Page 3 of Evil Queen

Nikita

My breath billowed around my mouth in a cloud of opaque smoke. As my feet crunched through the snow, there was an ever-present chill on the tip of my nose and ears. At least, that would be my cover story for why they were glowing bright red in the wake of a “Good morning, my life” text from Nathan. He was headed to breakfast with Kyle, which was good. My face was the only one he’d seen for the past two weeks, and on top of that, I still hadn’t sorted myself out enough yet. I loved Nathan so much more than I thought possible, but there were more than a few reasons why I was struggling with that. It was good for him to see someone else and, hopefully, work his way back toward normalcy.

“Hey,” a dusky voice called out to me.

I looked up and rolled my eyes at the scene. Jaxon was there, but he was wearing his typical skinny jeans and black boots. He’d also donned a red flannel, half-buttoned, and a sleeveless, acid-wash jean jacket that certainly wasn’t enough to protect him from the cold of the snow all around him. At least he had a black beanie pulled down, hiding his black hair and covering his ears. He was sitting on top of a picnic table at a park not far from Postings Proper High. It was our favorite place to go when we ditched or just needed to meet up, and he had a lit cigarette balanced perfectly between his lips.

“You’re gonna freeze to death like that,” I called out.

He shrugged, and I laughed. If there was anything I’d learned about my best friend in the time since Nathan brought him into The Royal Court, it was that it took more than a few trivial discomforts to rattle him. His naturally tanned skin from his Filipino heritage was covered in scars and scrapes, which he considered trophies. He was the kind of guy who could easily survive if the world went ass up and we had to revert to caveman tactics.

I kicked my legs over the bench of the picnic table and climbed in to sit, ignoring the frigid feeling on my butt and legs as I did so. I laid my head down on Jaxon’s knee next to me. He bent over at the waist and gave me a gentle headbutt, and I snickered.

“By the way, I don’t like not seeing you for two weeks, so let’s not do that shit again, okay?” he huffed.

“Agreed,” I replied. “What’d you do with your time off?” He didn’t respond right away, so I looked up at him, and he flicked his head over toward the parking lot. I looked back over my shoulder at his black and green Lamborghini and noticed there was another person sitting in the passenger’s seat. Though totally bundled up, the short, pixie haircut was unmistakable. “Colette. Is she asleep?”

“Yeah. She needs it, so I didn’t wanna wake her up.”

“How did she end up with you?” I asked.

Jaxon snuffed his cigarette out on the picnic table and flicked the butt off into the snow. “She’s been calling me pretty much all winter break to sleep with her.” I raised an eyebrow, and he shook his head. “No, not like that. Literally, sleep. Just hold her and talk to her until she falls asleep. She only gets a few hours a night, so I’m doing what I can, but…” He sighed. “She’s not doing great.”

I carefully watched Jaxon’s face and noticed how sunken his eyes were and how weary he seemed. He was normally an aloof, unemotional kind of guy, but he seemed truly pained by the anguish Colette was experiencing.

“It’s kind of shocking,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like I thought she was totally unattached, but I didn’t expect her to take it so hard. I didn’t even feel like Cherri liked her all that much.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I tried to get her to explain it to me a few times, but I don’t think shereally knows what it’s all about. I just think The Royal Court means more to her than she realized, and now it’s so fractured. She can’t deal.”

“I understand that deeply,” I replied.

Nathan and I grew up in the same neighborhood and became friends pretty quickly. It’s said that kids don’t understand romance at a young age, but I always knew that I loved Nathan. He was the one I always wanted to be around, the one I cared most about, and the one I would do anything for. When my grandmother finally saved me from my father, who was molesting me, and my mother, who was allowing it to happen, my therapist at the time, Sistine, saw how attached to Nathan I was. She stepped down to foster me, and my grandmother bought us a house to live in so that I could stay close to him.

Nathan promised to always take care of me, and he always did. When he established The Royal Court, he invited me in as a knight and kept me close. How important The Royal Court was to him made it important to me. I’d never been a big fan of Cherri, for obvious reasons, but I cared about her as an extension of this family I’d built.

Now it was broken, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed. Nathan hadn’t spoken to anyone from The Royal Court other than me in the two weeks that we were all off on winter break, and Cherri hadn’t spoken to any of us at all. The last time I saw her, she was denouncing all of us for dragging her away from Deon, who was chasing after Connor. I empathized with her position. When I first found out that a bunch of them knew that Nathan was missing and hadn’t told me for hours, I was so livid that I punched a hole through the glass of my driver’s side window.

Leaving Nathan behind at that cabin and not knowing if he was going to come back was the most difficult thing I’d ever had to do, but at least I had the choice. If someone had forcefully dragged me away from him, I’d be pretty pissed too.

“How did everything get fucked up so quickly?” I asked. “All it took was one tiny thing.”

“Well,” Jaxon replied. “We found out Nathan had a brother and found out his dad was on some sadistic, force-machismo shit with his son, and a teacher threw herself out of a third-story window. All of that wasn’t one tiny thing.”

“I guess.”

I was only one of two people in The Royal Court who knew about Deon before he suddenly resurfaced earlier that year. Connor had suddenly dropped the bomb on Nathan that he had a brother and that this brother was coming to live with them. It was pretty much just Nathan and me at that point, and I can admit I got a little jealous. Deon showed up, and Nathan was crazy about him. All he would talk about was his new brother, how cool his new brother was, and how much fun it was, having a new brother. Things that would ordinarily just involve Nathan and me suddenly had this new person hanging around, and it wasn’t long before Deon started to make friends, so our circle slowly grew.

I didn’t like how much Nathan loved Deon, and then when Deon decided to just drop everything and leave, Nathan was heartbroken, and that made me like him even less. Only Kyle stuck around from the friends that had gravitated toward Nathan thanks to Deon, and it was Kyle and me who made the leap with Nathan from his post-Deon days to when he established The Royal Court.

“Tack that onto the long, growing list of reasons why I feel guilty every single day,” I said. “I knew Deon existed, but he left a lot of that story out, especially the part about Cherri.”

“Yeah, fuck, that was the biggest reveal, wasn’t it? Nathan went and got Cherri because he knew she was his brother’s girl? That is a little twisted. I’ll give you that,” Jaxon said. “He’s obviously in love with you, though. Who knows how much of that shit was manipulated by his batshit dad?”

“A good amount of it, I would imagine.”

“How’s he taking all of it?” Jaxon asked. “Nathan.”

“As good as can be expected,” I replied. “For those first few days of the winter break, I literally had to force food down his throat. For being a spoiled, rich brat, he’s fucking strong.”

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