Kings of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #1) - Caroline Peckham ,Susanne Valenti Page 0,195

the force of a fucking freight train.

We had a single, cardinal rule which we had always followed to the letter whenever we’d fought before. Never hit the face, no wounds that lasted. But that had gone to shit just as surely as my fragile grip on my control had.

I threw another punch at Kyan’s face, but he somehow managed to get his knees between us and he launched me backwards off of him so that I fell against the coffee table. He was on me in a heartbeat, snarling in my face as his hand wrapped around my throat and he squeezed hard enough to cut off my oxygen supply.

A small part of my brain considered the fact that he’d clearly been pulling his punches whenever we fought before. But this creature leering down at me now wasn’t holding back at all.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Blake bellowed a second before his weight slammed into us too.

He managed to knock Kyan off of me, but I wasn’t ready to be done yet so I swung at him instead, my knuckles splitting as I drove my fist up beneath Blake’s chin, making his mouth snap shut.

Blake had been dancing a thin line with his control recently anyway and that was all it took to snap it.

Blake’s boot swung into my ribs as he kicked me off of the coffee table and pain made my body sing to a new tune. Kyan might have had a point about that. There was a subtle kind of beauty in agony. Something which cut through everything else and connected your body to your soul.

The three of us collided again and for a moment there was nothing between us but fists and pain and rage.

“Enough!” Kyan bellowed finally, throwing his hands against my chest and knocking me back against the stained glass window before shoving Blake back a step too.

We stood there, panting as we glared at each other and every small secret that hung between us seemed to expand to fill the fucking room.

Eminem was still playing, though I didn’t recognise this song. In some fucked up way that seemed right. The lyrics were angry, bitter, accusing.

Blake slowly reached out and touched the control panel on the wall to cut the sound and we were plunged into a silence so thick that I could feel it pressing up against my skin.

“This wasn’t the way this was supposed to go,” I snarled, the iron tang of blood coating my tongue.

“You can’t plan out every little fucking thing in life, Saint,” Kyan growled. “That’s not living.”

“So you think sauntering through life with no plan beyond seeing what assholes you can beat up next is better?” I demanded incredulously.

“At least I found a cure for the emptiness in me,” he growled.

“That’s not a cure,” Blake cut in. “It’s a fucking distraction. You crave the fight because you don’t want to look at who you are without it. You don’t want to risk feeling anything real so you crush it all with violence.”

“So who am I without it then?” Kyan demanded, the sweat on his skin making his tattoos glisten. He’d always claimed that the images on his flesh were meaningless, but I wasn’t convinced. Either he just didn’t want to tell us the meaning behind them or his subconscious was pushing him to choose tattoos which reflected the darkness in him. The pain. The things we all knew about his past but never discussed.

“You could be anything you want to be,” Blake snarled. “But you’re just taking the easy path all the damn time. You think being the toughest asshole in the room makes you the shit, but you’re still a fucking coward. You don’t make a single fucking choice that isn’t selfish.”

“I can’t help it if Tatum would pick me over you assholes,” Kyan bit back, ignoring most of what Blake had said to him. “And I’m not going to apologise for taking her out last night.”

“She could have escaped,” I snarled. “And then what would we have done?”

“She didn’t,” he replied flippantly.

“She’s our girl,” Blake said, driving his fingers through his hair as he tried to stay calm. “Which means we need to make decisions about the things she does as a unit, not just do whatever the fuck we want with her and cause this kind of friction!”

“That’s impossible and you know it,” Kyan snapped. “We might have a lot of things in common but we want different things from her. I know I