EVIL VILLAIN: A Dark High School Elite Romance (The Royal Court Book 3)

by Rebel Hart

  He walked to the end of the booths and sat down in front of me, then a prison guard stepped forward and unlocked the handcuffs around his thick wrists. He reached up and grabbed the phone hanging on his side of the booth, and I did the same.

  “Cherri, right?” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Are you Venom?”

  A huge smile crossed his face, unexpectedly kind. “Yeah. Call me Garrett.”

  “Okay,” I replied. “Hi, Garrett.”

  “Now, you are one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen,” he said. “My kid’s got good taste.”

  Deon had mentioned he thought of Venom like a dad. It was sweet to see that Venom thought of Deon the same. I remembered Anisa and Cobalt loving Nathan like parents, and I was happy to see that Deon had found something similar in Venom. “Thank you.”

  “Now, Cherri, I’m not sure if you know this, but anything you and I say into these phones can be replayed and listened to by anyone.” His eyes narrowed at me. “Anyone.”

  I didn’t have to guess what he was trying to say. Connor had contacts everywhere, and if we said anything about or pointing towards Deon, he could find out. “I understand.”

  “So. What can I do for you?” he asked. “I assume you’re on a bit of a hunt.”

  “I am,” I said. “Am I your first visitor?”

  Venom’s smile grew. “Smart too. I love it. No, you’re not. Someone else came and saw me about, oh, three months ago now. Needed a lawyer, so I put them in contact with my wife, Felicity.”

  “Felicity?” I said. “Williams?”

  “Yep,” he replied. “I’m sure she gave them some information and I’m sure she can do the same for you. I’ll give you her address. You shouldn’t attempt to call her. Prying ears, you know.”

  “Right,” I said.

  He looked over his shoulder at the prison guard standing right behind him and flicked his head, and the guard walked away. He said Felicity’s address into the phone while looking away from me, towards the wall, then he turned back and smiled at me. “You won’t forget it will you?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s the most important thing.”

  He nodded. “Felicity will get you straight. Don’t you worry.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  “No. Thank you. You’re a good woman, just like my woman. I’m glad my kid has you. Take care of him for me.”

  “I will, I promise,” I said. “We’ll be back.”

  Venom blinked a couple of times and then nodded. “Well now, that makes me incredibly happy.”

  He nodded towards those doors. “You don’t have to stay the whole time. Go. Go find out what you need to know.”

  “Thank you, Garrett.”

  “Nice to meet you, Cherri,” he replied, then he hung up the phone and a prison guard was behind him within seconds to start locking up his wrists again.

  I walked over to the door and stood next to it, and the officer on our side looked at me. “You ready? Can’t come back ’til next hours.”

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  She nodded, then she opened the door, did a scan of the room, nodded at one of the other officers on the visitor’s side, and led the way out. She brought me back down the hallway, back through the metal detector, and returned me to the room where Nikita and Brayden were sitting waiting. They noticed as soon as I walked in the room and stood up to come over to me.

  “Well?” Nikita said. “That was fast. Did you talk to him?”

  “Yeah. We couldn’t say much because…” Then I looked around. “Let’s actually get out of here first.” We went back outside and climbed into Nikita’s car, me in the front passenger’s seat, and Brayden in the back. “He gave me an address.”

  “Whoa!” Nikita said. “To where Deon is?”

  I shook my head. “No. He just said it was his wife and she should be able to give me the same information she gave Deon. Hopefully she’ll know where he’s staying though.”

  Nikita handed me her phone. “Enter the address. Let’s go.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Just… go? What about the others?”

  “Do you wanna go back first?” Brayden said.

  I really didn’t. This lead could bring me to Deon, potentially within the day still. I wanted to be fair to my friends who’d stuck with me through everything, but I also wanted to get to Deon as soon as possible.

  “No. I don’t,” I said.

  “Then let’s go find him,” Brayden said. “We’ll ask for forgiveness later.”

  I looked at Nikita, who had the same look of determination, and then I smiled. “Thanks guys.” I grabbed Nikita’s phone. “Let’s go.”

  The address Venom had given to me was about two hours from the prison, but that didn’t seem to shake Nikita or Brayden’s confidence at all. We swung by a gas station for a horrible lunch of gas station snacks and sodas, then set out on the drive. We listened to music and talked the entire way, and I was surprised how comfortable it felt, like I’d been friends with them forever. Once again, I was struck by how much I missed being so caught up in my own deal both before I left The Royal Court, and during my crazy rebellious phase. I was an incredibly lucky woman for the people fate had intertwined with my life, or at least the ones Connor had. He was a villain in every sense of the word, but I wouldn’t have Deon or my friends if it weren’t for him.

  Maybe I’d thank him before punching him in the face.

  Eventually, we got to Ushuru, Maine, a Japanese-inspired town near the coast. The address we’d gotten from Venom led us to a large and beautiful home. Nikita parked her car in front of the house and we got out, and not a moment passed before four people jumped out and had guns pointed at our faces.

  I held up my hands. “Shit. Was it a trap?”

  “Who are you?” One woman demanded.

  “We’re here to see Felicity. Garrett sent us,” I said.

  The gunmen exchanged nervous glances, then pulled their guns down. The woman stepped forward and motioned us towards the door. She knocked for us, and a dog started barking on the other side. After a few seconds, the door opened, and a gorgeous woman with long, braided brown hair and cocoa skin answered the door.

  She looked me up and down and then a bright smile found her face. “Oh my god. You’re Cherri.”

  My eyes widened. “Yeah. How do you know that?”

  She was damn near exploding with joy. “Come in.” Nikita, Brayden and I shuffled inside, and then the woman grabbed my hand. “I’m Felicity. Come with me. You two, we’ll talk when I get back. Make yourselves comfortable in the living room.” Brayden and Nikita didn’t even get a chance to answer before Felicity dragged me towards the stairs and pulled me up. “This is insane,” she said. “We’ll discuss the details later.”

  “Er, no… I’d really like to talk right away. If we could,” I replied.

  She didn’t respond, but instead stopped in front of a door. Side-glancing me, she gave me a huge smile and said, “I’ve been waiting for this moment.” She opened the door and my heart dropped straight from my chest, through my stomach, and into the floor.

  Passed out in the bed, shaggier than I remembered, was Deon.

  Tears filled my eyes as I carefully walked into the room. “I wouldn’t expect him to wake up. I gave him a little scare yesterday and he was up late.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I need the sleep too.”

  Felicity put a hand on my back. “Like I said, we’ll talk later. I’ll get details from your friends.” She left me then, leaving the room and closing the door behind her.

  I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing down my cheeks as I climbed into the bed next to Deon. He was on his back, so I was able to lay on my stomach and snuggle as close to him as I could get. So many questions ran through my brain, but I didn’t care about the answers to any of them for the time being.

  For now, I was back in Deon’s arms, and with that emotion overwhelming me, I quickly drifted off to sleep
.

  23

  Deon

  The fact that I could see the sun shining in through the window meant that I’d slept straight through the afternoon and into the morning. I could smell breakfast being prepared and knew that Felicity was already working on something delicious to start the day with, but for some reason, I just didn’t want to get out of bed. I was normally pretty warm under the down blanket that Felicity dressed my bed with, but there was something particularly warm and enrapturing about it that morning. If I didn’t get up right away, Felicity would just throw my breakfast in the microwave to warm up when I finally did.

  I was pulling my first ever “five more minutes!” card.

  Gripping the blanket, I attempted to roll over, and that was the first time I felt a weight settled next to me. At first, I thought it was Concrete, but then I looked down. What I saw made me think I was on some sort of psychedelic drug.

  “Cherri?” I said quietly.

  There was a woman laying across my chest, snoozing away quietly. Her hair was different from Cherri’s, short cut, with brown hair at the roots and fading to blond at the tips, but some of the naturally blond roots were starting to show right at the top of her head. For a moment, I tried to convince myself it wasn’t her. She looked slightly more rugged than the Cherri I remembered, but then I looked at her face. Those cheeks, those lips.

  It was definitely my Cherri.

  The dream I’d had with Nathan and Cherri in it crossed my mind, and I quickly realized the same was true here. Maybe my mind was forming some new image of Cherri to account for how much time had passed since I’d last seen her. I had dreams like that all the time in prison. Because it was impossible that Cherri was actually laying in bed with me, it was easy to draw the next natural conclusion.

  I was dreaming.

  My other dream felt so real too, and I actually had a chance to touch and kiss her then, and I didn’t. I wouldn’t miss my opportunity the second time around. If the only way I got to enjoy Cherri was in my dreams, then enjoy her I would.

  Twisting my arm around to comb into her hair, I was surprised by the silken feeling of the strands between my fingertips. My brain was going the distance with the dream. I curled her head towards me and ducked my head down so I could kiss her. Her lips were sweet and warm and I wrapped my other arm around her waist to pull her even closer. At first, she was still asleep in my arms, but then she blinked and groaned and slowly came to. Her pristine blue eyes opened and met mine, and my heart slammed in my chest.

  “I love you,” I said.

  Tears carried to her eyes. “I love you, too.”

  Her lips were back on mine a moment later. She pressed her body flush against mine and laced her arms behind my head and into my hair. The way she lightly tugged at my hair had the animal in me trying to break through to the surface. My tongue left my lips in search of hers, and she opened her mouth to allow me entry. It all felt so intensely real. I ran my hands along the bend of her waist and the arch in her back. I could only pray that my dream would allow me enough time to refamiliarize myself with every inch of her.

  Like a flip had been switched within us, we turned the dial up on the fire. Cherri’s hands slipped from around my neck and down under my shirt to drag along my skin. The coolness of her fingertips somehow burned, and I hoped they would leave marks. She pushed until my shirt was bunched around my neck and I had no choice but to break away from her to take it off. Her eyes flashed at the sight of me, and I smiled. Having a woman like Cherri look at you like Cherri looked at me could give a man a dangerous amount of confidence.

  I pushed against her to pin her back against the bed and hovered over her. She was wearing a dark blue t-shirt that clung to her form, and as sexy as the simple look was, I wanted it off. I grabbed the hem and dragged it upwards until I was able to toss it off of her. My hands quickly traveled then to the front clasp of her bra and undid it. Her perfect, round breasts came free, and I dipped in to take a taste. Her body was hot and her peach skin was flushed red.

  A body blusher—one of the sexiest things about Cherri.

  “Deon,” she squeaked in my ear as I sucked one of her pert nipples, and when I switched to the other she arched her back upwards. Her hands dropped between us and grabbed at my pants. “I need you, baby.”

  I hugged my arms around her back and held her tight. “I don’t want to rush,” I said.

  “I’ve missed you,” she complained. “Please.”

  But I knew how dreams worked. All I had was until just before the end. The sooner I got inside her, the closer I got to exploding, the quicker I approached the end of my dream. Just before I came, I’d wake up and Cherri would be ripped from my arms again. I couldn’t handle it. I had to hand onto her for as long as I could.

  To my surprise, tears filled my eyes and I simply set my head on her chest. “I can’t. I don’t want this to end.”

  “End?” Cherri questioned. “Why would it end?”

  “I’ll wake up,” I admitted. “I have to make it last.”

  “Deon,” Cherri said in a serious voice. “Look at me.”

  Part of me was too embarrassed to listen. Not because I was crying, but because it was all just a manifestation of my imagination anyway. Was I going to cry to myself and beg myself not to go? Cherri was back in Postings somewhere. I was getting high off a placebo.

  But I twisted my head back anyway, placing my chin on her chest and looking up into her eyes. She put her hands on my face and rubbed my cheeks gently. “Baby, I’m real. I’m here. This isn’t a dream.”

  I smiled. “I wish that were true.”

  She pulled, bringing my face up to hers and pressed our lips together again. Her mouth caressed mine, taking a passionate kiss, at the end of which she bit down on my bottom lip. It stung, and I grunted.

  But it stung.

  I leaned back a little bit, setting my fingers to my lip to feel the spot, and there was a small bump forming there. Cherri put each of her hands on my arms, and pinched spots that hurt as well.

  They hurt.

  I wasn’t dreaming. Cherri was lying beneath me, looking at me with the eyes I’d longed to look into every single day. “Cherri?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  It shifted me sideways, out of my own body. Anything in me that wasn’t focused on Cherri had to take a back seat. I wrapped my arms around her and lifted her off the bed. There was an armchair in the corner of the room, and I backed up until I was sitting in it. The sun glinted in through the window and bounced off her perfect skin, giving her an angelic glow. She undid the button of her shorts as I slid my lips along the curve of her neck. It only took a little bit of shifting to slide our pants off, and then I was standing at attention between Cherri’s legs.

  Cherri grabbed me and stroked me a little. “So is it okay to jump ahead a little?” she asked with a coy smile. “We’ve got all the time we need to double back.”

  “Fuck yes,” I said.

  That was all the go-ahead Cherri needed. She lifted off of me just enough to brace me at her entrance and then slowly started to lower herself onto me. It was so much hotter than I remembered, and I had to grip her hips to stop her.

  “What?” Cherri said.

  “I forgot how fucking good it feels,” I replied. It had been close to nine months since I saw and got to be with Cherri last, and being on the run didn’t afford a ton of time for helping myself out. Even since I settled down at Felicity’s, we spent most of our time together, and I had a tendency to pass out at the end of the day. “I’m not gonna last long this go round.”

  “That’s okay,” Cherri said, setting her hands on my face and kissing me. “Like I said, we have plenty of time.”

  With that assurance, I released Cherri’s hips and she continued to fall. She sucked me in, enticingly slow, reminding me of exactly what I’d missed in the past eight months. The way we fit together, as cheesy as it sounded, felt like it was fated, and when she was finally fully sitting in my lap,
we both threw our heads back, breathing in the ecstasy of the moment. The bed couldn’t have offered this forced closeness, and as I wrapped my arms behind her back and pulled her snug to me, I pushed even past what the chair was demanding to get closer.

  Her lips found mine again and we stayed latched that way while she started to raise and lower herself in a hypnotic rhythm. Each time she pulled me all the way in, she squeezed on me, and a grunt huffed out of me. She moaned into my mouth and the vibration of it sent a wave of chills down my spine.

  “I love you,” I said to her again, looking up into her sparkling eyes.

  There were tears in them. “I love you too. I missed you so much.”

  I squeezed her even closer. “I missed you too.”

  As if intended to make me lose the little bit of control I had, Cherri sat all the way down and then started to rock her hips back and forth. I dragged along every part of her inside, pulling even sexier noises out of her.

  “Shh,” I said. “We’ll be heard.”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  Finally, I had no choice but to dig my fingers into the milky flesh of her ass and hang on as she dragged me closer and closer to the edge. The gentle rocking got faster, the friction got more intense, and the steam whistle inside me started a low hum. Cherri alternated between rocking and moving up and down, and eventually that whistle started to blow.

  “Shit, Cherri,” I growled.

  The beautiful woman on top of me exploded, her moisture drenching me in a firestorm of pleasure. She clenched down on me and shuddered, and the power of it finally pulled a finish out of me. The noise that came out of me was something between a moan and a roar, and as Cherri pushed on, continuing to pleasure herself on top of me, my entire lower half started to tingle.