Chapter 6 #2
Unfortunately, he didn’t really leave.
Kyle’s family might be mafia, but it became obvious halfway through his senior year that his entire impetus for coming to Knightsblood wasn’t to graduate into the mafia world.
It was to source clients.
Over this past summer, Kyle opened Santoro Equities, a fucking hedge fund. And all his new clients are either recent Knightsblood graduates or their families.
I have to say, that rubs me the wrong way. You come to Knightsblood for the connections and potential future alliances, not to get people to invest in your crypto fund. It feels…slimy.
Even more obnoxiously, although the main office is in Manhattan, Kyle opened a satellite one right here in Hawthorne Hollow. So he’s right down the fucking street.
Apparently, that means he's still showing up uninvited to parties at his alma mater, and walking around Kingsward Hall like he owns the place, and acting like he’s the president of Para Bellum. I don’t think I have to elaborate on exactly how much that last one especially pisses me the fuck off.
“So Tsarenko wormed his way into the party?” Kyle grunts.
He’s not the only one, I resist saying.
Kyle scowls. “And was getting handsy with you in the hot tub, Selene?”
She shakes her head. “No. Honestly, he’s a pretty funny—”
“He’s a degenerate, Selene,” Kyle says abruptly. “And just so you know, he fucks dudes.”
Selene looks completely unfazed. “He’s bi. That’s…part of the deal?”
Kyle snorts, eyeing the rest of us. “I mean, pick a fucking team, right?”
Lochlan sighs and shoots me a “this fucking guy” look.
“I don’t get why you’d want to hang with that pervert, Selene,” Kyle sighs. “Also…can I just say, you’re looking good.” He winks lecherously at her. “How come you and I never got to know each other better when I was a student here?”
“Probably because I’m way too old for you, Kyle,” she says with saccharine, sarcasm-laced sweetness. “At the ripe old age of twenty-one.”
“Hey, I need to talk to you,” I growl at him.
He shrugs, following me out of the room and down the hall to the kitchen.
“What’s up, Drakos? Looking for some leadership advice?”
Not in a million fucking years.
I turn and level a cold look at him. “What’s the deal with the proposed twenty-story addition to the building your father and Nero De Luca bought?”
I’ve already talked Lochlan, Ronan, and a few of our other cousins down from the proverbial ledge after that PR post dropped the other day. But I'm sure it’s one of the reasons Lochlan was so heated just now to Selene about Kirill.
He’s not that protective of her. He’s just still furious at the prospect of this motherfucker's dad building a goddamn high-rise next to Ya-ya’s house.
Frankly, so the fuck am I.
Kyle sighs and spreads his arms. “You know my pops, Achilles. He’s just beating his chest, you know?”
“No, I don’t. What I do know is that Nero made a promise to my father when he bought that building that there’d be no vertical expansion. It’s right next to my great-grandmother’s house, Kyle.”
He spreads his hands again. “It’s fucking Manhattan, man. An island. The only way to build is up.”
“Not there,” I snarl.
He chuckles. “Relax, bro. I’m sure it’s just my dad being a dick, you know? But I’ll talk to him.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, well, you can pay me back by inviting me to the next party full of co-ed hotties, douchebag. You almost forgot to invite me to this one!”
Forgot.
Yeah…that's what that was, asshole. A memory slip.
The thing is, my restraint when it comes to Kyle is not out of politeness.
It’s politics.
He might be a slimy, predatory piece of shit.
Unfortunately, he’s not an idiot and I don’t think he’s completely oblivious to the fact that I despise him.
This past summer, when he was opening his hedge fund, the motherfucker went to my father, told him he and I were best buddies, and got Dad to pony up twenty million dollars as seed money for the fund.
Kyle even locked him in for a two-year period, which means Dad can’t take his twenty mil out of the fund until those two years are up.
Consequently, that means if I were to, say, punch Kyle in the mouth because it would feel awesome, there’s truly nothing stopping him from deliberately tanking dad’s investment to zero in retaliation.
“All right, bro.” Kyle claps me on the shoulder. “I’m gonna take off. Don’t be a stranger. My new office is right downtown. And hey, buddy,” he grins. “You’ve gotta come check out the new boat I’ve got moored in the harbor. Total pussy-magnate, bro.”
He turns to go, but then it comes tumbling out before I can stop it.
“What’s the deal with you and Yelena De Luca.”
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 pure crimson.
“And she was okay, I guess,” he shrugs. “But then she got clingy, 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 tossed something 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?”
Leo’s brow knits. “Look, man, you know I’m good with whatever. But I’m starting feel a little…” He shrugs. “Uneasy about this being so off the books. With your dad, I mean.” He glances at Lochlan. “Yours too, I assume?”
“Bingo,” Lochlan grunts. “Sorry, it’s gonna stay that way.”
Obviously, we’ve both had conversations with our families in the last two days about these twenty potential fucking stories rising over Ya-ya’s goddamn house.
But both my dad and Lochlan’s want to “play it cool” and take the diplomatic route in trying to talk sense into both Angelo and the De Luca family.
Lochlan and I see things a bit differently. To us, this isn’t a time for diplomacy.
This is an act of war, and wars have casualties.
The two dumb fucks down in the hidden dungeon under this very cabin…which I bought during my sophomore year for reasons…were caught snooping around Kingsward Hall the night of the Para Bellum party.
They’re in their thirties, which outs them as not being Knightsblood students. And they were both taking a bunch of pictures on phones that they’ve yet to give us the passwords for, which outs them as being guilty of…well, I don't know yet.
But it’s the burner phone one of them had, with just a single contact, that really sealed their fate.
The contact is a dummy office used by the Santoro family.
Since this is war, even if my father and uncle don't want to admit it, that makes them spies. And being caught during war has, historically, not been pleasant for spies.
Lochlan follows me down to the root cellar. I punch the code into the keypad next to the metal door set into rock wall, and calmly reach for the nine-iron golf club leaning against the wall as the door unlocks.
“Good evening, gentlemen.”
The two men tied to metal chairs bolted to the floor in the windowless stone room have barely looked up before I’m swinging the golf club as hard as I can at the guy on the right’s head.
Blood explodes from the dent I put in his skull.
His little buddy is screaming bloody murder as I hit the first guy again, then again.
The third time, the light goes out of his eyes, giving me the second guy’s complete and undivided attention.