Page 2 of Kings & Corruption

A tattoo snaked up his neck from under his dress shirt, and I knew from a “family” pool party that what looked like snakes were actually strands of hair streaming from the elaborate angel inked onto his chest.

Mara shrugged. "You’re not even blood-related.”

“It’s not about that,” I said. “He’s a dick. I refuse to give him a pass because he’s good-looking.”

“So you admit he’s good-looking,” she said triumphantly.

I sighed. “It doesn’t matter. He’s a total douchebag, remember?”

She turned her eyes on the two guys standing next to Neo. “What about Rock and Drago? Do they get a pass?”

“No,” I said, glancing at Neo’s sidekicks.

Rocco Barone studied the crowd, his gaze casual and curious. His blond hair was an anomaly we shared. My “uncles” had been commenting about my fair hair since I was a kid, making jokes about the mailman even though my mom was a natural blonde.

I wondered if Rocco had been the subject of the same kind of teasing or if that was yet another thing only the women in our world had to endure.

Oscar Drago (I couldn’t remember when we’d all stopped calling him Oscar in favor of his last name) stood on the other side of Neo. His hair was black as a raven, his eyes nearly as dark as he surveyed the crowd with something like hunger.

“More for me,” Mara said. “I’ll be the bologna in a Neo, Rock, and Drago sandwich any day.”

That would be stupid.

They’re not just jerks, they’re dangerous.

They might have something to do with Emma’s disappearance.

I forced myself to swallow the words. Mara was just dreaming, and who could blame her? In spite of their personality deficits, Neo, Rock, and Drago had been the three hottest male commodities in our little world since they’d turned sixteen, started marking their bodies with ink and piercings, and developed muscles that took the focus off their vacuous brains.

Okay, that wasn’t fair. I actually didn’t know them well enough to know if they were stupid, but it made me feel better to think so, because being smart andthathot? Well, that would be the ultimate injustice.

Besides, there was no proof Neo, Rock, and Drago were involved in Emma’s disappearance. She’d last been seen on the Aventine campus, but no one had copped to any information about why she’d been there, three miles from Bellepoint Academy, the all-girls college she’d attended.

The police had looked at all the security footage and interviewed Aventine’s entire student body, but none of it had turned up a thing. All of which meant absolutely nothing. I’d learned a lot of things as the daughter of Frank Russo, but the most valuable was that everyone could be bought.

Lesson number two? Loose lips sink ships, and the rats get dropped into a deep body of water with cement blocks around their ankles.

It made me sick to look at Neo, scanning the crowd like a fox with access to every henhouse in the Northeast, while my sister was missing.

Probably dead.

No. I couldn’t afford to believe that. Emma couldn’t afford for me to believe that.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said to Mara.

“I’ll be here,” she said, her eyes still on the three tools across the room.

I wove my way through the crowd, smiling and waving at the people who made up my extended family by virtue of their involvement in the criminal underworld, even though I knew they talked shit about my family behind our backs.

I didn’t trust a single one of them.

I’d vowed to someday be free of this world, to make my own way without stealing and hurting people. But first, I had to find Emma, and that meant attending Bellepoint when school started again in two weeks. I needed to get cozy with the people who knew Emma, people who weren’t part of a world where telling the truth could mean getting your tongue cut off.

The fact that Bellepoint and Aventine were both on the outskirts of Blackwell Falls was a bonus. Emma had told me the two schools partied together all the time, so I’d be able to do some low-key digging in both places.

I hadn’t told Mara I was going to Bellepoint yet — she had her heart set on my new stepdad pulling strings for a last-minute admission to Columbia so we could go to school together like we’d always planned — but I would.

I just needed to get through this stupid wedding.

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