Dukes of Madness: Royals of Forsyth U (Royals of Forsyth University Book 5)

My gasp feels pulled from somewhere so deep inside of me that I double over at the waist, breaking away from the Baron. My body overcorrects for the force, an instinct to pull me away from the sight and shape of him until I topple to the floor, landing hard on my backside.

My ears ring, and for a moment, everything feels bizarrely slow. The flames on the candles wave instead of flicker, and it’s just like that night at Felix’s when Nick shot him in the head. That’s how I know he’s dead. The garble in my ears, the way my heart stutters, the slowness of it all.

My eyes are wide on the blue tarp beneath me, waiting for the warmth, the rush of blood.

It never comes.

First there’s a sound, metal on wood, and then Nick’s aloof voice. “I win.” My senses come rushing back so fast that I feel dizzy, raising my gaze to find him loose-limbed and whole. His profile is horrifically casual as he stares at the King, waiting. “You know how it goes. To the victor and all that.”

“Well, this is disappointing,” he says, sitting more stiffly than he had before. “You would have been such a good addition to my collection.” The King turns to stare into the shadows, hand heavy as he flicks his fingers. “William. You know what to do.”

Will steps forward, face scrunched in outrage. “But we can’t just—”

“An agreement was made in blood,” the King snaps. Lower, he adds, “We have more than one reputation to uphold.” The dissatisfaction is clear in his voice. “Give them what they came for.”

Will storms off and I struggle to get my feet beneath me, lightheaded and so cold that my extremities feel numb. Nick doesn’t look at me. He just pops open the cylinder and pours the bullets out. They hit the table—one, two, three—clinking noisily as they scatter, and then Nick slings the revolver across the length of it.

It comes to a stop at the King’s hands. “Keep it.” His gloved hand hurls it back, pushing it so hard that it’d hit Nick square in the chest if he didn’t reach out to snatch it first. The King leans back, adding, “It was your father’s.”

If this is a surprise to Nick, then he doesn’t show it, smoothly pocketing it. “What exactly is Will doing?”

“You’ll see,” is all the King says.

Nick taps his fingers on the table, looking bored, and I hover at his side, trying to gather the parts of myself I’d lost on the floor, waiting to be covered in his blood.

I’m still shaking.

Will returns minutes later, carrying a bundle in his arms. As he approaches, Nick stands from the chair, and even now—even after almost splattering his brains in this sick pit of darkness—he still angles himself to protect me.

Will holds out the bundle.

To me.

We stare at it until Nick lets out a soft, “Shit.” Confused, my eyes ping between him and the wad of old cloth, but he doesn’t react when I reach out to take it. “Lavinia…” he starts, an odd warning to the tone of it.

Gently, I lift the cloth, uncovering what’s beneath it.

Leticia.

It should horrify me to realize I’m holding a skull, but it doesn’t. I stare at it, trying to place this as her—my sister, Leticia Lucia, the gem of North Side with her shiny hair and razor-sharp smile. The skull is brighter, tidier than the one at the Baron King’s side, but it doesn’t take me long to know it’s real. Possibly, some part of me has always known. The world has felt much too small since she left, as if her absence had carved some permanent void.

Leticia’s smile sparkled when she laughed, a back molar bearing a golden crown.

The skull has the same one.

I’d know it anywhere.

“It’s her.” The words emerge shaky with the chatter of my teeth. I can’t tear my eyes away from it. This is a girl who will never laugh mockingly in my face again. She’ll never dance across my father’s marble floors to watch me be locked away. She’ll never become someone who holds Forsyth under her twitchy trigger finger. If she’d at one point fallen for a tough, charismatic fighter from the West End, then Leticia will never know what it’s like to feel Tate’s love change her into something less ugly.

My sister is dead.

I look up, straight into the King’s shadow-eyes. “Who called on you to collect her?”

The King stares back, head tilting. “Do you really want to ask another favor of death?”

Instantly, I’m certain I can’t handle another roll of their dice. Not with my life and not with Nick’s. Forsyth has enough bodies hiding in this crypt, and I refuse to add another. This is all we’ll get from the Barons.

“No,” I decide, covering the skull. I’m not sure if I’m the one that has started moving toward the door or if I begin just blindly following Nick, but before we exit the crypt, the King’s voice rings out.

“Girl,” he calls.

I stop and turn.

He raises his head, the tips of his horns gleaming in the candlelight. “I showed you this so that you’ll recognize you’re fighting above your weight class. Both of you. You may be the spawn of Royals but you know little about how our world works. Accept the knowledge I’ve given you and don’t come back.”

“Is that a warning?” I ask, but he waves his hand, dismissing us for good, Will and Liam emerging from the shadows to escort us into the darkness.

I came to the Baron’s crypt with a severed hand in my lap, and I leave with a skull in its place.

Nick is quiet beside me in the driver’s seat, a hand slung over the steering wheel as he drives us toward home. There’s an ache in my chest. It’s as heavy as a boulder and just as big, and I try my best to keep it trapped there, lost within the debris of whatever had broken inside me while we were in that crypt. It’s dark in the cabin of the SUV, but occasionally we’ll pass another car, the headlights sweeping across the sharp angles of Nick’s pretty face. When that happens, my eyes are drawn to the tattoo on his temple. 237. I only get a flash before it’s gone.

I’m the first to speak, my voice ragged and shaky. “You didn’t have to do that.” He tosses me a quick glance, shrugging. “I didn’t want you to do that,” I add, scanning his stoic expression.

That hard soldier mask hasn’t fallen away, and he wears it comfortably, relaxed in that special, artificial sort of way I’ve grown used to. The words I want to say feel hollow and ineffectual.

Thank you.

So I root around all the broken things in my chest to find something else to fill this thick, suffocating silence with. “Leticia wasn’t a good sister.” He doesn’t look away from the road as he reaches out, kicking on the heat. It’s only then that I realize that I’m still shivering, my body tight with the tension of holding in the tremors.

“I got that impression,” he says.

“She wasn’t a good sister,” I repeat, tightening my grip on her skull. “But she was a good Lucia. I guess, in some way she’s a part of me. Whether I like it or not, she’s… she was…” The boulder bangs against my ribs and I clear my throat, trying to shove it back into place, tight and tidy with my shivers.

In my periphery, Nick turns to give me a look. “Are you going to cry?”

The brusque sentence gives me pause. “No,” I say. And then, “Does that make me a bad person?”

His eyebrows tug toward the center of his forehead. “What would I know about being a good person? I just executed some poor fuck for fingering the Addams family’s girlfriend.”

Slowly, I turn my gaze to the road; the trees whizzing past us in a blur of shadows that could be hiding anything. “Right.”

The rest of the drive is silent and surreal, and I can’t get warm. My bones feel as though they’ve been transformed into ice. I keep thinking about the fact I have Leticia’s head in my lap. Some sick part of me is cavalier about it and for a while, that’s the part I embrace. She’d do the same for me, I’m sure of it. We were made to be rivals, created by a man who loved nothing more than pitting us against one another, and Leticia always beat me. She glowed in the light of my defeat, but she’s not glowing tonight. She’s dead. I’m alive.

Tonight, I win.

“You know how it goes. To the victor and all that.”

We get home at midnight. We exit the car and I spend a moment looking upward, the sky vividly alive. It strikes me somewhere in my sternum, seeing the same stars she and Remy had that night when they jumped from the cliff.

Nick doesn’t wait for me.

He closes his door and stalks through the shadows toward the tower. I push my feet hard to catch up to him, to walk through the doors as a pair of victors, the fist and his fury.

The tower’s staircase has never felt colder. I’m still wearing Nick’s jacket, but I’m not imbuing it with anything resembling warmth. Shock, maybe. The climb to the top is spent watching him, the way his back shifts beneath his plain white shirt. He’s not acting like himself, too quiet and still, but I’m not sure how to break it, how to pull him back.

I keep Leticia clutched close as we enter through the party room, but the second we step through, Nick veers to the right, meandering to the bar. I watch as he stretches over the bar top, snagging a half-empty bottle of something amber from beneath it. He unscrews it and tips it to his mouth, his throat swelling and contracting with long, hard swallows, eyes fixed to the ceiling.

“Nick?”

Swallow.

“Nick.”

Swallow.

Gently, I place the skull on the bar, and then I turn to him, reaching out to curl my fingers around the neck of the bottle.

He gasps when I take it from him, swiping a wrist over his mouth. “Jesus fucking Christ.” He coughs, his eyes growing wet, and I understand why when I take a swig from the bottle. It stings the whole way down my esophagus, making my organs cringe and squirm.

When he meets my gaze again, he looks frayed and tired and pale, and something in my gut finally unwinds.

The soldier is gone.

I cap the bottle and set it next to Leticia. “Are you okay?”

“Well,” he swipes the bottle back before I can stop him, my reflexes shot, “my brains aren’t splattered on the Barons’ discount hardware tarp, so I’d say I’m fucking fantastic. Wouldn’t you?”

It seems like anger at first, and I’d understand. It’s my fault. In no universe was Nick going to let me do that. So yeah, I’d understand the anger. But then his free hand reaches out to touch my own—a nudging caress—and I realize it’s not anger at all.

This is relief.

“We can’t tell them,” he says, voice wrecked as he slumps onto a stool. “Not about meeting with the Barons. Sy will flip his goddamn shit, and Remy…” Nick gives me a long, significant look. “Remy will want to ask. Do you understand?”

But I’m already nodding. “He’d pay the price.” He was willing to take a swan dive off this tower if it meant having Tate back. To find her killer? He’d pull the trigger.

Nick lowers his gaze to the bottle, his shoulders looking suddenly too heavy. “You’re still shaking.”

I wrap my arms around myself, trying to stop the tremors. “I almost watched you kill yourself.”

“Don’t want to see me dead, Little Bird?” He tips me an impish grin. It’s said jokingly, giving me an out.

“No, I don’t.”

The smile flickers and then fades away. He holds my stare as he sets the bottle aside. “You don’t hate me anymore?”

I answer honestly. “I don’t know.” I also step up close to him, our heights equalized by his slump on the bar stool, and reach out to cradle his jaw, the thick stubble soft against my palm.

Nick goes eerily still, frozen as I pitch forward, our noses grazing.

His eyelashes flutter, but don’t close as I brush my lips against his. Maybe that’s what I’ll remember most about it—the intensity in the way he looks at me as he reaches up to touch my throat, mouth parting to take me inside.

I kiss him the way he’s always wanted, licking against his rough tongue to taste him, thumb digging into the hinge of his jaw as I deepen it. He makes a low, rough sound into my mouth, but even though I feel his hand on my hip, he doesn’t use it for anything but a sweep of his thumb against my skin. It’d be a lie to say it doesn’t stir the ember in my belly to life. Nick kisses like it’s something he wants to savor, slick and unhurried and sexual in some unavoidably primal way. These hands have hurt me. They’ve locked me away. They’ve tossed me to the vipers. They’ve pulled and clawed and bruised.

But tonight, they’re as gentle as his kiss.

When I pull away, he doesn’t chase it.

“Thank you,” I say, sucking the taste of him from my lips.

His eyes are heavy and glazed—from the liquor or the kiss, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the hand on my hip falls away, and he sighs, the rest of the tension falling from his frame. “You’re going to fucking kill me, girl.” Despite the words, the grin he sends me is incandescent.

For a split second, he looks a lot like that charming boy in the photo.

It makes me take a step back, clearing my throat. “I’ll need a place to hide her.”

Some of the mirth sinks away, but not all of it. He looks at the skull, nodding. “There’s some loose stones just outside, in the stairwell. I’ll hide it. Keep it safe.”

I nod back. “I know you will.”

He doesn’t follow me to the stairs. Halfway up, I take a glance over my shoulder and see him on the stool, nursing the bottle of bourbon as he stares unseeingly at the bar. I wonder if he’s as cold as I am, if the liquor burns but doesn’t soothe.

It’s dark and still upstairs.

Sy and Remy are already in bed, ignorant of the fact their best friend almost died tonight. The boulder in my chest bangs again, persistent and unwilling to be ignored, but I try my best to swat it away as I wander in search of a place to release it. Somewhere that can thaw these rattling bones.

I go to the greatest source of warmth I know.

He’s resting on the left side of the bed when I push through his cracked door. He keeps it open for me now, ever since the first time he pulled me out of the darkness. I stand before his bed with chattering teeth and shivering lungs, my arms wrapped around my middle as if I’m still cradling Leticia’s skull, unwilling to give up the weight of her. A slice of light from the window reveals that Archie is asleep in my usual spot, curled into a tight ball of white fuzz against my pillow.

“It’s after midnight,” comes Sy’s deep, rumbling voice. When I say nothing, he sits up, hand shooting out to flick on his lamp. “Where the fuck have you—” The words get bitten off when his eyes land on me, arm suspended halfway in its return to his body. Urgently, he asks, “What happened?”

But I’m too busy staring at his bare chest to answer—not that I could—the warmth of his bronze skin beckoning me closer. I press my knees into the bed and crawl up its length. It’s selfish, I know it is, to seek his heat, to climb into his lap, straddling his thighs and clutching his neck in a pitiful, greedy embrace.

He feels like a bright, roaring fire, the heat a welcome shock to the frigid cringe of my skin. Even though he’s stiff against me, arms held out to his sides in alarm, his body is so soft that I sink into him. The boulder bangs and crashes, and even if I wanted to hold it back, I couldn’t.

I bury my sob into his warm neck, shoulders heaving with the force of it. My cries surface like a wave crashing through a gate, guttural, body-wracking.

Sy’s voice rings out, sharp and dangerous. “Did Nick do something?”

I shake my head, a wretched sound yanked from my throat as I sob, clawing him closer. The truth would just confuse him, because I don’t even know who I’m crying for. Leticia, for being dead? Nick, for being alive? Me, for holding the grief of them when I’m not even entitled to it?

I feel Sy’s exhale against my temple, slow and measured, and then his arms slowly close around me. First against Nick’s jacket, and then more tentatively, dipping beneath it to engulf my waist.

His words come fiercely, in a voice that’s still thick with sleep. “Jesus, Lavinia. You’re fucking freezing.” His fingers tug at the jacket to remove it, but that would mean letting go of him, abandoning all this heat and softness, so I refuse.

Naturally, he doesn’t let me.

He pries my arms from around his neck, unmoved by the miserable sound of protest I make. “Come on. Just get this off…”

I gave myself to him once, that night in my old bedroom. I let him move and hold me, offered him a faith I didn’t feel, and he made me better, if not whole. I do it again, allowing him to strip the jacket from my shoulders, his palms rubbing warmth into my upper arms. I try to avoid his gaze, shielding my cries with the veil of my hair.

He brushes it back and ducks into my line of vision, giving me a glimpse of his furrowed brow. “Tell me what happened.”

I shake my head, but the moment I try to tell him something—anything, nothing—another wretched sound breaks free. Sy’s face collapses and he tugs me back into him, letting me wind my arms back around his neck.

He whispers, “I don’t know what to do.” But he tries, knitting his fingers into my hair. Sy cradles my head against his neck, letting me cry and clutch, and I don’t know how long it lasts, but it’s long enough that he must realize this is bigger than an awkward, rigid embrace in the middle of his rumpled blankets.

“Come on,” he says, voice firm and decisive as he lifts me from the bed. I follow because I couldn’t possibly not, sticking close to his heat as he draws me to his door. I hang onto his arm like it’s my only tether, and even though the sobs abate, my eyes still swim with the remnants. We walk through the living room, and then push through another door, and I neither realize nor care where he’s taking me until he reaches out to flick the light.

Remy makes a low, displeased sound into his pillow, and then rolls over to fix us with a disgruntled squint. “It’s not loud!” he snaps. Only then do I realize his music is playing, a quiet, desolate melody that tugs at the wound in my chest.

The annoyance instantly falls from his face when he sees us. There’s a pause as he watches us, the gears turning. “Nicky?”

Sy shrugs, saying, “No.” Quieter, with an edge of nervousness I’m not used to hearing from him, he tells Remy, “I don’t know what to do.”

Remy drinks me in, from the crown of my head to the soles of my shoes, and then rises to a sitting position. The sheets fall away to reveal he’s naked. He rakes his fingers through his tousled hair and lifts a hand to beckon us closer. Wordlessly, Sy leads me to him.

Inked fingers reach out to touch my waist, my ribs, my thighs, prodding the surface of my flesh with a pinched brow. Searching, it occurs to me. “She’s not hurt?”

“No,” Sy answers, shifting uncomfortably.

But then Remy looks up into my eyes, holding them just as tangibly as his hands hold my hips, and his forehead smoothes. “Yes, she is.”

“What?” Sy’s eyes scan me. “Where?”

“She’s fucking screaming with yellow.” Remy’s mouth flattens to a grim line. “It’s not the kind of hurt you can see, Sy. I’m going to take this off.” He says the last part to me, as soft as a feather, lifting my shirt over my head. I’m not surprised when his inked fingers dip into the waistbands of my jeans next, popping the fly. If anything, I’m glad to be rid of them when he shucks them down, as if some part of the crypt may have clung to my clothing like a foul odor, following me home. Remy leaves my bra and underwear, peering up into my eyes as he pitches forward to kiss the tattoo beside my hip. “Come here.”

He leads me into his bed. Remy has a good mattress, surely paid for with his father’s money, and when I settle into the middle of it, it’s still warm from his body heat. Propped on an elbow, he drags the blanket over me, his fingers touching my jaw, turning me to look into his green eyes. It’s uncomfortable, the knowledge that I’m too bare to hide from him, that I’ve brought all this rot into a place that’s become safe for me, that I would tell him everything that’s rending my insides to ribbons if my vocal cords would just work.

Instead, I turn into him, seeking his warmth.

“She wants me,” he says, thumb brushing the wet skin beneath my eye, “But she needs you.” He swings his gaze to Sy, jerking his head in invitation.

It’s a relief to feel the room bathed in darkness again, to feel Sy’s weight behind me, sliding beneath the blankets, skin hot against my back. It’s better to be pressed between them as they settle, Remy’s hand never leaving my cheek, catching my tears like raindrops before they can dampen his designer pillow.

Sy hovers behind me, close enough to feel his flesh, but far enough to be dissatisfying. The whisper he pitches to Remy is almost too quiet for me to hear over the rushing in my ears. “Like this?”

Remy’s hand leaves my cheek to reach behind me. He grabs Sy’s wrist and drapes it over my waist. “Like that.”

Sy’s fingers twitch before dipping around, pulling me up tight to his chest.

Yes.

Just like this.

For the first time since stepping into the crypt, my muscles give, crashing into a relaxed state with all the grace of an elephant on rollerblades. In the midst of it, I find myself able to offer two words.

“I’m sorry.”

I feel Remy’s lips against mine without seeing, the dark too thick, too obstructive. “I forgive you.”

He thinks I’m apologizing for the lie. I never would. Given the chance, I’d do it all the same, with so few options available to me. The lie is nothing compared to what I’m apologizing for now. There was a time when they were four, and someone took Tate away from them, just as someone had taken Leticia away from me, and just as someone had nearly taken Remy.

Nick could have died tonight.

That’s what I think about as I let sleep drag me under. I’ve lived so long without any choices that I’ve forgotten the havoc they bring. To choose is a freedom.

The freedom to win.

The freedom to lose.

Despite the fact we walked out of the crypt with the information we wanted, hearts beating, lungs pumping, it doesn’t feel like there are any victors.

Not tonight.