My stomach flips, wondering how I’m supposed to make a mad dash out of here if I’m trapped.

  Margo and Caleb sit on one side, and Eli, Riley, Liam, and Sky are on the other.

  The waiter comes by with drinks, and Caleb lifts his.

  “Cheers to us all being together,” he says.

  “Cheers,” we all murmur, stretching to clink our glasses.

  I suck on my soda, putting a good dent in it before I release the straw. I set it down just as Theo’s hand touches my thigh. It’s a good thing, too, because if I had still been holding it… well, I would’ve dropped it.

  “Lucy,” Caleb calls.

  I lift my gaze to him, willing my face to stay impassive.

  “You’re back for good?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.” I pause amid a few frowns and Theo’s fingers digging into my leg. “But now, I’m not going anywhere. Everything is…”

  Caleb raises his eyebrow.

  “I was going to say it’s all sorted. But there are a few loose threads.”

  He nods and glances at Margo. “Whatever you need, we can help.”

  “Thanks.”

  The rest of dinner is… surprisingly pleasant. Not the seventh circle of Hell like I might’ve been inclined to think it was earlier. Margo and Caleb are relocating to Boston soon for grad school. Theo leans in at one point and tells me Margo is pregnant—another surprise! Her recently freed father is contemplating joining them to help when the baby comes.

  Eli is set to start at the Massachusetts police academy next spring, right after he graduates from NYU. The same school Riley goes to. And due to the fact that Eli dropped out of the first school he went to, they started at New York University together—so they’ll graduate together, too.

  It seems everyone is relocating to Boston.

  “Well, we can’t leave, then,” I murmur to Theo.

  He presses a kiss to my temple. “Why not?”

  Right.

  “What do you want to do with your life?” he asks me on our walk home. The others have departed, going their separate ways. “I mean, you know.”

  I chuckle. “I’d like to travel more. Wilder put me on a plane for Colorado, and I loved it. I took a bus back and saw so much of the country that way. So maybe… Europe? Amelie is over there, probably having the time of her life. Visit her. Photograph people.”

  “Sneakily?”

  “Maybe. Or…”

  “You could become a journalist,” he suggests. “Or at least work for a legitimate paper.”

  “That sounds… really cool, actually.” I smack his arm. “Why didn’t you suggest that forever ago?”

  He smirks. “I had to think of some way to keep you around.”

  “I don’t know why you’d think, of all your qualities, your brain would be it.”

  He stops me. “What, then?”

  “Your abs,” I say with complete seriousness… until I break, anyway. “I don’t know. All of it. The fact that you get me is probably the top reason you’re my favorite person ever.”

  “Ever,” he repeats.”

  “Duh, Theo Alistair.”

  “Promise me something,” he demands.

  I raise my eyebrows. “Just like that?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Promise that forty years from now, you and I will still have this sort of banter. We’ll watch grandchild
ren run around our living room and have sex in our recliner—”

  “Oh god, not at the same time!”

  “No, during nap time,” he says.

  “Fine.” I grimace. “I notice you said recliner, singular, so we better be cuddling even when we can barely get out of it. We can wear matching life alert buttons.”

  “Excellent idea.”

  I pause. “So, were you proposing just now, or…?”

  He pauses, too. “No.”

  “Well, technically—”

  He sighs and pulls me along. “Technically I was proposing a future together. I didn’t get down on one knee and pop the question.”

  “The question being…”

  “You know, ‘Will you marry me?’”

  I gasp and jump up and down, spinning away from him and finally stopping just in front of him. “Theo Alistair!”

  “Lucy Page, that was not my proposal.” He tries to hold back his laugher and fails. “Stop bouncing.”

  I’m insane and I don’t care. “That was the most romantic—”

  “Hush, woman,” he growls. He scoops me up, one arm behind my knees and the other at my back, and marches down the street. He’s probably worried about the neighbors peeking out their windows at us. “When I propose, you’ll know it. Romance overload. It’ll turn your black heart red again.”

  I giggle and press the back of my hand to my forehead. “Be still my beating heart. You might just turn me into a hapless romantic yet.”

  Probably not… but you never know.

  Theo

  One month later

  “Go,” I say. Now or never.

  The video starts. Just her, front and center. Hair down around her shoulders, no glasses, no makeup. Black shirt. The background is my white wall and the back of the couch.

  I wish I could sit next to her, but this is her battle.

  Her demons she needs to fight.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. I’m back in Boston, and I have some things I need to get off my chest. I don’t know if you’re ever going to watch this, but… even admitting it out loud will be beneficial to me. So I can have a record of this. Of being honest to someone other than Theo.”

  She pushes her hair back behind her ear.

  “Just over two years ago, at Amelie’s engagement party with Wilder, a man lied to get me alone. He tried to rape me. I got away.” A white lie to keep Lux out of prison. “You didn’t care about my whereabouts. You didn’t notice that I wasn’t beside you, or tagging along. There was only one person who realized I was missing, and that was my sister.”

  She’s retreating. I can see it. My girl, who has worked so hard to come out of her shell, is crawling right back into it.

  “Your lack of attention started way before then. It started when I acted like a normal kid—a brat—and your response was to ship me off.” She narrows her eyes. “I just wanted to ask and see if you ever cared? If, when Jameson or Wilder approached you and said I might be in danger of being a police suspect, you had any hesitation? Did you know what you were sentencing me to?

  “I just wanted to be loved,” she whispers. “I wanted someone to give a damn about me because they loved me, not because I was pushed on them. My grandparents did the best they could, but they didn’t choose to have a child. You did. And then you abandoned me.”

  I can hear their rebuttal in my head and know Lux made the right choice. This is her story to tell.

  “I grew up thinking I was the unwanted stray.” She wipes a tear from her cheek. “God. I thought I was unlovable because of you both.”

  Her gaze lifts from the camera to meet mine. My heart is tearing open for her.

  “I’m back in Boston. I’m telling you this because I never want to see you again.” She pauses, letting those words fill the silence. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to know where you are, or how you’re doing. I love my sister, and I love my grandparents, but I’m done trying to chase your love. This is just a goodbye. And a fuck you, because you both should’ve thought about birth control before you had a child you clearly never wanted.”

  She nods to me.

  I click the camera off and stare. She just told her parents to fuck off, and I want to kiss her for it. But she’s very clearly not okay. She’s not even here, really. So I give her a moment and wait for her to come back to life. There’s still too much distance in her gaze, even after a long moment of quiet.

  I hop up and sit next to her, pulling her hands into my lap. They’re frozen, too. I rub them between my palms, bringing them up to my lips and blowing on them as if we were outside.

  She slowly melts back to her normal self, relaxing against me. Her cheek touches down on my shoulder. Her gaze is fixed on our hands together.

  “How was it?” she asks. “I think I blacked out.”

  This morning, she told me she wanted to send her parents a video message. She contemplated a letter, but that wouldn’t get the right emotion across. And there would be no response. If they read it, or if they didn’t, would be an unknown.

  I can relate to Lux not wanting this to be another unknown in her life.

  So she had me sit in her spot on the couch as she fiddled with camera settings, then switched places with me. I hit record, and I watched my Lux disappear right before my eyes. But the important thing is that she got through it.

  “We should watch,” she says when I don’t answer. She rises, seeming to drift away, and collects the camera off the tripod. She steps past me to sit again, but I lift her onto my lap and rest my chin on her shoulder. “Is it bad? I don’t think I can do it again.”

  I kiss the soft skin just below her earlobe. “It’s not bad. It’s perfect. You even said fuck you to them.”

  She smiles. “I think I remember that part.” She shuts off the camera. “I trust you. Will you send it?”

  I nod. Her parents deserve worse—not only for what they did to Lux, but both of their daughters. They’re manipulative and selfish.

  That’s just putting it lightly.

  It took a month of Lux living in Boston, living with me, to realize that her parents are the root of her self-esteem issues. I didn’t help in high school. I take responsibility for that. But I wasn’t the one who taught her that she didn’t deserve love.

  And over the last month, we’ve relearned a lot.

  Sex.

  Joy.

  Life.

  I feel awake for the first time in years, and I attribute it to Lux. She’s come with me to the last few football games of the season—including the playoffs, which we won the week prior—and has formed friendships with some of the other players’ girlfriends.

  Everything is settling into place.

  One of the local newspapers even hired her for their investigative journalism team—photography and writing, which I find inspiring.

  Lux would call it a sign. Karma, maybe, or divine intervention.

  She curls closer to me and wraps her arms around my neck. “I think that’s it,” she whispers.

  I nod.

  “Hey, Lux?”

  “Yeah?”

  I grin. “We’re going to get married, right?”

  She hits my chest and laughs. “Stop fake proposing.”

  “Just checking.” I kiss the top of her head. Someday she’ll answer it seriously, but until then, I’ll enjoy each day she gives me. My light—forever.

  THE END

  Continue for a sneak peek of Amelie’s story, Ruthless Saint, or pre-order here.

  Ruthless Saint Prologue

  Today started with a wedding.

  Mine, to be exact. I had the perfect dress, a lace veil that covered my face, something borrowed, and something blue. Pearls strangled my neck.

  I didn’t picture my life like this.

  And I know what you’re thinking. Blah, blah, Amelie. Everyone says that. That’s true to an extent. Everyone does complain that their lives are miserable and they have no control.

  They don’t know real helplessness.
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  Your every move planned down to the minute.

  Where to be, when to speak, what to say.

  While dread held my body hostage, my family was eager. They had been awaiting this day for years. Our house was filled with never-ending talk about the alliances they were forging. The steps forward we were taking.

  Steps forward meant power. Respect.

  Power required money—of which we had plenty.

  It was the respect part that dear old Dad was always chasing after, and perhaps that’s why he never was able to fully grasp it.

  That, plus one other important factor—respect could seem a lot like fear.

  Therein laid the trap: his eldest daughter was a hostage. And not just that…

  A bargaining chip.

  There was the dress and the veil and the stupid sapphire earrings that made my lobes ache. The walk down the aisle, toward a man I had done my best to understand. The eldest DeSantis brother. The one with the most to lose—and the most to gain, depending on the outcome of our union. We’d been in orbit for a while, and today we were on a collision course.

  But my entire world rotated on its axis that day.

  My life was planned from my sixteenth birthday onward, like the second hand of a clock. Onward; drearily, relentlessly forward.

  But my wedding?

  Instead of a kiss on my lips, it ended with blood splattered across my veil.

  And that… well, that’s where our story begins.

  Pre-order here.

  Acknowledgments

  Dear reader,

  Thank you SO MUCH for reading (and hopefully loving) this series. I can’t even describe how much you’ve changed my life. I love the dark romance community and writing these twisted stories.

  Every kind message I’ve received warms my heart. Sometimes I can’t even wrap my brain around the fact that this is real life.

  There have been a lot of people helping me along the way, but I’m eternally grateful to them. My editors, assistant, alpha & beta readers, just to name a few. There are a lot of moving pieces behind bringing a book to your ereader (or paperback). So many helping hands. So thank you to all of you who play a part in my publishing process.