“Did you know that we’re all flying to Kiznitch next week?” Lilith murmurs from behind the opened stainless-steel fridge door. She slams it closed and pops open the lid of an OJ. She glares at me over the lip. “Kiznitch.”
I’m desperate to get the attention away from Kiznitch, and not far off, Patience.
“What’s with you and Russia?” I ask, reaching for the glass bottle and bringing it to my mouth.
She swipes hers with the back of her hand. “I don’t like Russia.”
“Why?” I ask, pushing the bottle over to her on the counter.
Her eyes start roaming around the area, and I watch as her face changes. Russia is forgotten, and my question remains in the area of things we don’t talk about. The muscles in her face relax, her eyes turning a soft shade of lilac instead of the fiery hard steel.
“This place is nice.”
She makes her way into the sitting room, where a large U-shaped sofa is facing the windows. There are black jambs molded over the glass like something out of an old Victorian home. From this angle, you can see the large willow tree that shades over what looks like an outdoor bar.
“It’s so—wait, this is Kyrin’s house?”
“His other house, I’m guessing.”
Lilith runs the tip of her finger over the beige sofa. “Huh. Not enough grungy, dark for me to have picked that.”
I chuckle softly, lowering myself down onto the couch. Resting my ankle on my knee, I nod. “For real. Why don’t you want to go to Russia, baby girl?”
She turns to face me, kicking off her shoes and sliding her legs beneath her ass. Her hair is an unnatural shade of silver, her eyes an absurd tint of violet. Almost like they can’t decide if they want to be gray or purple. The strangest fucking eye color in the world. Her skin is pale, youthful—flawless—and her body is tight but curvy. “I guess I just don’t like vodka.”
I roll my eyes, waving her off. “I’ll let you have it this time.” When my phone starts vibrating in my back pocket, I lean up to grab it out, seeing Bishop’s name flash over the screen.
“Yo!” I stand from the sofa and make my way out to the timber patio.
“I haven’t processed what you told me last night, and I haven’t shared it out yet, but I need you to know something.” I close the door behind myself, turning to face Lilith once I reach outside. I need to know she’s not somewhere listening, but I also just sort of want to stare at her. She has a face people are drawn to, even more so in her natural state. My favorite is when she thinks no one is watching her.
“Go on.”
“If you do this, if it goes further, you know you can’t have both.”
“I know.” And he ain’t speaking about my dick…
“If you do this, you will need to make a decision. This is serious. I spoke with Dad about it briefly, without giving anything away—that’s for your safety, you’re welcome, by the way—and he said that if a King was to go out on his own, away from us, that your line would be ridiculed. You’d be out of the fold. Eli—” Bishop takes a deep breath. He doesn’t do that often. Usually he says exactly what he wants to say when he wants to say it. That gavel must be rather heavy for him. “You need to think about this. Hard. There will be no more Rebellis line. The Kings haven’t had a scandal like this since fucking Vitiosis, and even then, he never left.” I roll my lips beneath my teeth a few times, wondering where I’m going to start first.
“I know,” is all I manage to say. “I’m not walking from The Kings, B. I bleed black and gold.”
“I know, brother. Let me work on something and get back to you. Unless you’re ready to call red on both of them, then that could be an angle I could move with.”
I hold my breath, tensing my jaw. “I didn’t want to tell you this right now. Wanted a bit more time to work through shit, but—”
Reality offers peace for those who spend a lifetime running from their nightmares. For me, it’s always the opposite. I hate it here. Everything is a reminder of why I’m different. What do people see when they look at me? Chaos? Pain? Insanity. All of the above are true, but in Patience, I never asked these questions, because between the walls of an asylum, the patients don’t know what goes on in the world outside of them. Kyrin still hasn’t come back to the boathouse that he put both Eli and me into like some stray animals he had picked up along the way. Eli seems to be more unsettled than me with this current change of plans. I watch as he moves from the sofa to the shower, to the kitchen, to outside near the lake. I leave him, lost in my own thoughts of what might be happening. Everyone in Midnight Mayhem is, if anything, smart businesspeople. Changing something like this raises a red flag.