“E, you hear me?” Bishop, aka the mini godfather of The Elite Kings, interrupted my thoughts.
“Yeah, I heard you…” My eyes narrowed. “So, you want me to go on tour with the Midnight Mayhem crew because…”
Bishop glared at me, his cold, dead eyes reaching across the room to grip me around the throat. “So, you weren’t listening.” Bishop wasn’t always this moody. Well, no, that’s a lie, he was, before Madison V-dog happened, but then she up and left him. Now Bishop was back at square one, only worse, because he’s older. Meaner.
“No, I heard you.”
“Oh, okay, shithead, then what did he say?” Nate, my other brother and fellow King, said, pointing his finger at Bishop.
“I just said!” I wave my hand around.
Nate shook his head at Bishop. “He wasn’t listening. Fuck it. I’ll go in.”
“No,” Bishop snapped at Nate. “Tillie fucking needs you here.” He looked back at me. “You are going in, Eli. I fucking mean it. Saddle up.”
Slowly, I cocked a brow at Bishop. I knew what he wanted. Fuck, we all knew. It had been the war that had been stewing for generations that was slowly starting to reach a boiling point. River-fucking-edge. There’s a road that cut down the middle of Riverside—along with the original Riverside Prep school—fucking haunted castle—and the town of Riveredge. They’re the fucking yin and yang. Our fathers contained it for years, as did their fathers, but there had been whispers that they were creating their own fucking kingdom. Now, that didn’t sit right with us. No, the fuck it did not. There’s a reason why we got our names, and there’s an articulately savage way in how we obtained it. The Elite Kings wasn’t just a club or a crew filled with cute little preppy boys who beat people up when they didn’t obey their mundane little rules. We’d eighty-six your ass after sawing off all of your limbs and send little RIP packages to your loved ones. We didn’t have rules, we had laws, and they were written in the blood of our ancestors. Our society ran deeper than the soil in which this damn fucking city was built on. That, in itself, was not to be taken lightly.
“You sure that you want to involve Midnight Mayhem in this?”
Midnight Mayhem wasn’t just a carnival crew. They were all fucking unstable and sick in the head. Not sure I wanted to play clown fetishes with the crazy train. Everyone saw the carnal aesthetic of their shows and thought they’re just that—performers. But they weren’t. You could roll with Midnight Mayhem for years and still not reach the surface of the kind of shit they hid behind the curtain.
Bishop’s eyes remained passive. “No. I want you to go in there under the guise of something else.”
I kicked my foot out, resting it against the desk. “Oh yeah? And what’s that?”
“What you always do…” He finally gave me a glimmer of the old B. “Getting your dick wet.”
My eyes swung around the room. “Wait, you think they’re just going to let me up in there?” I couldn’t help the deep chuckle that escaped me. “Dawg, literally no one can get in there without jumping hurdles, and those hurdles are usually always scattered fucking body parts. Literally. They steal people. They have hurdles, B! Come on!”
Bishop glared at me, bored. “Then jump.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
He didn’t flinch at my words, he welcomed them. “People need to find a new word to describe me. Asshole just isn’t it anymore.” Bishop stood from his chair, slowly making his way to the oversized window that overlooked the busy Upper East Side.
“I could think of another.” I smirked at him, flicking my pierced tongue over my teeth.
He flipped me off. “Go in there, make some noise.” He turned his head over his shoulder. “King and Dove are already waiting for you…”
The stain of darkness is permanent once it has clung itself to you. There’s no shaking it off, no denying it. Once you’ve tasted the bitter tang of sin on the tip of your tongue, you’ll do everything you can to drink from its poison for the rest of your life. You’ll be like a junkie, needing your next fix. It’s addicting, fucking powerful.
I know this. It’s a fucking fact.
Two people came into my life. Shit, I wasn’t even sure how it happened. I didn’t realize what was happening until I was hit right in the fucking core of a twisted fucking tale of a love lost, saved, and ruined. Fucking no one could save me.
Not her.
And definitely not him.
And anyway, I didn’t need fuckin’ saving. I was Eli fuckin’ Rebellious, an Elite motherfucking King, and the blood that ran through my veins was the concoction of that poison, so I guess you could say it wasn’t me that was drinking it…