Kings of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #1) - Caroline Peckham ,Susanne Valenti Page 0,9

ever tried to come between us.

I padded down the curving staircase on bare feet, eyeing Kyan irritably as I went.

His heavy breaths came to me as I closed in on him and I crossed the huge space before the enormous stained glass window to stand over him.

The eighty inch TV on the exposed brick wall was still lit up with the pause screen for the zombie game he’d been playing on the Xbox last night and the headphones he’d been wearing now hung around his neck.

My toe nudged something sitting on the floor beside the grey couch and I glanced down at the bottle of Jack Daniels which was more than half empty.

He’d asked me to drink with him yesterday evening, but I hadn’t been in the mood. So apparently a party for one had been on the menu instead. He hadn’t been here when I’d headed up to bed last night and I guessed he’d appeared during one of the hours where my eyes had actually managed to stay closed.

Blake had been mysteriously absent too. Which meant Kyan had most likely headed into town.

He shifted in his sleep and I waited for the inevitable nonsense ramblings to spill from his lips.

“Wear the pink thong…looks best ona watermelon an’ you know it…”

I snorted a laugh as he shifted in his sleep, his free hand scratching at the skull he had inked on his ribs before falling still.

My gaze scanned his split knuckles and my suspicions about his location last night were confirmed.

A group of kids from the closest town, Murkwell, had taken him out to join a gambling ring who ran bets out of an old barn up near Sahale mountain last year. They liked to waste their hard earned dollars placing bets on illegal fight nights which were hosted up there every few weeks and Kyan had found himself an outlet for his monster.

He’d taken us up there once or twice, but it wasn’t my scene. A bunch of roughnecks swigging cheap liquor from the bottle and laying ten dollar bets on assholes beating the shit out of each other just didn’t appeal to me. The bets weren’t rich enough for my taste and the stench of body odour and damp straw turned my stomach.

But Kyan still liked to head down there and beat the shit out of mean fuckers with a chip on their shoulders about their lot in life. He had a thing for fucking the local girls too. Preferring to keep his specific preferences away from this place and the rumour mill of the rich and powerful. Though he claimed the reason was that rich girls didn’t like to fuck dirty enough for him.

When I went down to Murkwell, I stuck out like a sore thumb wrapped in a designer coat with a thick layer of pretentious asshole smothered on top. It was all they could see; money, privilege, entitlement. But somehow, Kyan slipped beneath their radar, managed to relate to them. They knew he had more money deposited into his trust fund monthly than most of them made in a year, but they acted like they didn’t.

And despite the fact that he shouldn’t have been any more able than me to mingle with the commoners, he made it look easy.

It wasn’t as if he was even likeable; Kyan’s monster was much more visible than mine. It was painted on his flesh and spoke without a filter. But maybe that was the key to it. People knew exactly why they should be afraid of him. Everything from the murderous look in his eyes to the permanent scowl etched on his face and the I-give-no-shits attitude he wore like armour screamed run the fuck away to any normal asshole. But with me it was harder to pinpoint exactly why you felt like shitting yourself in my presence. And in all honesty, Kyan might beat the shit out of you and leave you bleeding in the gutter in a puddle of your own piss. But if you became my enemy, you might just disappear altogether.

I turned away from one of the only two people in the world who truly knew me and headed past the kitchenette, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge before taking the stairs down to the old crypt.

I flicked the lights on as I descended, the cold concrete beneath my bare feet reminding me of the original reason for this building’s existence.

The space directly beneath the old church had been emptied out and