Page 104 of Kingmakers, Year Two

Yet he’s beautiful. So fucking beautiful.

He’s beautiful when he’s sad and when he’s scared. When he’s happy or when he’s angry. He’s a diamond with a hundred facets. Each one is pure and perfect to me.

But he doesn’t belong to me and he never did.

I was never meant to have such a treasure.

“I’m going to marry Rocco at the end of the school year,” I say. “There’s no point putting it off any longer. He’ll only make life miserable for the rest of you.”

“I can’t let you do that,” Miles says quietly.

“It’s not your choice,” I tell him. “It was never a choice, for any of us.”

Miles looks at me the way he always does, fully and completely, taking in every part of me.

“I made you a promise,” he says.

“It was an impossible promise. I know you would have kept it if you could.”

He looks at me. Then he stands up from his bed in one quick motion, and closes the space between us. I think he’s going to kiss me, and I don’t know how I’ll find the strength to push him away.

Instead, he takes my hand and lifts it to his lips.

He looks into my eyes, his mouth pressed to my knuckles, his touch telling me more clearly than any words could do that he loves me, that he’ll always love me.

And I love him. I love him and Cat and Chay and Anna, Ozzy and Leo and Hedeon too.

Which is why I can’t be selfish any longer.

I leave Miles’ room planning never to return.

20

MILES

Ihad a long time to think in the Prison Tower.

Even longer in the weeks that followed, when Ozzy was gone and I was alone in the dorm room.

What I realized is this:

If not for Zoe, it would have beenmymother who was executed.

I was in a rage that night.

I wanted to kill Wade, Jasper, Dax, and most of all Rocco.

They pushed us and pushed us, crossing every fucking line. In that fight—with Zoe in danger, and Chay and Ozzy hurt—I lost control. I could have killed any one of them.

It was Zoe who screamed for meto stop.

She was the one who dragged me back. The only person who could have brought me to my senses in that moment.

Ozzy struck the killing blow.

But it could just as easily have been me.

Then it would have beenmymother who traded her life, who took the punishment, who paid the debt. I know she would have done it, unhesitatingly. Just like Ozzy’s mom.

---