King studies me in that unnerving way for another minute. I feel like I’m on fucking trial here, like one wrong answer will get me convicted and sentenced to execution, gangland style.
“You care about him?” he asks at last.
“Of course I care about him.”
He watches me another minute, a stitch pulling between his brows, his jaw working like he’s trying to decide whether to say more. At last, he does. “He treating you okay?”
That’s about the last thing I expected to come out of his mouth. And of course I can’t answer honestly, that Royal mostly treats me like shit unless we’re alone together. Then he’s a different person, leaving behind his cool, cruel exterior and becoming the most intense, overwhelming, dominant person I’ve ever met, forcing me to bend to his will, whatever it may be that day. Sometimes he’s selfish and filled with rage, like the day he threw me down on the side of the road and fucked me, and other times he’s vulnerable and needy, practically forcing me to cum for him until I physically can’t do it again, like he has something to prove. And sometimes he treats me like I’m air itself, the only thing he needs, the most precious thing in the universe, the only one who he can share his pain with, one story at a time.
And even though I know better, I’m falling for him despite all the ways he’s treated me.
“As good as I’m treating him,” I answer King at last. “What about you? Are you guys close?”
“Yeah,” he says, watching a girl on the dancefloor as she sways her hips and smiles seductively at him. He frowns and glances at me. “Or, at least, we used to be.”
I’m not sure what to say, so I settle for the generic, “I’m sorry.”
It’s not like he needs my ass explaining to him that his brother is guarded, hard to love, and all that other shit. He probably knows Royal a hundred times better than I ever will, even if they’re not close anymore.
“It was easy to keep an eye on them when we all lived in New York,” he says. “I always knew what they were up to. Now…” He shrugs and shifts his feet, watching me from the corner of his eye.
“Now you’re asking me to do it?” I say, a coil of unease twisting inside me. It’s been months since I seriously considered that Mr. D was anyone other than a Darling. But my earlier question about King comes back to me. What if it really is this guy, someone who wants to know about his brother but can’t keep an eye on him? They’re all rich. He could have floated my scholarship, and either he’s not part of the Swans, or that’s not what Royal is doing tonight.
But why would a New Yorker care so much about some secret society in Arkansas, even if his brothers are in it? And if this guy got kicked out along with the olds, they must have started fresh when the Dolces won the town. I can see why he’d be pissed, after helping them take down the Darlings, if they turned around and kicked him to the curb. But why would they? What are those boys doing that they don’t want anyone to know about, not even their own brother?
*
The King
The king in the faraway lands
At the borders of his kingdom
Doesn’t see the destruction at home,
Within the walls of his own castle,
Or hear the whispers of dissent
As the royals dance drunkenly in the sacred throne room
And deface his great throne.