EVIL QUEEN - Rebel Hart Page 0,68

with sadness in his voice. “I know I’m not your favorite person in the world, but I’m gonna miss you guys.”

Avery looked at Alistair, and then Alistair looked at Nathan with a smile. “We spent about twenty minutes last night talking about how much we’re gonna miss you. You’ve been a huge part of our lives, even if an annoying one.”

Avery swatted Alistair’s arm. “You said you were going to leave that out.”

Nathan laughed and held up a hand. “Avery, he just admitted he’s gonna miss me. He can insult me all he wants.”

Everyone at the table laughed a little bit, and it drew the attention of some of the people around us. I noticed someone at a nearby table let out a full-blown sigh of relief, and then the tension at their table loosened a bit. The Royal Court’s fractures had been stressing out the people outside of it, apparently. The Royal Court, and Nathan, specifically, sort of ruled over the school, so it stood to reason that our subjects would take on some of our emotions.

“Do you think you’ll come back?” Kyle asked, dragging my attention back to our table.

Again, Avery and Alistair exchanged a look, but that time, they were referring to one another for the answer. “I don’t really know,” Avery said, and then she looked back at everyone else. “If I’m totally honest, during Christmas break, we were out of here, and we weren’t looking back. We started looking into places in New Haven, and Ali started looking for jobs there. The whole nine yards. But with everything that has happened in the past few months, I guess it changed some things for us. Now we have to figure out what we really wanna do.”

“I don’t say this out of self-blame or desire to pay you back or anything like that, but you guys know if you need anything as we move onto our next state, I’ve got you covered, right? We may not all stay here, but we’ve still gotta stick together,” Nathan said.

No one responded, but everyone gave their own forms of affirmation, and then the table went a little silent as we all ate our food in quiet bliss. It wasn’t until Alistair finished that anyone said anything, and when he cleared his throat and looked around the table with a wince, we knew it wasn’t going to be good.

“Okay, listen. I love this”—he waved around the table—“a lot, but are we just going to ignore what happened to Brayden?” He looked down at the guy. “I mean, you were missing for, like, two weeks.”

“I wasn’t missing. I just took a break for a couple of weeks,” Brayden responded.

“You took a break right after the spring break?” Colette asked.

Brayden held up his hands in frustration. “Yeah? You honestly don’t think my parents would have filed a missing person’s or something?”

Jaxon and I locked eyes for a moment. We hadn’t had a chance to explain what happened with the people we chased. Kyle got part of the story from Jaxon when Kyle met him at Brayden’s place, and Nathan had gotten a majority of the story from me before I left his house after we slept together, but no one else really knew what happened. Both Jaxon and I had kept our suspicions to ourselves for the time being. Jaxon believed that the men were after Cherri and me, specifically, but we also thought that they had something to do with Brayden’s disappearance. Why would they take him if we were their quarry, and if they had snatched Brayden, why would he be lying about it now? He made a good point. His parents didn’t seem as concerned with his disappearance as we were. We had some of the pieces of the puzzle, just not all of them, and we didn’t want to put the rest of the group on edge without knowing for sure.

Kyle seemed to take notice of Brayden’s discomfort first. “Let’s, uh, change the subject. I don’t know how many of you have looked at a calendar, but prom is next week.”

Colette choked slightly on her drink. “Oh my god! Are you serious?” She dragged out her phone and clicked through it. “You’re right! My god, are we already mid-May?”

“Yeah,” Alistair said with an exasperated breath in his voice. “That is painful to hear. I feel like it was just yesterday that we all hated each other.”

Everyone snickered, and Kyle continued. “Well, in the interest of being slightly normal, we