Page 25 of Kings & Chaos

My idea was starting to crystallize when my phone buzzed with a call from Mara.

“Hey,” I said, when Mara’s face came into view on the video call. She had her copper-colored hair pulled back again and was obviously in sweats on her bed in her Columbia dorm room.

“Hey,” she said. Her brown eyes drew together in concern. “You okay?”

“Fine, why?” I asked.

“You look funny,” she said.

I laughed. “Gee, thanks.”

“No, I mean, you look like you have something on your mind.”

“Just… you know. Everything here,” I said.

“With Emma?” she asked. “Or your three hunky roommates?”

“All of the above?” I sighed. “Did you hear about the guy they found who left a letter admitting to killing Nikki?”

She hadn’t, and I filled her in on all the details, including the fact that the Kings thought the dead guy was a scapegoat for the real murderer.

Or murderers.

“And the Kings?” she asked, when I’d told her everything I dared about Emma. “Have any more of them fallen under your spell?”

“Let’s talk about you,” I deflected, because the situation with the Kings — or one King in particular — was complicated af. “How are things there?”

“No way.” She paused to guzzle from her water bottle. “I’m not saying a word about my boring life until you tell me everything.”

“Fine,” I grumbled. “The Kings are not under my spell. I think it’s the other way around at this point.”

“Youmustbe talking about Neo,” she said.

“He’s the last domino to fall,” I admitted, “which is crazy, because if you’d told me a year ago that I’d consider having a three-way with the Kings, I would have thought you were smoking some good shit.”

“Is it because of the stepbrother thing?” she asked.

I wished it were that easy. Thestepbrother thing, as Mara called it, had fallen to the bottom of the long list of reasons I shouldn’t fuck Neo Alinari.

“That’s actually the least of my worries,” I said. “He’s just such a…”

“Gorgeous fuck boy?” she finished.

“I was going to say monumental dick.”

“What’s wrong with some monumental dick?” She sighed dreamily. “I could really go for some monumental dick right now.”

“It’s not going to be easy with Neo like it is with Oscar and Rock. There’s… too much there,” I said.

“Too much what?” she asked.

I tried to give words to the feeling I had — with all the guys, but with Neo in particular — that there were things I didn’t know.

About him. About us?

I grasped for the thread my mind was teasing, but it kept slipping away, the way the perfect word did when it was on the tip of my tongue.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like there’s some kind of… baggage there?” It was the closest I could come to articulating the weight of what was between Neo and me.

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