The Freshman (Kingmakers)

by Sophie Lark

  Unable to help myself, I look for Leo again, thinking he won’t miss a chance to dance.

  Everyone in our family loves dancing. Miles is right in the thick of it, with a small halo of space around him because he’s really fucking talented and plenty of people just want to watch him.

  Leo isn’t next to Miles, however. I spot him sitting at a side table, surrounded by Ares, Matteo, Hedeon, and a few other friends, but not talking to any of them.

  Trying to cheer myself up, I join Miles and start doing this silly routine we created when we were about ten years old. It’s old-school hip hop—a whole lot of bust-downs and body rolls and figure-eight sways. Miles jumps right in on it, and for a second I’m happy again and almost laughing, because Miles is smooth as fuck, he’s got swagger and style, and there’s nobody more fun to dance with.

  Ozzy is whooping and laughing, trying to copy us, and soon we have a dozen kids trying to learn the routine.

  I’m getting pleasantly sweaty, finally feeling that sense of buoyancy again, like everything might work out someway or somehow.

  I look up, thinking maybe Leo will join us. He knows the dance as well as I do. But he isn’t sitting at the table anymore. I look around, trying to peer through the press of bodies. I can’t see him anywhere—he’s completely disappeared.

  I’m disappointed, and almost angry. I don’t know why I’m angry. Maybe because that bubble of happiness popped as quickly as it came.

  I stop dancing after that, but I don’t stop drinking. I lose count of the flutes of champagne I down in a gulp. Dean practically has to carry me back to my dorm an hour later.

  He pins me against my door, attacking me with his lips, thrusting his tongue in my mouth, biting and sucking on my neck.

  My head is spinning, and I can barely stand up. I don’t know why I feel so miserable and so confused. Nothing went wrong at the dance. It should have been a festive night.

  I’m trying to tell Dean to stop, to let me go to bed. I drank too much, and I’m afraid I might throw up from the aggressive kissing.

  Before I can get the words out, he shoves my legs apart with his thigh and shoves his hand up under my skirt. He pushes his fingers under the elastic of my underwear and starts rubbing my pussy.

  I’m leaning hard on his shoulder, unable to hold myself up. If he wasn’t pinning me to the wall with his weight, I’d fall over. I feel limp and out of control, unable to close my legs with his knee pressing my thigh against the wall and my arms trapped between us.

  “Dean, don’t—” I try to say, but he silences me with his mouth on mine. Meanwhile his fingers are stroking up and down my pussy lips, his middle finger grazing over my clit with each pass.

  His fingers are getting wetter and wetter, and I know he can feel that as easily as I can. With each stroke of his hand, my clit becomes more sensitive and the warm throbbing spreads down my thighs and up into my belly.

  Now his fingers are parting my pussy lips and I knew he’s feeling for my entrance, wanting to slip his fingers all the way inside.

  I try to turn my head to the side, but he keeps his lips locked on mine, his tongue shoved into my mouth so I can’t speak.

  He pushes one finger inside of me, then two. Meanwhile, his thumb rubs back and forth across my clit, and my pussy clenches helplessly around his fingers.

  I can feel his erection through his pants, grinding hard against my hip. I can feel his hunger too—his hot breath and his rabid desire for me. I’m aroused whether I want to be or not. It’s an uneasy mixture of guilt, fear, and desire.

  Dean releases my mouth at last and starts sucking hard on the side of my neck while he fingers me roughly.

  I can’t stop it, I can’t hold back. I start to cum around his fingers. As I cum, Dean whispers in my ear, “You’re going to give me what I want, Anna. Sooner or later . . .”

  January arrives cold and gray. For the first time, I’m truly feeling how lonely and isolated Kingmakers is out in the middle of the ocean. The wind howls at night like it’s trying to tear the castle right off the cliff, and the sea spray freezes into thick, black ice along the balustrades.

  Now we’re all making use of the blazers and pullovers that came with our uniforms. The girls are complaining about their skirts, and it’s become a trend to borrow an oversized sweater from the boy you like, because their pullovers are thicker, and if the boy in question is big enough, the sweater will cover your hands and come almost down to your knees.

  Dean freely offers one of his to me, but I don’t take it. I’m annoyed with him. He asked me to eat lunch with him, only to have Bram Van Der Berg and several others of their gang sit down all around us five minutes later.

  I don’t like Bram, and I don’t particularly like how Dean behaves when Bram’s around. It brings out the side of Dean that’s callous and even a little cruel.

  Bram apparently isn’t enjoying his ham and peas. He’s flicking the unwanted peas in the direction of Matteo Ragusa and Paulie White. Paulie is pretending not to notice the peas hitting his arm, but I can see his thin freckled cheeks turning pink.

  I know Dean can see what’s happening just as clearly as I can, but he’s ignoring it entirely, talking to me about our Contracts and Negotiations class that morning. He doesn’t give a fuck about Matteo, who’s a known friend of Leo’s, or Paulie, who’s nerdy and awkward and only an Accountant from a minor mafia family.

  Bram launches his next pea particularly hard, hitting Paulie in the ear.

  “Could you stop it?” I snap at Bram, interrupting Dean mid-sentence.

  “Why should I?” Bram says lazily, setting another pea in his spoon and preparing to launch it over to the next table.

  “Because you’re acting like a fucking child,” I say.

  “Control your girlfriend,” Bram says to Dean.

  Before Dean can say anything to either of us, I whip out my hand and overturn Bram’s plate, sending the remains of his ham, gravy, and peas flopping directly onto his lap.

  Bram leaps up from the table, the crotch of his trousers stained with grease and his fists balled at his sides.

  Dean and I jump up, too, Dean wedging himself in the middle, facing Bram and simultaneously pushing me back behind him.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Dean says to Bram.

  “She’s making you soft,” Bram hisses back. “Be careful, or you’ll end up like your father.”

  Dean seizes Bram by the front of his shirt and for a second I think they were going to start swinging at each other. But one of the Penose gives a soft whistle, jerking his head toward the doorway where several of the burly kitchen staff are standing watching. The dining hall is not a good place for a fight.

  Reluctantly, Dean lets go of Bram. They’re both breathing hard and glaring at each other. Bram steps back slowly, then nods to his Penose. They stride out of the dining hall, leaving only Dean’s Bratva sitting at our table still.

  Dean expects me to sit down again too, but I’ve lost my appetite.

  “Where are you going?” he demands.

  “To my next class,” I say.

  He follows right after me and tries to take my arm in the hall. I pull it away from him.

  “I don’t need you to escort me,” I say.

  “I’m just walking with you,” Dean says, grabbing my arm harder and forcing me to stop. “What’s your problem? I stood up for you with Bram.”

  “You didn’t say anything about him being a fucking asshole to Matteo and Paulie, though.”

  “Why should I care what he does to them?” Dean says. He’s scanning my face with his purplish eyes, genuinely confused.

  “Because he’s a bully,” I say.

  “So what? This isn’t an ice cream social, it’s Kingmakers. Bram’s an Heir. They’re nobodies.”

  “That doesn’t mean he has to be a dick for no reason.”

  I try to keep walking, and again Dean stops me, backing me up against the wall. Now he’s really starting to piss me off.

&
nbsp; “You’re an Heir, too,” Dean says, his eyes fixed on mine. “You’re going to have to command men like Bram. You won’t win their respect being sweet and sentimental.”

  “I’m not fucking sweet,” I snarl at Dean. “And I don’t need you to tell me how to be a leader. I’ll control my Braterstwo because they WILL respect me. Because I’ll have honor and high standards for my behavior, and I’ll expect the same from them. I’ll cut a man’s throat if I have to. But I won’t torment him for fun.”

  With that, I push past him and stomp off to my next class.

  I’m angry with Dean for being patronizing. But also because I’m afraid that he might be right. My men will always be looking for signs of weakness in me. I’ll have to be more ruthless than any of them to show that I’m strong, that I have what it takes to be a boss.

  19

  Leo

  The weeks after the first challenge are a strange mixture of accolades from my fellow Freshmen and thinly-veiled hostility from the upperclassmen.

  Surprisingly, Kasper Markaj is the only person not holding a grudge—he came up to me right after the challenge and clapped me on the back saying, “You did well. Your team trusts you.”

  “It was bad luck that you were first out,” I said.

  He shook his head, his broad, friendly face resigned. “There’s no luck in competition. Only good and better strategies.”

  We only placed third in the challenge, but we managed to steal Pippa Portnoy’s flag, an affront that didn’t go unnoticed.

  I often find her watching me now, sly and silent, her lips quirked up in a perpetual smirk. When she’s not actually around, it’s almost worse, like when you lose sight of the spider in your room. I’d rather have her in plain view where at least I can see what she’s up to.

  I’m drawing glares and mutters everywhere I go on campus, and a couple of not-so-joking threats.

  Miles seems to find it all hilarious. He couldn’t care less that his own Sophomore team is out of the challenge.

  “They don’t know what a desperate little psycho you are,” he tells me, cheerfully. “They don’t know you’d literally rather die than lose.”

  “Right,” I say dully.

  Winning has always been the most important thing in the world to me. When we arrived at Kingmakers, there was nothing I wanted more than to get the Captainship and be the first Freshman to ever win the Quartum Bellum.

  But with each week that passes, I struggle to feel even basic enthusiasm about the next challenge.

  My competitors don’t share my ennui.

  Calvin Caccia has gone from friendly rival to all-out enemy. He didn’t appreciate my stunt in the dining hall, which fulfilled the terms of our bet, but not quite the spirit.

  For me, that was the last day I felt anything approaching happiness.

  The cheers and back-slapping from my fellow Freshmen gave me a burst of triumph. But it faded away almost immediately, and I sank back into the gloom that’s been suffocating me for the last two months.

  I feel dull and drained, and I’m finding it hard to care about what I’ll be facing next.

  “The first one was sort of a warm-up,” Matteo says, “but they won’t go so easy on us next time.”

  “You thought that was easy?” Ares cries. “We almost lost.”

  “Yeah, well it’s gonna get a lot worse,” Matteo says darkly. “Last year in the second challenge one of my brothers broke his leg so bad they almost had to amputate it.”

  “Why in the fuck are we even doing this?” Ares says, shaking his head in wonder.

  “Why did we come to Kingmakers at all?” Matteo grins. “To live a life less ordinary.”

  “Ordinary life was nice,” Ares says wistfully.

  Since I’ve been in such a low mood myself, I’m becoming more cognizant of the fact that Ares isn’t always as cheerful as I thought. What I’d first taken for a laid-back attitude, I’m now realizing might actually be a carefully-cultivated sense of calm to conceal the more turbulent emotions underneath.

  I thought that Ares disappears into our room or the library because he gets tired of the constant socialization required to live, eat, sleep, and study on campus. But now I think it might be something else. I think he might be depressed. When I come across him unexpectedly, when he doesn’t know anyone is watching, he sometimes looks discouraged or even upset.

  When I try to talk to him about it he brushes me off, smiling and telling me I’m imagining things.

  “I’m just tired,” he says, pushing his hair back out of his eyes with a sweep of his hand. “It’s all this homework. I never did that great in school. Probably never wrote so many words in my life as I did last semester.”

  I can tell that Ares isn’t going to open up to me. He doesn’t want to confide in me. And that makes me realize I’m not as good a friend to him as I thought.

  Maybe I’m not that great a friend to anybody.

  I was blazing through life with me at the center of my own universe, and everybody else in orbit around me. I took for granted that they were all as happy and content as they seemed. I never bothered to look that deep below the surface.

  I thought of myself as the star of the show, and honestly, Ares was a sidekick. I hadn’t really considered him as a person with struggles as acute or complex as my own.

  The same was true with Anna. I made assumptions about her feelings and her goals. I wasn’t careful to find out what she really wanted. I took her for granted.

  I don’t think I can win her back, but at least I can treat Ares better. I try my best to help him with his schoolwork, introduce him to pretty girls, and ask him a hundred questions about his family and his home, hoping I can figure out what’s bothering him.

  It’s probably too much, because after a week or two of this, Ares says, “Do you need a kidney or something? You’re being too nice, and it’s freaking me out.”

  “No,” I say, embarrassed. “Sorry. I’m just trying to . . . you know. Be a good friend.”

  Ares laughs softly, shaking his head at me. “You’re the best friend I’ve got here,” he says.

  “Yeah?” I smile. “Alright. I’ll take it down a notch, then.”

  I try to buckle down and apply myself to my classwork instead. It’s the only way not to constantly be staring at Anna, who likewise attends most of my classes, usually sitting only a few desks away from me.

  Every time she speaks or laughs with any of her other friends—even her female friends like Chay and Zoe—I burn with envy. And when she talks to Dean, I want to set the whole school on fire.

  Dean is some kind of dark doppelgänger who managed to switch places with me. Now I knew exactly how he felt the first few months of school when it was Anna and me sitting together, Anna and me exchanging glances when the teacher said something amusing, Anna and me casually leaning against each other as we walked across the commons.

  He swapped positions with me, and now he’s basking in the light of the most beautiful girl in school, and I’m the one locked outside, jealously looking in with my face pressed up against the glass.

  On January 17th I call my parents like I do every weekend. My mother picks up the phone on the first ring, sounding uncharacteristically excited.

  “Leo!” she says. “How are you?”

  “Decent,” I say. “You know . . . tired, but doing alright.”

  “We’ve got something to tell you,” my dad says, his voice tight with anticipation.

  “What is it?” I say, my stomach clenching up. I’m not really in the mood for a surprise at the moment.

  “We’re going to have a baby!” my mom says in a rush. “You’re going to have a sibling!”

  “I—how?” I stammer out.

  My parents tried for years to have another kid. It never worked—my mom never even got pregnant, let alone carried a baby all the way through.

  Now she’s forty-three. I thought they were long past trying.

  “It happened in the usual way,” my dad laug
hs.

  I can tell he’s over the moon, but it’s my mom I’m listening to—her shaky breath, the way she’s trying to hold back tears. She’s wanted this so badly for so long.

  And she deserves it. She was the best mother in the world to me. I don’t have the heart to be anything but happy for them. Having recently had a taste of disappointment myself, I won’t say anything to puncture their excitement.

  “Congratulations, Mom,” I say. “This is such good news.”

  “You’re happy, Leo?” she asks me.

  “Yes,” I say. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

  That’s not a hundred percent true. I’ve been an only child my whole life—the idea of a sibling at this late date is more bizarre than enticing. Also, having just been cut out of Anna’s life and replaced with Dean, I can’t say it’s pleasant to picture my parents centering their whole lives around some bouncing new baby.

  But it’s not my choice. None of these things are my choice.

  I’m trying not to be selfish and immature anymore.

  I’m going to support my parents and see if I can be a better friend to this kid than I was to Anna.

  Three days later is Anna’s birthday. I didn’t think to bring her a gift to Kingmakers, so I pay the gardener an outrageous sum for a potted orchid and leave it outside her door. I know she’ll know it’s from me even without a card, because orchids are her favorite.

  I wouldn’t know what to write in a card. I wouldn’t even know how to sign it. ”Love, Leo” doesn’t seem right anymore.

  When I see her in Chemistry class that afternoon, she gives me a small smile but doesn’t mention the gift.

  I don’t bring it up, either.

  The last week of January is the coldest yet—the air is full of sleet, and the grass is frozen solid on the ground.

  Regardless of this, Professor Knox demands that we go outside for target practice.

  “How are we supposed to shoot if our fingers are frozen solid?” Hedeon moans.

  “Not all battles take place in perfect weather,” Professor Knox says mercilessly.