Page 79 of Kingmakers, Year One

Anna will dress up in her street clothes, and probably wear her hair down and paint her face like the queen of the undead. And that’s something I want to see, even if it’s from a hundred feet away.

Making a decision, I shove my plate away and stand up, startling Bodashka and Valon mid-sentence.

“Where you going?” Valon asks.

“I’m gonna take a shower.”

The party is way downon Moon Beach, one of the only parts of the island that has a white-sand beach. The beach is tiny and shaped like a crescent moon, and you can’t actually swim there—not unless you want to be dragged away and drowned by the intense rip tides only a dozen yards out in the water. But it’s a popular place for students to walk or lay out and tan when the weather is nice.

To combat the night chill, some of the kids have built a bonfire that fills the air with sparks, bathing the sand in shifting, orange-tinged light.

I walked down here with Bram. He’s recovered his spirits enough that he immediately seizes a dusty bottle of wine from one of his Penose and chugs half of it down.

“Where’s the fucking music?” he shouts.

“I’ve got a speaker,” Chay Wagner says.

I already knew of her before I ever came to campus—the Night Wolves have a sort of celebrity cache. But I’d know exactly who she was either way because she rooms with Anna. She’s a pretty girl, petite but strong, dressed like a rockstar in tight leather pants and an artfully slashed Guns N’ Roses t-shirt.

The speaker she sets up atop a pile of driftwood is the same one that Anna uses when she practices dancing.

The music pours out, boisterous and loud, echoing off the limestone cliffs,DaisybyAshnikko

I forgot how long it’s been since I watched a movie or a TV show, or listened to music on earbuds. Kingmakers is a castle frozen in time. With everyone wearing uniforms and spending all their time studying or punishing their bodies in the gym, it might be today, or twenty years ago, or a hundred.

Anna’s roommate is here with her speaker, but not Anna herself. I hadn’t planned to drink, but as an hour passes with only the same classmates I talk to every day, and not the one person I actually wanted to see, I become irritated and angry, and I take the remaining half-bottle of wine from Bram and chug it down.

“There you go,” he says approvingly.

I don’t usually drink with him. I don’t drink much at all, or use drugs. I have a hard enough time controlling myself without taking the governor off. Who knows what I might do if I were completely uninhibited.

“Do you want to dance?” a curly-haired girl asks me nervously. I think she’s in my Combat class.

“No.”

I don’t dance. I’d feel like a fool doing that publicly.

“Okay. Sorry,” she mumbles, hurrying away with her face flaming.

“What’s your problem?” Bram says. “She’s not bad looking.”

“You fuck her, then.”

“I will if I can.” Bram grins. But he stays where he is, sipping a mixed drink out of a plastic cup. His wolf-like eyes are roaming the fifty or so students scattered around the fire. Like me, he doesn’t want just any girl. He wants the best he can get.

Finally, I see what I was waiting for all this time: Anna Wilk.

She strides across the sand, graceful as ever, while everyone else slips and stumbles on the uneven ground. Her long, silvery hair is loose, just like I hoped. It falls all the way down to her waist when she doesn’t have it twisted up in a bun or a ponytail.

We’re not supposed to wear our normal clothes even on the weekend, but everybody does when they leave campus.

Anna is wearing jeans that are more holes than material, her pale skin showing through the slashes, gleaming gold in the firelight. Her top is likewise a complicated assortment of straps and buckles. All I care about is how painfully tight it looks—how it shoves up her small, round breasts, and emphasizes the impossible circumference of her tiny waist.

My cock is rock hard in my jeans and she’s only taken five steps across the sand.

Bram follows my gaze. He lets out a low chuckle.

“Ohhh . . .that’s what you were waiting for.”

---