Page 11 of Evil King

His resulting chuckle was full of malice. “How did I not expect that you’d show up here looking like a cutout from Criminal’s Digest?” he spat back.

“Good to see you’re still a snobby asshole,” I hissed. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

He laughed. “Ah, you’re still as petulant as ever, Deon.”

I smirked. “That makes two of us.”

“So tell me, dear brother of mine,” Nathan started, and I could have gone the rest of his life without him reminding me, “how was prison?”

5

Deon

Looking through the small window that each classroom’s door had, I could see that Nikita was standing in a way that would prevent anyone from seeing in.

“Scared?” Nathan asked.

A chuckle escaped through my lips before I could stop it. “I spent the last four years of my life in prison. Two of those in adult prison. My cellmate was a serial murderer. Your punk ass couldn’t scare me if you were twice your size and holding a blowtorch.” The truth was, if Nathan tried to pull something, I wouldn’t hesitate to body slam him through one of these desks, whether he was my brother or not. The plausible deniability of the fact that no one would see that was only sweetening the pot.

The arrogant smile on Nathan’s face faded. “You shouldn’t underestimate what I could do to you at the drop of a dime if I wanted to.”

“Is that right? Tell me, how exactly are you going to hurt me when I have nothing to lose?” I asked.

“Nothing?” Nathan asked. “Are you sure? There’s not asinglething you could stand to lose?”

Cherri immediately came into my mind. She and my mom were the only people in my life that I cared about, and my mom was beyond capable of taking care of herself. She’d stood up to the Loches once before and won, and if she had to, she could do it again. Cherri was tough as nails, always had been, but Nathan didn’t know the depth of our relationship. Even if Nikita had already told him that she saw us talking during homeroom, he didn’t know how I felt about her. If Cherri truly was involved in The Royal Court now, that inevitably meant that she and Nathan ran in the same circle. The last thing she needed was for me to give Nathan any fuel to dislike her or cast her out. The less he knew about my history with Cherri, the better.

“I can’t think of anything someone likeyoucould take away from me,” I said. “I’ll admit, I’mmildlyimpressed by the fact that you even have the teachers under your thumb, but I think you and I both know that it’s your last name that scares them much more than your first.”

Nathan’s upper-lip curled into a scowl. “Everything I have, I worked for,” Nathan said. “Everyone here bends to my will because of me and no one else.”

“Sure, bud.”

“Don’t forget, we’re cut from the same cloth. Everything you hate about him is in you somewhere,” Nathan said.

My hands were balled into fists before I could stop them. “That man has nothing to do with me,” I said. “You think spending a year trying to turn me into another one of his carbon copies is going to give me some sort of restored faith in him? For my mom raising me by herself for ten years, that shit was barely a blip on the fucking radar, and now…”

I fanned my arms out to either side of myself, flashing the several tattoos I’d acquired over the last four years. One of my mom’s name, written in beautiful script up the inside of my left forearm. The letters of my mom’s last name, my last name, Keane, on the backs of my fingers on my left hand. The scaly viper, whose tail started just above my right elbow and coiled around my arm down to where its head was sitting in the palm of my right hand—a sigil of the gang I stuck with in the adult prison.

“I don’t think he’s going to be rushing to take any candids with me anytime soon.” I looked Nathan up and down. “You’ve got the carbon copy shtick down pat, though.”

Nathan’s lips pursed as he glared at me. “I’m nothing like him.”

The only thing Nathan and I had in common was that we both hated our father. We were two sides of one coin, and the only reason Nathan was on the house-in-the-hills side while I was from the slums-side was that his mom looked better on posters.

My mom was a down to earth, Ireland native who came to the United States in search of the nonexistent American Dream. What she got instead was Connor Loche, a nose-in-the-air asshole with an inability to keep his dick in his pants. Despite already being married to Nathan’s mom, Connor met my mom at the post office and couldn’t resist a new-to-Postings woman who didn’t know who he was just yet. He laid on the charm, the kindness, the promises of taking her away from her lower-class life, but those promises all went up in smoke when my mom discovered that not only was Connor Loche married, but he also had several mistresses all across Maine, some even in other states.

She ended things with him immediately, but not before she got knocked-up. Nine months later, I was born. My mom did the right thing and told Connor about his illegitimate son, but he’d just had a kid of his own with his wife and couldn’t be bothered. Why he came around after ten years, looking to drag me into his high-brow lifestyle, I never understood, but I barely made it a year. I wasn’t an ascots-and-fencing kind of guy, and when I went back to my mom to celebrate Christmas a year later, I refused to return to South Postings. Connor tried to muscle a custody order, but when my mom revealed that she had evidence of Connor’s continued affairs, he backed off. So ended the disgusting chapter of my life that involved the Loches.

Or so I thought.

Here I was again, four years later, looking my mini-Connor of a brother in the face, feeling something between bad that he couldn’t escape too and angry that he would dare approach me when all I wanted was to leave him in my past.

“Are we done here?” I asked. “I’ve had just about enough of looking at your dumb fucking face.”

“No,” Nathan said. “I have a proposition for you.”

The scoff I let out was so loud it echoed off the empty classroom walls. “A proposition for me? Go ahead, rich boy. Tell me what you have to offer me that I’d even beremotelyinterested in.”

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