Chapter Thirty-One
Rhys
We exit the main building and walk out into the warm June day, the various couples holding hands as we amble out onto the perfectly trimmed grass.
Turning back towards the building, Rogue wraps an arm around Bellamy’s shoulders and looks at his son.
“What did you think of that, Rhodes?”
The boy in question shrugs, his face an unreadable mask.
“It fucking bored me,” he answers dispassionately.
Bellamy frowns. “Language!”
Rhodes turns on his heels and walks away, taking a path that we all know will lead him to a fork in the road between the pond and forest.
I watch him go, realizing that the fourteen-year-old is more man than boy these days. He’s already well over six feet tall, with a full head of chestnut brown hair and moody dark green eyes. He looks too much like his father for his own good.
I need to keep thinking about him as a boy, because if I let myself consider him a man, I’ll want to rip his throat from his neck for what he’s done to my daughter. It’s not lost on anyone here that she’s conspicuously absent from this reunion and that Rhodes is the sole reason for it.
Nera turns towards her daughter. “What about you? Any thoughts about the next four years of your life?”
Suki rolls her eyes at her mother. “Whatever.”
With an insolent flick of her hair, she follows after Rhodes.
I remember a time when Suki was gregarious, funny, and kind, but that was before.
Almost overnight, she changed.
These days she’s nearly unrecognizable from the little girl I watched grow up. She wraps herself in emotions ranging from indifference to downright spitefulness, her razor sharp tongue aimed at those closest to her, a pale imitation of the girl I used to know.
Her parents have tried intervening to get to the root of what’s wrong, but the results have backfired. Once the apple of her father’s eye and her mother’s cherished middle daughter, she’s now frosty with them on the best of days.
And I know it hurts them.
Astra watches her ex-best friend walk away with an expression that hovers between sadness and longing. She was another casualty in Suki’s overnight volte-face. To my knowledge, there was never an official falling out between them; one day, Suki just started giving her the cold shoulder.
Phoenix puts a protective hand on his daughter’s shoulder.
“You okay, star?”
She gives him a sweet smile, as constant in her personality as her friends’ have changed.
“Yes, Daddy. I thought the orientation was very helpful.”
Astra is being kind where the other kids weren’t. Her mother’s family has been coming to RCA almost since the day it was founded. She needs the orientation about as much as I need a Football for Dummies book.
It’s not my first time back at Royal Crown Academy, but it’s always a weird experience. Walking the grounds and the halls as a parent who has hopes and ambitions for his daughters comes with a sort of out of body experience when those halls are the very same I used to wreak havoc in.
Everywhere I turn, I have flashes of memories of my time here.
The good, the bad, the earth-shattering, like the closet we just walked past on our way out, the very same one where I touched Thayer for the same time. I’d looked down at my wife and the pretty pink flush of her cheeks had told me she’d been thinking the very same dirty thoughts that I was.
We’d definitely have to make time for a little pit stop back into the closet before we left.
Thankfully, neither one of our daughters is here, otherwise they’d be mortified. Hayes, like Cato and Kiza, has already been an RCA student for two years so we didn’t bring her along.
And Ivy…
Enrolling her at RCA was out of the question. Like the Royals, we’d move away from London after her kidnapping to give her a much-needed fresh start. I’d signed a contract with Real Madrid and we’d relocated to Spain.
Progressively, Ivy had been coaxed out of the dark hole in which she’d buried herself after that ordeal. She was better now, but not completely. There was still something not quite right, something her mum and I couldn’t quite put our finger on, almost like a tiny sliver of her was still missing.
She was prone to bouts of intense quietude that were unlike her, times where her gaze strayed off and she became unreachable.
I’d have given my entire fortune to know what she thought about in those moments, if she was mentally torturing herself like I imagined she might be.
As her dad, I wanted to take all of her pain away, and the obvious place to start seemed to be getting rid of Rhodes.
If I ever got him alone, I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t kill him, his father be damned.
In the meantime, we’d decided to enroll Ivy in a local secondary school in Madrid to keep them apart, so she wasn’t here either.
“Can you guys believe Thornton’s still here?” Phoenix drawls.
Tristan grumbles. “Fuck no. Every time he sees Nera and I together, he looks on the verge of having an aneurysm though, so might not be too much longer,” he adds with a hopeful note in his voice.
“Not in front of the children,” Nera chides under her breath, tipping her head at Juno and Hana who are hanging out just off to the side of us.
“That’s it for the orientations, right?” Six asks. “What should we do now?”
Rogue turns towards his wife with a shamelessly racy smile on his face. “Bell and I are going to go check out the library.”
She flushes and Riot looks at him with a disgusted expression on his face. “Dad, please never look at Mum the way you just did in front of us again. I know we’re rich, but there’s no amount of money in the world that’ll cover my therapy bill.”
“Or mine,” River adds crisply.
“What’s in the library, Daddy?” Rowan asks.
“Your mum and I used to spend a lot of time there,” he grins down at Bellamy who swats playfully at him. She still bears a faint scar on her forehead from the blows she suffered at Gingrich’s hand. “I want to see if there’s still the fist-shaped dent in one of the back shelves.”
River scrunches his brow. “Why would there be?”
“I punched a hole in it after your mother threatened to move on with another man.”
“Mum!”
“Hey, context! I was entitled to. Your father had pretended to cheat on me at the time.”
Rowan turns on her father, aghast. “Dad!”
Rogue’s face darkens. “I was an idiot,” he mutters, wrapping an arm around Bellamy’s shoulder and pulling her close. “I learned the consequences of my actions that day. Let’s go, sweetheart,” he adds, moving back towards the main building.
“Hey, what about us?” Riot asks.
“Entertain yourselves for a bit, darling,” Bellamy answers. “We’ll be back in ten–”
“Twenty,” Rogue interjects.
“ Twenty minutes.”
Riot makes a disgusted sound and turns towards his best friend. “Come on, Juno, let’s go check out the pond.” He stalks off, the rest of the children following dutifully behind him.
“Be careful!” Six calls after them.
Tristan grabs Nera’s hand. “Alone at last. We’ve got unfinished business with the forest, don’t we, baby?”
He drags her away without a backwards glance.
Thayer glances up at me with a suggestive look on her face. I have her in my arms before she’s even uttered a word.
“Soccer pitch?” she asks, wagging her eyebrows.
“Football,” I correct in a throaty whisper, before claiming her lips with mine. “But, fuck yes.”
I hear Six turn towards Phoenix. “And you? Where do you want to go?”
A contented rumble rolls up his chest as his hands find her waist. “Wherever you want. I’ve only ever wanted to be wherever you are.”
As the four of us walk off in different directions, I can’t help but think about the closing of one door and the opening of another. All of our children, together, starting where it all began for us, about to make their mark on the very same world we inhabited for years.
A new generation begins.
***