Page 63 of Kingmakers, Year One

Chay is loud, confident, and unbearably cheerful. Couple that with a healthy dose of German bluntness, and I have to hear her opinion on virtually everything I do throughout the day.

Chay’s petite, with strawberry-blonde hair and full sleeves of tattoos on both arms. She tells me the tattoos were done by the best artists in Berlin as they passed through her father’s shops. Each is in a different style, everything from pop-art to ultra-realistic black and gray portraiture.

The Night Wolves are a fascinating mafia group, a mixture of rock n’ roll enthusiasts and bikers, from the era when both those things were illegal in Moscow. What began with underground concerts has grown into a string of tattoo shops and rock clubs across Europe, along with custom motorcycle shops and even their own racing team.

As heir to the Berlin chapter of the Night Wolves, Chay is something of a minor celebrity on campus, which is another reason our dorm room is never quiet. She says a German station tried to sign her up for a reality TV series, but her father flatly forbade it.

“I’m going to make my own clothing line after I graduate,” she tells me. “Leather jackets, vest, biker gear, you know . . . I think Papa’s wrong to avoid attention. Ninety-percent of our revenue is mainstream anyway. I honestly think Papa only keeps up with the chop shops and the protection money ‘cause he can’t stand the idea of being fully law-abiding.”

It’s clear that Chay views Kingmakers as something to get through to appease her father. She has almost no interest in our classes, and barely bats an eye at her failing grades.

“Why do you study so hard?” she demands, as I’m poring over an ancient leather-bound library book on contract law.

I shrug. “I like reading. I like learning things.”

“You’re competitive, too,” Chay says slyly.

“I don’t think there’s any point in doing something, unless you’re going to do it well.”

“It’s not just that—you want to be top of the class. I know you do.”

I pause in my reading, wondering if she’s right. Am I more like Leo than I realized?

“Maybe I’m just trying to prove that I’m good enough to do this job.”

Chay laughs. “With all the idiots who manage to be bosses, I think you’ll be fine.”

The classes are challenging, but I really do like studying. It’s a hundred times more interesting than the shit I had to learn in high school. Who gives a fuck about the order of the presidents, or logarithms, or the history of the fur trade? Everything I learn now I’ll actually use someday when I take over my father’s empire.

Leo and Ares are in most of my classes, which is nice. I hate the process of making new friends. I hate the part where you have to be polite and talk stupid nonsense to get to know each other. I already know everything about Leo, and Ares is soeasygoing that he slipped right into our little group like he was always meant to be there.

On Wednesdays Leo and I have a class called Environmental Adaptation. When I saw it on my schedule, I forgot for a minute what sort of school I was attending, and wondered if it had something to do with “going green.”

Of course it has nothing to do with environmentalism. Instead, it’s about acclimatizing to unexpected environments. In our first semester, this means learning to scuba dive.

Our instructor is a man named Archie Bruce, a Navy SEAL turned mercenary-for-hire. He’s got a shaved head, pale blue eyes, and a giant beak of a nose that adds to his air of authority.

He teaches us in the underground pool beneath the Armory.

The pool began as a natural sinkhole in the limestone, where seawater seeps. It’s been dug out and enlarged, but the walls of the pool are still rough, pale stone, and the water is salty. It’s much deeper than a normal Olympic swimming pool—even with the pot lights set into its walls, you still can’t see down to the bottom.

The underground cavern is vast and echoing. Professor Bruce barks at us to shut the fuck up, because he won’t be repeating a single word of the lesson.

I watch closely as he shows us each piece of equipment we’ll need, and how to operate it.

I’m feeling anxious, because even though Leo and I have been swimming at Carlyle Lake since we were kids, I’ve never been entirely comfortable in the water.

The idea of breathing on the bottom of the pool, with the full weight of thousands gallons of water on top of me, not to mention several million tons of mountain and castle overhead, is triggering a whole new level of claustrophobia.

“You okay?” Leo’s golden-brown eyes search mine.

“Of course.” I lie. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason,” he says with an easy shrug. But he grabs my hand and gives it a quick squeeze all the same.

Even after he lets go, the warmth of his hand seems to travel up my arm, spreading through my chest and slowing my heartbeat down just a little.

A dark-haired girl stands on the opposite side of the pool. We’re taking this class with a bunch of Spies, and I assume she’s one of them. Her black hair is almost blue in the reflected light of the pool. When I glance over at her, her eyes are fixed serenely on the professor. But I know she was watching us a minute earlier.

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