EVIL QUEEN - Rebel Hart Page 0,4
expect her to take it so hard. I didn’t even feel like Cherri liked her all that much.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I tried to get her to explain it to me a few times, but I don’t think she really knows what it’s all about. I just think The Royal Court means more to her than she realized, and now it’s so fractured. She can’t deal.”
“I understand that deeply,” I replied.
Nathan and I grew up in the same neighborhood and became friends pretty quickly. It’s said that kids don’t understand romance at a young age, but I always knew that I loved Nathan. He was the one I always wanted to be around, the one I cared most about, and the one I would do anything for. When my grandmother finally saved me from my father, who was molesting me, and my mother, who was allowing it to happen, my therapist at the time, Sistine, saw how attached to Nathan I was. She stepped down to foster me, and my grandmother bought us a house to live in so that I could stay close to him.
Nathan promised to always take care of me, and he always did. When he established The Royal Court, he invited me in as a knight and kept me close. How important The Royal Court was to him made it important to me. I’d never been a big fan of Cherri, for obvious reasons, but I cared about her as an extension of this family I’d built.
Now it was broken, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed. Nathan hadn’t spoken to anyone from The Royal Court other than me in the two weeks that we were all off on winter break, and Cherri hadn’t spoken to any of us at all. The last time I saw her, she was denouncing all of us for dragging her away from Deon, who was chasing after Connor. I empathized with her position. When I first found out that a bunch of them knew that Nathan was missing and hadn’t told me for hours, I was so livid that I punched a hole through the glass of my driver’s side window.
Leaving Nathan behind at that cabin and not knowing if he was going to come back was the most difficult thing I’d ever had to do, but at least I had the choice. If someone had forcefully dragged me away from him, I’d be pretty pissed too.
“How did everything get fucked up so quickly?” I asked. “All it took was one tiny thing.”
“Well,” Jaxon replied. “We found out Nathan had a brother and found out his dad was on some sadistic, force-machismo shit with his son, and a teacher threw herself out of a third-story window. All of that wasn’t one tiny thing.”
“I guess.”
I was only one of two people in The Royal Court who knew about Deon before he suddenly resurfaced earlier that year. Connor had suddenly dropped the bomb on Nathan that he had a brother and that this brother was coming to live with them. It was pretty much just Nathan and me at that point, and I can admit I got a little jealous. Deon showed up, and Nathan was crazy about him. All he would talk about was his new brother, how cool his new brother was, and how much fun it was, having a new brother. Things that would ordinarily just involve Nathan and me suddenly had this new person hanging around, and it wasn’t long before Deon started to make friends, so our circle slowly grew.
I didn’t like how much Nathan loved Deon, and then when Deon decided to just drop everything and leave, Nathan was heartbroken, and that made me like him even less. Only Kyle stuck around from the friends that had gravitated toward Nathan thanks to Deon, and it was Kyle and me who made the leap with Nathan from his post-Deon days to when he established The Royal Court.
“Tack that onto the long, growing list of reasons why I feel guilty every single day,” I said. “I knew Deon existed, but he left a lot of that story out, especially the part about Cherri.”
“Yeah, fuck, that was the biggest reveal, wasn’t it? Nathan went and got Cherri because he knew she was his brother’s girl? That is a little twisted. I’ll give you that,” Jaxon said. “He’s obviously in love with you, though. Who knows how much of that shit was manipulated by his batshit dad?”
“A good amount of