The Freshman (Kingmakers)

by Sophie Lark

  I run for the door, not even stopping to try to find my clothes in the dark.

  “Wait!” Dean calls after me.

  I don’t wait, not for a second.

  22

  Leo

  I’m worried about Anna.

  She’s not looking well. She seems to be folding in on herself, like a star collapsing. Getting even more quiet than usual in class. No hint of a smile on her face.

  I think she might have broken up with Dean. I haven’t seen them sitting together at lunch or walking together across the grounds.

  Granted, I’ve barely seen Anna, because she seems to fade away the moment class dismisses, and she must be eating at odd hours, because I haven’t seen her at the dining hall.

  I’m embarrassed to ask her friends. They might not know what’s going on anyway—Anna has always been reticent about her romantic life.

  The main reason I think Anna might have split with Dean is because Dean is in a foul temper. I saw him snarl at Bram over breakfast, to the point where it looked like the two of them were about to come to blows, and then the next day his knuckles were swollen and bruised from hitting the heavy bag.

  He’s stomping around campus just hoping that somebody is stupid enough to get in his way.

  A few months ago I probably would have taken the opportunity to do exactly that. But I’m not as interested in butting heads with him anymore.

  What I want to do is talk to Anna. I want to talk to her the way we used to—when we communicated perfectly, and everything in the world seemed like a joke between the two of us, that only we could understand.

  It’s hard to find her, because she seems to be avoiding me. Or maybe she’s avoiding everyone.

  We don’t have as many classes together this semester. And the course work is getting more and more difficult. I have to spend several hours a night on homework.

  We’re in Marksmanship at the same time, though not much chatting can occur while we’re all wearing protective ear- and eyewear, taking aim at targets. Psychological Interrogation has assigned seating, and we’re on opposite sides of the room. So Chemistry is probably my best chance to speak to her.

  Our Chemistry class is more like a lab. Last semester we were studying undetectable poisons. This semester we’ve moved on to explosives.

  The desks are rectangular tables that fit two people. Anna’s been sitting with Zoe generally, but Zoe has fallen prey to the flu that’s been sweeping through Kingmakers, so I take my opportunity to slip into the seat next to Anna while Professor Lyons is still writing a list of ingredients on the chalkboard.

  Anna gives a little jump when I sit down next to her, and I see her hand clench convulsively in her lap.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hello,” Anna replies quietly.

  “Zoe still sick?”

  It’s a stupid question. I already knew she was before I sat down, having already asked Chay that question over breakfast.

  “Yeah,” Anna says. “I think I might be getting it too. My head is killing me.”

  She presses one slim pale hand against her temple, trying to ease the headache apparently throbbing beneath the skin.

  “They probably have aspirin at the infirmary,” I say stupidly.

  “Probably,” Anna agrees.

  I should have offered to get her some. Too late—Professor Lyons is already starting the lecture, and I wasted those precious moments talking about Zoe and fucking aspirin.

  Now we just have to sit here listening, while I’m painfully aware of Anna’s slim frame next to me, the strand of her hair tickling my arm, and the soft puff of air that runs across my knuckles when she lets out a silent sigh.

  The lecture seems interminable. I want to look at Anna, not at the professor, but I can’t turn my head without her noticing, not when we’re sitting side by side like this.

  She’s not taking notes like she usually does. Her notebook sits closed in front of her, her pens lined up next to it untouched.

  Her black nail polish is chipped—unusual for Anna, who is careful with her appearance. She really must be sick. Or upset about Dean.

  My stomach clenches painfully.

  When the class ends at last, I blurt out, “What do you have next?”

  “Contracts and Negotiations,” Anna says.

  “I’ll walk over with you.”

  Her blue eyes flit up to my face, and for a moment I feel a hint of that old spark, that connection between us.

  “Alright,” she says.

  We descend the long, spiraling staircase on the south end of the Keep, then go out into the February sunshine. It’s still chilly outside, but you can taste the first hint of spring in the air—the fresh grass coming up on the commons, and puffy white clouds in the sky that are friendlier than the thick gray fog we had all through January.

  The wind seems to remind Anna of the last time we spoke. She says, “I never returned your sweater.”

  “It’s alright,” I say. “I have three.”

  “That was kind of you to lend it to me,” Anna says. The unspoken part of her sentence is, Considering we’re barely friends anymore.

  My chest is aching, and I wonder how I can keep this conversation going without fucking it up somehow. I used to never worry about what I said to Anna. Now all I seem to do is make mistakes.

  “It was nothing,” I say.

  Wrong. That was wrong. It came out sounding like I didn’t care about giving her the sweater, like I would have done it for anyone. It took away the meaning of the gesture and made it seem like there was no emotion behind it. When the truth is that I was compelled to help her. I can’t stand watching Anna shivering, or cold, or unhappy in any way.

  Frowning slightly, Anna switches the subject.

  “The next challenge is coming up.”

  “Only a week away,” I say.

  “Are you excited?” Anna asks.

  She’s talking about the old Leo who loved competition more than anything. I still feel some of that anticipation. But I’m not nearly as cocky as I used to be. I’ve been at Kingmakers long enough now to understand how brilliant and ruthless and experienced the older students are, how much they’ve learned in the three years they were here when I was not.

  “I wish we knew what the challenges were going to be ahead of time,” I tell her. “It’s hard to prepare.”

  “You’ve always good at thinking on your feet,” Anna says.

  I hear a hint of her old confidence in me. It gives me a warm glow, it buoys me up better than anything else could do.

  Encouraged, I take a deep breath and I ask her, “Are you alright, Anna?”

  She throws a quick glance at me. “Of course,” she says. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I thought . . . I thought maybe something happened with you and Dean.”

  She’s silent, walking beside me. We’ve almost reached the intersection where we’ll part ways for our next class. It’s now or never.

  “Are you still dating?” I ask her.

  She turns to face me, her expression impossible to read. “Why do you ask?” she says.

  I feel like I’m traversing a thin layer of basalt over molten hot lava. How to navigate this? How to say the right things?

  “I . . . I just wanted to apologize. For trying to tell you who to date. It’s your choice, obviously, if you want to date Dean. I had no right to tell you not to.”

  Anna looks up at me, blue eyes like winter, cheeks like snow. No color in them at all.

  “So you’re happy for me,” she says tonelessly.

  No. No, I’m not fucking happy for her. I’ll never be happy as long as Anna is with someone else.

  But I don’t own her. I thought I did. I was like a kid with a toy—careless and stupid. Until I lost her.

  “Yes,” I lie. “I’m happy for you.”

  I don’t know if I’ve ever lied to Anna before. It doesn’t feel good coming out of my mouth. In fact, it feels fucking horrible.

  Anna regard
s me with a look I can’t interpret. Maybe it’s sorrow. Maybe it’s contempt.

  Without answering, she turns around and walks away.

  I know I’ve fucked up all over again. But I have no idea how to stop.

  23

  Dean

  Anna disappears from class for several days.

  She’s barely spoken to me since that night in the icehouse.

  I’m equal parts furious at her, and desperate to see her.

  After Combat class, I sneak into her dorm tower, planning to break into her room again. Before I even put a hand on her door, someone pulls it open from the inside, and I’m met with the petite but stubborn frame of Chay Wagner.

  “She’s sick, and she doesn’t want to talk to you,” Chay says.

  “Let me in,” I say, trying to push past her into the room.

  Chay blocks the way, keeping the door mostly closed so I can’t even peer around it to see if Anna’s actually in bed, or if she’s even inside at all.

  “Get out of the way,” I growl at her.

  “How about you get out of our dorm before I yell for Pippa,” Chay retorts. “You’re not allowed to be up here.”

  It’s probably an empty threat. Pippa Portnoy is likely in class herself at the moment, but I don’t particularly want to tangle with the famously vicious Senior, who wouldn’t hesitate to report me if I annoyed her—or arrange an even more inconvenient run-in with one of her many minions.

  “Anna!” I try to call around Chay’s shoulder.

  Chay just scowls at me and says, “You broke up. Get over it,” and slams the door in my face.

  Technically Anna and I can’t break up, because technically we were never boyfriend and girlfriend.

  But that’s irrelevant.

  I claimed Anna the moment I saw her.

  I thought she might run back to Leo as soon as she fled the icehouse. But she hasn’t done that—not yet at least.

  I have a few theories as to why.

  First, though she’d never admit it, I know that seeing Leo getting a BJ from Gemma Rossi cut Anna deep. The continued presence of Gemma, and her obvious interest in Leo, has been salt in the wound ever since. I’ve seen Anna carefully refusing to look at either of them when we’re all in class together. She avoids Gemma’s whole cavalcade of Spies—luckily for me, because that nosy redhead Shannon Kelly is the only person who could possibly throw suspicion on what happened that night. Gemma obviously has no idea, and it seems like Leo doesn’t either—he just thinks he was smashed and made a bad choice.

  Anna may still be hung up on Leo, but she hasn’t given up on her resentment from that party, either. My little scheme was more successful than I ever could have dreamed.

  I assume it wasn’t the first time Leo fucked around with some random girl, but as far as I know it was the first time it happened here, at Kingmakers, and apparently that means something to Anna. She must have thought things would be different once they went away to school together.

  Maybe she would have forgiven him if Leo begged and groveled. As far as I know, he never did that. He’s probably too proud, the fucking idiot. Or else he knew it wouldn’t work.

  Anna is intense. She loves hard and hates harder. That’s exactly what I like about her. I want her to take all that misplaced affection for Leo and turn it on me instead. For all the pleasure I’ve had with Anna—holding her hand, walking with her, talking to her, touching that silky skin and those full lips—I’ve barely sipped from that cup yet. I want to drink her down all the way to the bottom. I want all of her, every last bit. Not a scrap left for Leo.

  I made a mistake though, that night when I finally had her alone.

  I was desperate. I tried to do whatever it took to take her virginity. I thought that would connect her to me whether she wanted it or not.

  But it was a miscalculation.

  What I actually have to do is make her choose. I have to show her indisputably that I’m the better man. Smarter than Leo, stronger than him. I have to humiliate and destroy him. And then when she sees how pathetic he really is, then she’ll come back to me. Willingly and fully.

  For that reason, I look forward to the second challenge in the Quartum Bellum almost as much as Leo himself.

  He thinks it’s his chance for redemption.

  I know he’s about to fail, publicly and spectacularly.

  At least if I have anything to say about it.

  With the Sophomores ignominiously defeated in the first round, the Freshmen are facing off against the Juniors and the Seniors. They’re confident in their ability to crush us. But there’s a certain level of frisson in the air—the uneasy acknowledgment that this contest isn’t quite as lopsided as they’d hoped.

  Damari Ragusa tells me there’s an alliance between Calvin and Pippa. They’ve agreed to finish Leo off quickly, so they can face off against each other in the final round.

  The problem is that Calvin doesn’t really want to clear the way for Pippa to sail through to the finals. As arrogant as he is, he must know that Pippa is smarter than him, and she runs her crew of Seniors like a generalissimo. She’ll use Calvin to get rid of Leo, then slaughter him in a head-on match.

  I know all these things. I wonder if Leo knows them, too?

  I see him holed up with Ares and Hedeon, strategizing.

  Despite moping around about the loss of Anna, Leo is still the darling of most of the Freshmen. Through his friendships with Hedeon and Kenzo, he’s got the Londoners and the Yakuza working with him enthusiastically. The Paris Bratva seem to like him too, despite the fact that he abandoned Jules Turgenev in enemy territory. It’s only my crew who despise him almost as much as I do. But even they feel the allure of an unprecedented Freshman victory.

  “Do you think we could beat Pippa? If we made it through to the end?” Bram asks me one night, with pretend nonchalance.

  “No,” I say flatly. “And it doesn’t matter anyway. We barely made it through the first challenge. We’re not going to win the second.”

  The weather seems to agree with me. The morning of the second challenge is lightning-stricken with thundering rain. The fields around Kingmakers are soaked and muddy as we take our places at the three vertices of a triangular pitch marked out with bleeding spray paint.

  We’re all wearing pinnies to show our class colors—white for the Freshmen, green for the Juniors, and black for the Seniors.

  Squinting across the field, I see Calvin Caccia staring back at us, his hair plastered to his skull with rain, and his gray gym attire already soaked through and clinging to his bulky body.

  Pippa’s team looks even more intimidating. The Seniors on average are significantly bigger than us, and more muscular. Pippa stands in front of them, the smallest of the bunch but the most unsettling. With her dark, wind-blown hair, she looks like a witch commanding an army of giants.

  I watch Leo, trying to gauge his mood. He’s pacing back and forth, not in nervousness, but in prowling strides like an animal. He looks like his father. I don’t see anything of my aunt in him.

  I know what Sebastian Gallo looks like—he’s not careful to scrub his image online. Not like my father. You won’t find a picture of Adrian Yenin anywhere, not even in our own house. There used to be a wedding photo on our mantel—my mother trim and pretty and laughing in a short 50s style wedding dress, my father also smiling, his face turned toward her so that only the handsome side of him showed.

  I think he burned that photo after she left.

  You’d think he’d be afraid of fire, but he isn’t. Fascinated by it, more like. I’ve seen him burn plenty of photographs of himself from his younger years, letting the flames take both sides of his face.

  The rain pounds down on my head. My rifle is slung over my shoulder on a strap.

  Professor Howell has already explained the rules of the second challenge.

  Each team has a bomb. Not a real bomb—it’s a metal sphere tripped by a pull-tab and loaded with paint. Likewise, our rifles are only paint
ball guns. But not the usual type of pellets—these paintballs are the size of a chicken’s egg and they fucking hurt. They’re closer to the rubber bullets shot at rioters. A direct shot could easily fracture a rib, and will certainly raise a bruise bigger than your fist.

  Unlike in the first challenge, being shot doesn’t mean you’re out. You can keep going if you’re able. But a paintball to the wrong spot—to the balls, for instance—will knock you out of commission pretty quick.

  I’d fire one right in Leo’s eye if we weren’t wearing safety glasses. They’re not much use in the rain—I can barely see out of mine, and they’re not even fogged up from running yet.

  The goal is simple: get your bomb to one of the opposite corners and detonate it. First two teams to succeed are the winners.

  Leo is muttering orders to our team, laying out his strategy. It sounds like he intends to make a spearhead to take the bomb across to the Junior’s corner.

  “Why the Junior’s corner?” Hedeon says. “Shouldn’t we wait to see which side is easier?”

  “That will be the easier target,” Leo says with supreme confidence.

  Hedeon nods, going along with the obvious assumption that the Seniors will be harder to get past.

  I’m not so sure he’s right. Pippa Portnoy is aggressive as hell. Speed and intimidation are her favorite weapons. I think there’s a good chance she’ll try to rush us again, like she did in Capture the Flag.

  “Once we get through, our little battalion will split,” Leo explains. “I need the fastest runners to stay with me—Erik, Kenzo, and Thomas, you stay right up front. Hedeon and Silas, you flank us and run their defenders over if you have to. I want the best long-distance shooters to stay behind us—Chay, that’s you for sure. Why don’t you take Anna, Ares, and Zoe along, I know you all work well together.”

  Anna gives Leo a quick nod but doesn’t say anything. Her pale skin looks almost translucent in the rain and the botanical tattoo on her forearm stands out like a brand. She’s stubbornly refusing to meet my eye, though I know damn well she can feel me watching her.