Kiss Me in the Dark Anthology - Monica James Page 0,50
was four, I remember my mother telling me she hated my fucking guts. She had pulled our car over to the side of the road, unbuckled my car seat—or whatever the fuck those seats are called when a kid is four—and told me to get the fuck out.
Apparently, she was pretty pissed about something. What? I didn’t know at the time. All I knew was that the hate she spewed at me all of my life left invisible scars over my flesh. People saw the cute smile and ravishingly good looks, the money and—let’s be real—the fame, and thought, “Well, shit. This little fucker has it all.”
Money and fame do not amount to love. Money, fame, and my killer looks were merely the concealer for the torture I endured as a kid. My story wasn’t an obvious dirty—naaww, none of that.
Sometimes dirty doesn’t start with a being tied to a basement floor. Sometimes dirty starts from being fed lies by a silver spoon over the surface of Pietra Firma Luxtouch Tiles. That’s a whole story in itself, so we won’t go there right now.
Now my father, on the other hand, was like my hero. He knew how to tell a joke and make people laugh, but that didn’t mean you would want to cross him. My older brother Cash was more like my mom, and I like my dad.
Then I met my brothers. My uncles who are part of The Elite Kings Club and their sons. It became my life. I attended the new building of Riverside Prep Academy and graduated—barely. And now… well, now I’m doing exactly what my father did.
Well, at least I should be.
“E, you hear me?” Bishop, aka the mini-godfather of The Elite Kings interrupts my thoughts.
“Yeah, I heard you…” My eyes narrow. “So, you want me to go on tour with the Midnight Mayhem crew because…”
Bishop glares at me, his cold, dead eyes reaching across the room to grip me around the throat. “So, you weren’t listening.” Bishop wasn’t always this moody. Well, no, that’s a lie, he was, before Madison V-dog happened, but then she up and left him. Now Bishop is back at square one, only worse, because he’s older. Meaner.
“No, I heard you.”
“Oh, okay, shithead, then what did he say?” Nate, my other brother and fellow King asks, pointing his finger at Bishop.
“I just said!” I wave my hand around.
Nate shakes his head at Bishop. “He wasn’t listening. Fuck it. I’ll go in.”
“No,” Bishop snaps at Nate. “Tillie fucking needs you here.” He looks back at me. “You are going in, Eli. I fucking mean it. Saddle up.”
Slowly, I cock a brow at Bishop. I know what he wants. Fuck, we all know. It has been the war that has been stewing for generations that is slowly starting to reach boiling point. River-fucking-edge. There’s a road that cuts down the middle of Riverside, along with the original Riverside Prep school—fucking haunted castle—and the town of Riveredge. They’re the fucking Ying and Yang. Our fathers contained it for years, as did their fathers, but there have been whispers that they’re creating their own fucking Kingdom. Now, that doesn’t sit right with us, no, the fuck it does not. There’s a reason why we got our names and there’s an articulately savage way in how we obtained it. The Elite Kings isn’t just a club or a crew filled with cute little preppy boys who beat people up when they don’t obey to their mundane little rules. We’d eighty-six your ass after sewing off all of your limbs and send little RIP packages to your loved ones. We don’t have rules, we have laws, and they were written in the blood of our ancestors. Our society runs deeper than the soil in which this damn fucking city was built on. That, in itself, is not to be taken lightly. “You sure that you want to involve Midnight Mayhem in this?” Midnight Mayhem isn’t just a carnival crew. They’re all fucking unstable and sick in the head. Not sure I wanna play clown fetishes with the crazy train. Everyone sees the carnal aesthetic of their shows and think that they’re just that—performers. But they’re not. You could roll with Midnight Mayhem for years and still not reach the surface of the kind of shit they hide behind the curtain.
Bishop’s eyes remain passive. “No. I want you to go in there under the guise of something else.”