Page 26 of Kingmakers, Year Two

Jasper leans his elbow on Chay’s shoulder, his skeleton fingers dangling down just above her breast. Chay has no problem staring him down even with their faces inches apart. She went to boarding school with both Rocco and Jasper, and she is well familiar with their tactics.

“Nice breakfast, biker bitch,” Jasper says to her. “I always knew you liked sausage.”

Chay picks up one of the brats in her fingers and takes a ferocious bite off the end, chewing loudly in Jasper’s face.

“I only like big, thick sausages. From what I hear, you’ve barely got an Oscar Meyer weenie.”

“Big enough to choke you when I shove it down your throat, you fucking whore,” Jasper hisses, his nose almost touching hers.

“Fucking try it and see what happens,” Anna says furiously from Chay’s other side.

Rocco’s hand closes like a pincher on my upper thigh, squeezing so hard that his fingertips dig into my flesh.

On the other side of me, I can feel Cat tense up as if it’s her leg in a vice grip. Her eyes are big and round, and I think she’s scared to even breathe, caught in the middle of this sudden conflict that blew in like a hurricane.

“Are these really the types of girls you should be associating with at school?” Rocco says to me, looking coldly between Anna and Chay. “An incestuous goth and the school bicycle? What would your father say . . .”

His fingers are tense as steel. They feel hard enough to punch right through my skin. It takes every ounce of strength I possess to sit stiff and upright, while my thigh is shaking with pain.

“He’d say there’s nothing in our contract about who I’m allowed to have as a friend,” I hiss at Rocco. “So kindly fuck off and leave us alone.”

Rocco’s fingers clench all the harder, until I can barely keep from crying out. Then he abruptly releases my leg.

“You disappoint me, Zoe,” he says quietly. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“We have nothing more to discuss.”

“Oh, my love,” Rocco says, reaching out his slim, pale hand to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “That’s not up to you.”

He stands up from the table, slipping out of his seat with unnerving grace. Dax follows him.

Jasper lingers a moment longer, still engaged in his silent stare-down with Chay. He cracks his knuckles single-handed, using his thumb to pull down each eerily-flexible joint. Chay winces at the off-putting sound. At last Jasper gives a slow, lazy blink, like he never cared at all, and pushes away from the table as well.

Only after they’re all gone can I let out a full breath.

“One more second and I was gonna stab my fork into that walking skeleton,” Chay says, gripping said fork in her fist.

Anna shakes her head, slow and angry.

“I hate sitting by like that, doing nothing. But I don’t want to make things harder for you, Zoe.”

She knows as well as I do that antagonizing Rocco could have long-term consequences for me. It’s not like I can irritate him into canceling our engagement. He thrives on my resistance—it only fuels him to worse behavior.

Anna doesn’t stop frowning until Leo Gallo drops down next to her, throwing his arm around her shoulders. Anna and Leo are indeed cousins, as Rocco snidely pointed out, but it’s only by marriage, not by blood. After a tumultuous first year at school together, the two of them have apparently decided to be lovers as well as best friends, and they’re now openly dating. Or at least, as open as you can be at Kingmakers where we’re not technically supposed to date.

Watching Anna with Leo is like watching a flower open under the light of the sun. She instantly relaxes against him, the stressleaving her body like a sigh. Her face brightens, and she becomes twice as talkative.

I could be jealous of Leo and Anna. Leo is everything that Rocco isn’t—handsome, warm, decent, genuinely affectionate . . . But it’s impossible to see the two of them together with anything but a sense of rightness. They so clearly belong with each other, like salt and pepper, or sea and sand. Besides, I never expected to have anything like that myself.

Miles Griffin and Ozzy Duncan deposit their heavily-laden trays next to Leo’s. Miles is likewise Anna’s cousin, and Ozzy is his best friend. The two of them are the biggest troublemakers at school. Ozzy loves to get in fights, and Miles is the prime procurer of contraband for anyone who needs it.

Miles makes me distinctly uncomfortable, since my goal in life has always been to follow the rules as carefully as possible, while he seems to break every single one for fun.

He has the privilege of that type of behavior since he’s the son of an Irish mafia boss turned mayor of Chicago. I expect he’s been able to get away with pretty much whatever he likes all his life.

I don’t particularly like him. There’s something amoral in the way he’ll sell anything to anyone—like an arms dealer, with no questions asked.

Not to mention the fact that he applies his particular brand of sarcasm like a switchblade. If he sees the opportunity to make a joke at your expense, he’ll cut you without warning.

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