EVIL VILLAIN (The Royal Court #3) - Rebel Hart Page 0,79
at her boyfriend. “Honey, I meant like, if I wasn’t madly in love with you.”
“Deon, your friends are funny,” Felicity said, petting Concrete and enjoying the show.
Alistair was leaning away from Avery and wouldn’t even look in her direction. Avery tried to give him a couple of kisses on the cheek to help, but he couldn’t be swayed for the time being. Avery turned and gave Cherri and Nikita each a death glare. “Great. Thank you both for this.”
“Huh,” Brayden said. “It’s rare that I’m not causing the fighting.” He smiled at Kyle. “It’s nice.”
Kyle wrapped an arm around Brayden and pulled him close, and I simply laughed. “Damn. The Royal Court has changed quite a bit. I don’t even recognize you.” Nathan was leaning his head against his hand on the arm of the couch. “You aren’t gonna do your weird king thing and simmer ‘em down?”
“I no longer have control of this train. I just have the prestige honor of sitting in the driver’s seat so that I’m the first one to hit the wall when we crash,” Nathan said flatly.
“Damn,” I said again. “I was about to ask what I missed, but I’m not entirely sure I want to know.”
“I’ll tell you what you missed,” Sicily said. “Avery would put me on her list.” He winked at Avery and smacked a kiss in her direction and Alistair shifted immediately. Sicily scrambled away with a yelp and sat next to the couch where Felicity and Concrete were. “It was a joke. Just lightening the mood.”
“Getting back to your question Deon,” Felicity said. “It sounds to me like your friends have been on quite the hunt for you. Some of the tactics they tried, I hate that I didn’t think of them first.”
“Really?” I asked. “All of you?”
Sicily nodded. “Colette has been my little tech monster. The rest of them have helped, but she and I have been checking pings off your unknown number for weeks trying to track you down.”
“And Brayden has put in a ton of work trying to find Connor,” Cherri added in. “Everyone is doing their part though. We’ve been working nonstop, it feels like.”
I looked at Colette and Brayden, the two people I might have previously considered the snobbiest, shallowest members of The Royal Court, and they were looking back at me with nothing but smiles. In fact, I could see it in all of them, they were happy to see me. The Royal Court had not been my group of friends before everything went ass up. I had Cherri, and through Cherri I’d begun developing something of a friendship with Avery and Alistair, but other than that, I thought very poorly of all of them, Nathan included.
In just that one day, the one where everything changed, I realized that my understanding of The Royal Court wasn’t just skewed, it was totally off. When push came to shove, they dropped everything to rush to Nathan’s aid. Even Cherri, who had just had a horrible experience with Nathan, was committed to finding and saving him within 24 hours. These people, whether they realized it or not, were committed to each other in a way most people never found.
The fact that they extended that commitment to me when they barely knew me was a true tell of the wonderful people that they were. “Well, I’m appreciative,” I said. Squeezing Cherri around the waist, I smiled. “You guys kept my girl safe, you kept my brother safe, my best friend. You’ve been trying to stop my shithead sperm donor, and you’ve been looking out for one another. I couldn’t thank you as much as I wanted if I tried. How did you eventually find me?”
“That was a combo effort between Sicily and Nathan,” Cherri said. “Nathan had a couple of Connor’s goons being held by some people he knew and they were able to swipe their phones. Sicily was able to break in and compare the info in their phones to the info he and Colette had gotten from the pings off the number you were calling Nathan and I from, and we realized you’d been near the prison. Once we realized you hadn’t gone back to prison, we guessed you must have visited and both Sicily and I remembered you mentioning Venom, so I went and spoke to him. He gave me Felicity’s address and here we are.”
“You met my dad?” I asked. “What’d you think?”
“He’s pretty great,” Cherri said. “He was super helpful and really