Page 89 of Kings & Chaos

I took a deep breath and opened the box.

I immediately recognized the symbol nestled in velvet: snakes winding around a gold crown, a shimmering pink diamond at its center.

“What is this?” I removed it from the box and it trailed a black velvet ribbon with a heavy gold clasp.

“It’s a choker,” Oscar said. He glanced at Neo, then back at me. “And a tracker.”

I should have dropped it then and there. Who gave a tracker to a woman as a birthday present?

But I didn’t, because in this case, I knew who gave a tracker to a woman as a birthday present: the three men standing around me, who seemed intent on protecting me and had so far managed to do just that under less than ideal circumstances.

I held the heavy gold crown closer to my face, trying to spot the tracker, and saw something engraved on the back of the crown:sic semper tyrannis.

I looked at them. “What does it mean?”

“‘Thus always to tyrants,’” Neo said, the only words he’d spoken since I’d come downstairs.

“Translation?” I asked him.

“Roughly?” His expression was stony, but the light of hate burned in his eyes. “'Death to tyrants.’”

I sucked in a breath, then murmured the words. “Sic semper tyrannis.”

They felt good on my tongue. Too good.

“It’s engraved in our rings,” Rock said.

The Kings had a motto, and now I had one too, because whoever had taken Emma and the other girls had used their power to do it. They’d punched down to hurt people weaker than them, the worst kind of tyranny.

I looked again for the tracker, but couldn’t see it.

“It’s sewn into the velvet,” Oscar said, reading my mind.

I ran the velvet between my fingers. I didn’t catch anything the first time around, but the second time, I thought I felt a tiny little piece of… something, like a flat grain of rice.

“It’s not just about the tracker,” Oscar said. “The symbol, it’ll give you protection in town, with the Blades and the Barbarians, the Phantom and the Hounds.”

The crown was prettier than I wanted it to be, the pink diamond glimmering from one of the spikes at the center. “What if I won’t wear it?”

Oscar met my eyes. “It’s your call. If you don’t believe we want to protect you by now…” He shook his head and shrugged.

I touched the crown, emotion warring with reason in all directions.

It made sense for someone to be able to find me, especially with my stalker still on the loose, and a phone was too easy to lose, too easy for someone to take away.

But wasn’t letting a bunch of guys track your every move against some kind of feminist rule?

And also, did Iwantto be… branded with the Kings’ symbol?

It was the last question that got me. Because if I were telling the truth, if I were being honest, with myself at least, the thought of being branded by the three men in the room wasn’t as unappealing as it should have been.

I had… feelings for Rock and Oscar, even if I hadn’t quite defined what they were yet. And Neo, well, my feelings about Neo were still complicated, but I couldn’t deny that they were there.

More than that, more than all of those things… I was one of them. I felt it in my bones even though I kind of hated it.

We’d shared something formative, something important. It had shaped them, and it had shaped me too, even if I hadn’t remembered it at first, because everything shaped us, the stuff we remembered and the stuff we didn’t.

The stuff we remembered and the stuff we tried to forget.

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