He turns with a curious expression on his face. “Huh?”
“Nero’s daughter. She’s a sophomore in The Order.”
He nods. “Yeah… Yeah, I know her.”
My molars grind as I think about Yelena leaving those fucking panties for him.
He flashes me a grin that makes my right hand close into a fist.
“Sniffing around my sloppy seconds, Drakos?”
Red mist begins to cloud my eyes.
“Just messing with you, bro,” he chuckles. “I never fucked her, if that’s what you’re asking. But, you know…” He grins. “We hooked up.”
The mist turns purecrimson.
“And she was okay, I guess,” he shrugs. “But then she gotclingy, you know?”
I don’t say anything. I don’t trust myself to speak right now.
After he finally leaves, I force myself to walk back into the common room before I'm tempted to follow him into the parking lot and slam his head in his car door until it closes.
Ronan and Akira have taken off—I’m guessing to the gym, which is their usual deal on a Sunday night. But Selene and Lochlan are still sprawled on the couches. Selene is giving Lochlan shit for watching “TikTok hoe thirst traps”, and Lochlan has just tossedsomething back about someone called Velvet Villain or whatever being a Knightsblood student.
I have no idea what they’re talking about—and right now, I don’t care.
They both look up when I clear my throat. I nod my chin at Lochlan.
“Wanna go for a drive?”
He shrugs casually enough, but I don’t miss the glint in his eye.
“Why not.”
“Thanks for the invite, assholes,” Selene says dryly.
“Sorry,” I grin. “Just, you know…guy stuff.”
She rolls her eyes. “Men will literally drive around in silence for hours instead of going to therapy, won’t they?”
Twenty minutes later, my Range Rover rumbles to a stop at the end of an overgrown, unassuming dirt road in the woods a few miles from campus.
“I checked with Leo earlier today,” my cousin growls as I park in front of the dilapidated old cabin. “Our guests haven’t said shit yet.”
The Kildare and Drakos families are separate entities each with their own business and goals. But the fact that the families inter-married—my mom is a Kildare and Lochlan’s is a Drakos—means we’re also very closely allied.
When it comes to someone potentially putting up twenty fucking stories that will loom over our great-grandmother Dimitra's—aka Ya-ya’s—house?
Consider us a united,lethal, front.
Leonidas, nephew to Ezio Adamos who's run the Adamos family since before my parents met, is watching sports highlights on tv with two of his guys when we walk in.
“Shit, boys,” he grins, taking a last drag of his cigarette and stamping it out before he stands. He walks over to shake first my hand and then Lochlan’s. “If I'd known you were stopping by, I’d have cleaned the place up.”
I’d normally smirk at Leo’s dumb jokes—this one being a nod to the fact that the cabin basically looks like it’s been abandoned for the last three decades—but right now, there’s too much venom boiling under the surface. Too much trapped poison. Too much throbbing tightness in my golden mask.
“How are our guests?”