Chapter 22
School was different after that.I lost my cocky, aggressive energy, and Sofia figured it out almost immediately. She became a real thorn in my side again, nipping at me with snide comments and little pokes or pinches whenever I stood close to her.
She even cheated off me in one class, and spat in my lunch before my Kings were at the table with me. She was disgusting and all her friends were just as bad, mocking me and making my life at Covington a living hell unless I was in the presence of my Kings.
They were still the Kings of the school, that hadn’t changed. The Organization didn’t punish the men, only the women in their world, and I was currently at the receiving end of all their misogynistic disdain.
So my Kings still ruled the school, and they still ruled me whenever we were in public, but in private they were soft and kind, like they’d been before.
I lived for those moments. I needed them, because my home life wasn’t any better than my school life. Reg had taken the Organization’s suggestion to watch me very seriously and he would open my bedroom door at all hours to spy on me, hoping to catch me doing something risqué.
I wished I could put a lock on my door, but clearly privacy wasn’t a big priority in our household.
It was a special kind of hell, being trapped under the same roof with the man who had raped you for years. It didn’t make it any better that he’d only done it when I was drugged, in fact at times it made it worse. I had been helpless under his assault, completely devoid of any ownership over my own body, as he and his friend had used it against my knowledge.
And now I was once again victimized. I couldn’t even claim my memories as my own. I remembered nothing about it, but he did and Rick did. And all the men who had seen it happen had memories of what happened to me. All that I had of it were fractured images and foggy sensations of fear and panic.
I danced around him, trying my best to avoid him at all times, but since the shooting he didn’t leave the house other than to work and the occasional meeting with the Organization it proved extremely difficult to do. It was truly torture to have him there with me, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized how small our house really was. There was no escape.
I would go outside as much as possible in hopes of running into Kingston, and at times I was successful. And I was also still allowed to run, it fell under the category of me keeping myself healthy for their pleasure, and it gave me freedom to escape everything even for a moment. Although I wished it was sex and not running. What I wouldn’t give to have the four of them touching me and making my stress disappear.
There were moments of bliss in the midst of it all. We still had the occasional meet up in one of the locker rooms at lunch. We knew they weren’t allowed to have cameras in the change areas, and nobody cared about the equipment room, so we would text our group chat and arrange it on the burner phones Valen and Archer had purchased for us all.
The app we used made texts disappear and was next to impossible to hack, and the burner phones themselves were super secure and loaded with cutting edge technology to prevent anybody from wirelessly adding a tracker.
In situations like this, money was a lifesaver, and I was so grateful to have Archer and Valen included in my group. Team Everly, as they called it. I never could have bought the security of my burner phone without them.
A couple of weeks into this total surveillance, when it was almost December, we finally had an entire lunch hour to meet each other. There was nothing wrong with the Kings being seen with me, but when it was in public, they had to be such assholes to me. They had to give the illusion that they’d broken me, and even though I knew it was an act, it still served to give me heartache and insecurity that I could barely stand.
It was like having an itch that you couldn’t scratch, so on this day in particular, I needed them. I needed them badly. I texted them from my history class to meet up in our usual spot, that I was craving their love and support. Of course they all replied immediately, and Ryker added that he wished he could be there for me, too.
I left my class a few moments early to make my way to the storage room ahead of them. I had to escape Sofia’s snickering and taunting insults, she’d been extra over the top that day for some reason and it was actually getting to me.
“Oh thank god,” I said when I saw Archer show up first. One of our hiding spots was in the storage area in the back of the girl’s change room. We could only come here on days there weren’t any girls sports at the lunch break. “I thought I was going to go crazy this morning when I couldn’t jump into your arms.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hate it so much, fuck this is hard.”
“Harder than I thought,” I replied, and I knew he was hurting when he didn’t make a sexual innuendo at the use of the word hard. “I don’t know how much longer I can handle this.”
“It’s only until June,” he said. “That’s when Dirty Kingdom is held, and then it will be over.”
“But not in a good way. It will be over for me because they’ll sell me even if I wind up here with the Kings. None of the previous Tributes have ever survived. I’ve been looking into it.”
“Are you certain of this? I just don’t want to believe it,” he said, and he frowned. “I’ve heard rumors, of course, we all have. But I thought they were just that. Rumors.”
“Not rumors, I’m afraid,” I said. “I’ve been doing deep dives into their life after Dirty Kingdom and every single one of them for the past ten years just disappeared. Not a single trace left online, all their social media accounts scrubbed and nothing showing up in any university databases. It’s like they never existed.”
“What are we talking about?” Kingston asked, coming into the room with Valen trailing right behind him. Valen had healed after being jumped by Max’s guards, but his nose still had a slight crooked bump on it that gave him a rough look. It only served to make him hotter, somehow.
I explained my concerns, that I was going to disappear whether they won Dirty Kingdom or not, and neither of them seemed able to believe it.
“I think at this point, why don’t we just enjoy this short time we have together?” Kingston asked as he pulled me into his arms. He sat on a stacked gymnastics horse and let me lean against him. “I don’t like seeing you worked up like this, Evie. We’ll make sure nobody can touch you, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t sound convincing. I sounded miserable and scared.
“I’m serious,” he said and tucked his finger under my chin to tilt my face up to his. “I won’t let anything happen to you, I’d rather die than see you hurt by them.”
“Don’t say that,” I said quietly. “It scares me when you talk like that.”