Page 83 of Kings & Corruption

“Ugh. This isn’t what I imagined when we agreed to stake out the admin building,” I muttered.

Rock glanced over his shoulder. “What did you imagine?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Snacks and sitting?”

He chuckled and the sound of it in the dark tickled my belly. “We have to be able to see inside the admin building. Can’t do that from a car.”

I didn’t love the thought of sneaking into the admin building, but he was right: there was no way to see who cleaned the lounge unless we were inside. “What about the cameras in the building?”

“We can work around them for this,” he said.

“But not to take the medals?” I was still hoping for a way to steal the medals that didn’t involve taking them in broad daylight on a school day.

“No,” he said. “That hallway has cameras at either end, and we can blend into the crowd during the day. All we need to do tonight is see who goes in to clean the lounge. We can stay hidden for that.”

“Right,” I said miserably.

He slowed his steps and I came up beside him. I’d always known the Kings were big guys, but I hadn’t expected how it would make me feel. Standing next to Rock in the woods, getting ready to enter the admin building when we were definitely not supposed to be there, I felt completely safe.

There was something about him — about all of them if I were honest, even Neo, who I still fantasized about suffocating in his sleep — that was solid and reassuring. Maybe it was their sheer size, or maybe it was the way they swung their dicks like they owned everything and everyone. I didn’t know, but I felt untouchable when I was with them, and for someone like me, someone who’d been anything but safe for a long time, it was a nice fucking high.

Light had started to seep in through the woods, and I realized we’d come to the edge of the forest. We walked for another minute and came to the tree line. Beyond it, the campus’ streetlights shone, illuminating the roads and pathways.

We stopped walking, and I saw that we’d emerged from the woods right behind the admin building. “The trail leads right here?”

I was thinking about Emma, about all the students — from Bellepoint and Aventine — who used the trail to sneak on and off campus. Why make it to the admin building? There were more cameras there than anywhere else, plus the possibility of being seen by someone working late.

“This one,” Rock said.

I looked up into his blue eyes and my heart stuttered a little. Fuck, he was gorgeous. “There are other trails?”

“Quite a few of them,” he said.

My heart sank. Emma could have come and gone on any of them.

I didn’t say anything and he looked down at me, his expression softening like he knew what I was thinking.

He reached out and touched my face. “The cops searched all the trails,” he said. “More than once. We all did, even the townies.”

I knew it was true because I’d been there during a couple of the searches that had been conducted for Emma, taking my place in a sea of people with flashlights at night, all of us walking only a few feet apart in a grid pattern to make sure we didn’t miss anything.

“All of them?” I said.

“All of them,” he said. “Dean Giordana knows they’re here. Everyone does. It’s a way for staff to look the other way when it’s best for them to look the other way.”

I nodded. Aventine was populated with students from notorious crime families. Being here wasn’t about following the rules — it was about learning how to break them.

The heat of his fingers made me remember the way he’d squeezed my tit in the car, the feel of his hot mouth on the other one while he licked and sucked my nipple.

I squeezed my thighs together to force myself to focus. “Now what?”

“Now we go in.”

* * *

It wasn’t as hard to get in as I’d expected, mostly because Rock knew where the cameras were positioned and how to avoid them. We approached the building in a blind spot and slipped in through the door leading to the dumpsters behind the building — propped open, just like he said it would be, so the cleaning crew could dump trash without worrying about being locked out.

Clearly the Kings had done recon without me.

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