Page 22 of Kingmakers, Year Four

She says it’s the tiny mistakes that get you caught—the errors that don’t seem to matter until all of a sudden they do.

I look around once more, to make sure there’s nobody within earshot.

“She’s here,” I tell her. “I saw her with Chay and Anna, and Sabrina Gallo.”

My mother nods slowly.

“Good,” she says. “I thought he might not send her, even after they signed the contract. Predators have a sense for traps.”

I try to swallow the burning acid in my throat.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say.

She sets down her pencil and takes off her fake glasses, so she can fix me with her ferocious dark eyes.

“You can do whatever you decide to do,” she says sternly.

“I hate her,” I hiss. “How can I get close to her when I want to strangle her on sight?”

My mother tilts her head to the side, showing the sharp curve of her jaw.

“You get close to her by any means necessary,” she says.

My face is hot. “You mean . . . seduce her?”

My mother laughs softly. “Befriend her. Help her. Earn her trust. If she’s already associating with Sabrina Gallo, it should be all the easier. Manipulate the circumstances if you have to—create a need and then fill it.”

I feel like she’s asking me to cuddle up with a viper.

Marko Moroz is the most treacherous counterfeit of a human being I’ve ever encountered. I don’t want to get close to his daughter any more than I’d want to roll around in a pile of his dirty laundry. The thought disgusts me.

Reading my face, my mother says, “She’s his weakness. His one vulnerability. You know this can’t be done by force—only by subterfuge. Or we’ll lose everything. All the time, all the money, all the suffering . . . for nothing.”

I force myself to nod. “I’ll do it. Whatever it takes,” I say.

“I know you will,” she says, unblinking. “You are his son through and through.”

I swallow hard.

“Loyalty in Blood,” I say.

It’s the motto inscribed on the gates of our monastery. And on the band of my father’s ring, wherever that might be.

“Loyalty in Blood,” my mother replies.

6

Nix

My first week at Kingmakers is not at all the scintillating hubbub of social expansion that I’d hoped. If anything, I’m even lonelier than I was at home.

The only Freshman who will talk to me is Sabrina Gallo.

Everybody else avoids me like I’m infected with the plague.

At first I didn’t want to believe what Sabrina said—that it was all because of my father and his reputation.

But by the tenth, or twentieth, or thirtieth brush-off, it was pretty fucking clear that my father is feared and loathed to an unusual degree, even by mafia standards.

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