by Rebel Hart
Copyright © 2020 by Rebel Hart
www.RebelHart.net
Photo by Regina Wamba
Cover by Robin Harper of Wicked by Design
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
1. Cherri
2. Cherri
3. Cherri
4. Deon
5. Deon
6. Cherri
7. Deon
8. Cherri
9. Deon
10. Cherri
11. Deon
12. Deon
13. Cherri
14. Deon
15. Cherri
16. Cherri
17. Deon
18. Deon
19. Cherri
20. Cherri
21. Deon
22. Cherri
23. Deon
24. Cherri
25. Deon
26. Deon
27. Cherri
28. Deon
29. Cherri
30. Deon
31. Cherri
32. Cherri
33. Deon
34. Cherri
35. Deon
36. Cherri
37. Cherri
About the Author
Also by Rebel Hart
EVIL KING
The Royal Court - Book One
Rebel Hart
1
Cherri
“Hurry up! Keep going! We just have to get back home, and we’ll be fine!”
My chest burned as the familiar voice screamed from behind me. We raced through shrubs and trees, the leaves and branches slicing against my skin as we fled. Getting a few cuts or scrapes was better than the alternative, so I pushed past the pressure in my legs and the shortening of my breath and just kept running.
My home wasn’t far from where we were, a mile or so maybe. The trip to the park had been a relaxing stroll. My heart raced then, too, but only because I was finally going on my first date with the guy I was crazy about. After years of just being friends, he finally packed up a picnic and invited me out to a park in the nice part of town, complete with candlelight and the sunset. We were finally moving forward, and then everything went wrong in the blink of an eye.
“Deon!” I shouted.
“Keep running, Cherri.” His hand found my back in the encroaching darkness. “Go straight from here, and when you get to Clearview Avenue, take a left and go around the long way. It’ll take more time, but hopefully, he won’t know to chase you that way.”
“Wait.” I came to a stop and turned around. Deon’s normally slicked-back red hair and budding facial hair looked disheveled, and his dark gray eyes were wild with panic. “What do you mean, chase me? Where are you going?”
He put his hands on my shoulders. I could hear the sounds of footsteps crunching in the leaves, getting closer with each step. “We’re gonna split up.”
My whole body prickled at the words. “What? No. I’m not leaving you.”
One of his hands combed into my blond hair to pull my head toward him. For a brief moment, I thought he might kiss me, but he just set his forehead on mine. “We have to. We’re too loud together. I’ll meet you at home, okay? In our spot, in twenty minutes. I promise.”
My throat burned, and my eyes started to water. Nevermind the fact that I was afraid. I didn’t want to leave Deon’s side. “Okay.”
“Go.” He pulled away from me. “Go!”
With one final look at Deon’s face, I turned my back to him and rushed off. His words rang through my mind as I followed the instructions he laid out for me. I got to Clearview Avenue, bursting through the manicured shrubs, and took a left. This way was one I’d taken many times on my way home from school, though it wasn’t the quickest route home. Clearview was a one-way with no turnoffs until nearly the highway when it bumped into a frontage road that led all the way down into the slums where I lived. When I was on the frontage road, I could no longer hear the steps of my pursuer and slowed my pace. It took nearly the entire mile-long stretch down the frontage road to catch my breath, and when I was finally turning into the run-down neighborhood that I lived in, I’d never been so happy to see the peeling paint and condensed homes.
My house was way at the end of the block. It was a small, green-slatted house with two bedrooms and one bathroom. I imagined my twin-sized bed inside and how nice it would be to just flop down onto it, but instead of going home, I walked to the tall oak tree on the abandoned lot halfway between Deon’s house and mine and slid down to sit beneath it. The sun, which was meant to be the backdrop for my date, was nearly set, and I sat in silence while it crawled closer and closer to the horizon, eventually dipping behind it an hour or so later.
Deon never arrived, and the longer I sat beneath the tree—our tree—the less and less of the neighborhood I was able to make out. My green house blotted out from existence, turning into a shadow first, then just disappearing as if someone had taken a pair of scissors and cut it out of the picture. The old cars parked along the street started to disappear, darkening to voids, then just falling out of view. I sat up straight, and my stomach twisted into knots as I watched the houses, one by one, fade away. People who’d still been sitting on their stoops, watching the night sky and chatting with their neighbors, turned to dust before my eyes and blew off in a wind I couldn’t feel. Darkness surrounded me, an endless sea of nothingness, and I was alone apart from our tree.
“Deon?” I called out, but there was no response. “Deon?”
I stood up, and the second I pulled away from the tree, it, too, disappeared into the darkness, and I was left standing alone with nothing and no one.
“Deon!”
“Cherri!”
I sat straight up in my bed. I was shaking, and for a second, I was afraid I’d been taken to an unfamiliar place. I wasn’t in my ratty, old twin bed, but in a magnificent four-poster queen with a comfortable white down blanket draped over me. The sun spilled in through ceiling-to-floor windows with fresh white paint, and regal purple curtains were tied to either side of the windows. I wasn’t in the room I was used to.
“Cherri.” I turned my attention to the voice that called my name, and my heart started to calm. Looking back at me, through a reflection of my own crystal blue eyes, was my younger brother, Gus. His short, scraggly blond hair was still in bed-head mode, but his expression was panicked, and his arms were clenched tightly onto my arm. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
Finally, my brain started to tether to reality. It’d been nearly four years since I slept in that old twin bed, since that tiny, green house had been our home—since I’d last seen Deon.
“Hey, bud,” I greeted Gus finally, seeming to calm his fear a little. “Sorry. Did I wake you up?”
“I came to get you for breakfast, but you were screaming.” He hiked his feeble, nine-year-old body up onto my bed and sat cross-legged in front of me. “Who’s Deon?”
Gus and I used to share a room back in our old home. A path of fortune for my dad at work had taken us out of the slums and up to the ritzy part of town, to a six-bedroom, eight-bathroom home where we slept in different rooms. Thankfully, those old days of humility kept us close, even when we were no longer struggling for money.
I curled my arms around Gus and pulled him over to me. He repositioned so that he was sitting in my lap and leaned backward, and I gently pet
his head. “He’s an old friend of mine.”
“I don’t remember him,” Gus replied.
“Yeah, you were still pretty young. I knew him from before we moved.”
“Did you stop being friends after we moved here, like what happened with Tia?” Gus asked.
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from chuckling at Gus’s comparison. There was a young girl in our old neighborhood that Gus liked to run around after, but she didn’t like him much. Gus could be excitable, and Tia was very subdued. When we moved, Tia must have decided she was finally free of the little boy who would run around after her, and in order to keep him from being too sad about it, my parents had to tell him that he couldn’t be friends with her anymore because we moved.
“Something like that,” I replied.
The truth was, I never saw Deon after that day. I thought maybe he’d gotten caught or something, but when I went back to visit with his mom, she confirmed that Deon was fine, but he didn’t want to see me. For everything we’d been through and for the fact that he’d been my first crush, maybe even my first love, it was heartbreaking that he’d suddenly stop talking to me.
Gus tapped mindlessly at my fingertips. “Do you miss him?”
When tears started to rise to my eyes, I was actually a little shocked. It’d been over four years since I saw Deon last, and it’s been almost as long since I’d even thought about him. My mom told me to write it off, that sometimes the people in our lives were more important to us than we were to them, but I couldn’t get him out of my heart so quickly. Even though it was a bad idea, I kept an eye out for him in the neighborhood. I even asked some of the other kids about him, but I got nothing in return. Deon was gone, never to be seen again, at least by me.
“No,” I lied to Gus. “He didn’t want to be friends anymore.”
Gus flipped around and looked into my eyes with his now wild and wide eyes. “How could someone not want to be friends with you? You have all the cool kids as friends.”
“That’s true,” I said. Gus looked truly bewildered, and it made me smile. “Sometimes, people just don’t want to be friends. It’s part of growing up.”
Gus poked out his bottom lip. “I don’t wanna grow up then.”
“You and me both, kid.” I tapped his arm. “Come on, let’s go eat before Mom flips.”
There was a dull thud as Gus hopped out of my bed and scuttled from the room. I took a few moments after he was gone to stretch and try to shake my sudden memories of Deon and the last day I saw him from my mind. No good came from considering the past, I’d learned, and I had more than one thing to focus my attention on, so I packed my Deon memories into a mental box, used a little too much duct tape to seal it closed, and then stuck it up on a high, out-of-reach shelf, never to be pulled down again.
The covers around me tried to suck me in the more I tried to get out of them, but I fought against their pull and slid out. My PJs were enough to get me through the morning, so after unplugging my cell phone from its charger on the bedside table next to my bed, I walked out of my bedroom. All of the bedrooms were on the third floor of the house, so I made my way over to the staircase and down to the second floor, where my parents’ offices and Gus’s and my playroom was situated, then continued down to the first floor, where the living room, kitchen, and other such family meeting spaces were located.
The dream with Deon hadn’t just brought back my memories of him. It also brought back memories of the conditions we used to live in. Our old home had two floors, with two bedrooms and a single bathroom on the top floor, and a small, open living room and kitchen on the main floor. It wasn’t the extravagant home we lived in now, but I liked how contained everything was. Unlike the average teenage girl, I actually enjoyed sharing a room with Gus, and what our old home lacked in expense, we made up for in being a tight-knit family.
Then my dad got his promotion. It was relatively out of the blue, shocking even him when the president of the company claimed that he’d come across some of my dad’s work and wanted to promote him. My dad went from a cubicle to an office overlooking downtown in less than a week, and a few months after that, we were packing up and moving out to upscale Postings, Maine, where all the richest people in our city lived.
“Good morning, sweet girl,” my mom greeted when I padded into the kitchen.
“Good morning.” I relented to her forehead kiss as I walked past, then slid into the kitchen nook next to Gus, who was already well into a plate full of delicious-looking breakfast foods.
My mom pointed at a collection of pans situated on the six-burner stovetop. “We’ve got pancakes, bacon, eggs, sausage, hash browns, toast, and a fresh fruit bowl. What would you like?”
“Doing it up big, huh?” I joked.
“Well, there’s only a week left before you kids are back off to school and doing quick grabs on your way out of the door. And as for you, Miss Senior, this is my last summer doting on you, so just take it.”
“If it makes you feel better, I will be coming home from college for your breakfast a lot, so you won’t miss it as much.”
“Ha, ha,” my mom replied flatly.
“Eggs, sausage, hash browns, and fruit, please,” I said.
My mom nodded and went to work, piling the things onto a plate. “Coffee?”
Gus scoffed. “Gross.”
I nudged his head before saying, “Yes, please.”
My mom finished the plate and then poured a cup of coffee and set them both in front of me. She stepped away for a second and then came back with a fork, napkin, and the creamer for the coffee. “Bon appetit.”
“Thanks, Mama.”
She smiled. “You’re welcome, baby.” She turned, and her grin got a little bigger. “Hey. You look great.”
I looked over my shoulder and saw my dad walking into the kitchen. He did look nice, done up in a fresh suit. “Yeah? Thanks!”
He wrapped an arm around my mom’s waist and pulled her into a kiss. The love they had was the most beautiful I’d ever seen. I’d always dreamed of being in love like they were, but I had failed miserably in that department.
My dad turned and greeted me, setting one of his hands on my head. “Hey, squirt. Last week of your last summer before graduating. How’s it feel?”
“Weird,” I said, “but exciting.”
He grinned at me. “It’s very exciting. Between your grades and The Royal Court, you’re gonna have your pick of the colleges.”
“That’s what I hear,” I grumbled.
“Hey, bud,” my dad said, turning his attention to Gus. “Slow down, or you’re gonna choke.”
“It’s really good,” Gus replied with his mouth full of food.
My dad laughed. “Well, I’d better get some before you eat it all.”
Both of my parents got plates of their own and joined Gus and me at the table. We discussed a few different topics, how things were going for my dad at work, my mom’s progress on her current writing projects, how Gus’s summer assignment was coming along. Mostly, I listened and was happy for my family’s ability to stay the kind of close that lack of wealth necessitated, even after transitioning into a wealthy situation. When my phone eventually rang, causing me to get up and leave the table, I was actually a little sad, but I got up anyway, dropped my plate in the sink, walked out to our house’s backyard, and sat by the pool to answer my phone.
I lifted the phone in front of my face since it was a video call and answered it.
Avery, my best friend, appeared on the screen. She must have also been outside where she was because her beautiful light cocoa skin was glowing in the sunlight, and she had her curly black hair up in a bun on top of her head.
“Ugh, I will never stop being irritated at how you can just wake up stunning,” she said.
I laughed. “You’re one to talk.”
Avery tilted her head. “You okay? You seem off.”
I scooted up to the edge of the pool and dipped my feet in the water. “Yeah. I just had a cra
zy dream.”
“Oh, really? What about?”
Avery was my best friend and had been for the past four years. She was the only person I’d gotten as close with as I used to be with Deon, and I’d told her nearly everything about me. I had, however, kept everything about Deon to myself. Part of me didn’t want to succumb to how embarrassed I was that I’d been ghosted so suddenly.
“Just my life before my dad got promoted and I met you guys.” The warm water rippled as I swished it around.
Avery dramatically threw a hand to her chest. “A life before you met me? How horrible.”
“Shut up,” I giggled.
On the other end of the phone, the image started to blur and twist a little bit. I thought maybe Avery dropped her phone or something, but when the image became clear again, it was no longer Avery’s face on the screen, but a paler-skinned man with a clean goatee and long, light brown hair that dropped past his shoulders. His chocolate eyes brimmed with happiness, and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling widely.
“Hey, Cherri,” he greeted.
“Hi, Ali.” I raised an eyebrow. “Pretty early for you to be at Avery’s.”
Alistair, one of the guys in our group of friends, grinned from ear to ear. “Well, you know I don’t travel in the daytime.”
I snickered as Avery’s hand came flying into the frame and smacked against Alistair’s head. “Stop it. Give me that,” Avery demanded, but Alistair leaned away from Avery, keeping the phone secured in his hand. “Ali!”
