A heavy breath escaped him, as he faced out of the window of our large home. All brick, we basically lived in an enchanted castle, and my dad had grown up here, him and his sister.
Now, he was the only Prinze to remain from that life long ago. Obviously, I was around and our extended family, but the other Prinzes who had lived in this house were long gone. We didn’t speak about my grandfather, his father.
The man was a curse in this house.
I’d found this out later in life, sitting here before my father now.
“Your schedule doesn’t have any trips upstate, Dorian.” Dad would know since he loathed football. He and his friends, my god dads Knight, Jaxen, Ramses, and LJ had all played lacrosse when they’d been in school. My dad had learned to endure football for me. Dad lifted his head. “Dorian.”
“The trips weren’t with the team,” I said quickly. “Ares, the other guys, and I signed up for our own day trips and scrimmage weekends. You know how we like to perfect our game.”
He knew how I liked to perfect my game. I didn’t do anything in my life half-assed. I worked hard, getting that from my dad.
Dad stared at me then, real long and hard. He wet his lips. “I do.” The words arrived on a breath, as his hand rose. “Lord knows you eat all that cardboard with your mother.”
Dad was a meat eater through and through. I nodded. “Yeah.”
My father’s visible relief at what I said was evident. He believed me. He did when he shouldn’t have, and that told me something. It said that he wanted to believe me, and that when it came to an alternative, well, there wasn’t one. I was going upstate for football.
That was why I went.
I could imagine this was something his brain could compute, and I was grateful for that. He faced me. “I’m assuming the trips are done, then?”
This wasn’t a negotiation, not the way he said it. I bobbed my head once in acknowledgment.
“You don’t go upstate,” he finalized, then sat in his chair. “You don’t, Dorian. And if you need to, you talk to me first.”
My stomach twisted up, adrenaline raised to hell. “Yes, sir.”
He sat back. “You can go now. Have a good day at school.”
I didn’t give him a chance to question me more. I just grabbed my smoothie, my school bag, and got out of there. I went to close his door and noticed his hand rubbing his brow. He was tense, but I noted something else.
He’d believed a lie when he never ever did.
&nb
sp; Chapter Ten
Dorian
I arrived on time to school, but didn’t get out of my car right away. I texted the guys I’d be in later, then parked in a random spot in the lot.
I lit up a joint.
I just needed a moment to fucking think, and I did that for a while. After taking the seconds I needed, I eventually parked my car with the rest of the guys, then hit the halls of the school. First period was most people’s homerooms, but usually the guys and I just dicked around. Really, we did whatever the fuck we wanted to do, but today, Wells said he needed to talk to us. When we all needed to meet, we met in the computer lab only the tech kids had access to. Thatch was one of those since he was a tech boy genius. He had keys to the lab, then made us dupes.
The lab was basically Legacy’s personal fucking room, a place where we brought chicks and smoked weed. We usually didn’t fuck girls together in there, but there’d been a time or two where things had gotten crazy.
I didn’t go out of my way to see my buddies’ dicks no matter how close we were, though. So if I needed the space, I usually texted ahead. The other guys didn’t give a shit, but there were plenty of places to take girls on campus where we didn’t have to smell each other’s fucking cum.
Today, we were just meeting to talk and shit. We’d, um, acquired all the other tech kids’ keys so only Legacy had access to the place now.
I unlocked my way in, and Wells passed me a bag of food from Jax’s Burgers. His dad owned several burger joints around town, and Wells knew I liked the tots from there since they were vegan. I usually only ate the shit when I wasn’t training, but I’d had a hell of a morning and texted him to get me some since he always stopped. Anything he got at his dad’s franchises was free, so why the fuck not.
I devoured the tots after barely bumping Wells’s fist for the grub, throwing myself in a swivel chair. Wells and Thatcher already sat around a computer screen, playing video games, and Wolf sat beside them with an empty wrapper. No doubt from those egg sandwiches he liked to eat in the morning. He crumpled it, tossing it at me. “You all right?”
The others swiveled in my direction, and I hoped to fuck my face wasn’t telling shit. I didn’t need any of them on my back either, their suspicions and shit. Especially Wolf. He also hadn’t known I’d been going upstate. None of them did.