AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Precisely why I’ll be there,” I grunt. “Let yourself out when you’re done. Cheers for breakfast.”
Then I’m out the door and heading across the street to the campus.
The “tonight” Noel is talking about is a meeting of the eight of us: myself, Noel, Thomas, Oliver, Braddock, Lars, Kristoff, and Maddox.
In the beginning, we were all mostly strangers—all first-year students here at Lords, with all manner of backgrounds. From wealth and privilege. From royal names and titles. But also from the streets and houses of crime—mafia, Bratva.
The common thread running through all of us was, and remains, Thomas. It was he who ended up being the lynchpin in this whole bizarre group that has somehow come to mostly call itself friends despite the different roads that led us here, and the different titles we bear.
It’s why he decided to name the group what he did. It was Thomas who said that in all of us, all eight of us, there are both kings and villains.
Yale University has the Skull and Crossbones. The University of Oxford has the absurdly pretentious-sounding Bullingdon Club. Lords College has us: the Kings and Villains.
The biggest difference between us and those other prats? You’ve heard of them.
You’ll never hear of the Kings and Villains.
Secret society sounds…stupid. Fellowship, as Thomas likes to call it, sounds ridiculous, like we’re playing some stupid fantasy game involving hobbits and elves or some shit.
To me, the group just…is. Eight men with their eyes on conquering the world, who found each other through various connections to one of their own.
We meet on Friday nights. And every third or fourth meeting, such as tonight, we have a fight night amongst ourselves. There’s no deeper message or meaning to it. It’s not because we’ve seenFight Clubtoo many times. It’s not some fucking blood oath or bullshit like that. Like the group, it just…is. We box, one round at a time, winner fights winner, until there’s only one left standing.
Normally, that last one standing is either Noel or Thomas. Noel, because his father was the relatively famous boxer Colin Ransom. Thomas, because despite his bookish accountant’s appearance, he can fight like the bloody devil.Ican fight. We all can. Braddock hits like a goddamn truck to the face, and Maddox is a fucking monster. Kristoff has almost certainly killed people with those hands of his. But Thomas, for all that he grew up privileged and gilded…he has one leg up.
He was trained to fight foryearsby Noel’s famous father, when he was the Ashford family’s personal trainer. That’s how the two boys became friends, actually. It’s also how—no disrespect intended—a guy like Noel, with the lack of money, influence, or power his family has, got into Lords College.
BecauseSirGeoffrey Ashford, Thomas’s father, took a shine to Noel right from the start. He always looked at him like a second son. Probably because hisactualsecond son, James, Thomas’s older brother, is a pretentious trust-fund douchebag. James will do nothing with his life, and his father knows it. Thomas and Noel, however, like the rest of us, will conquer it.
I duck into the faculty offices just as it starts to drizzle outside. My mind ticks, trying to recall the fight schedule this evening.
I grimace.
Fuck, I’m fighting Kristoff tonight. I want to smirk, wondering if Thomas did that on purpose—pitting the two criminally-connected ones of the group against each other. Me, the lowlands gangster, and Kristoff, whose way to Lords College has been paved with blood money, courtesy of his employer, the Bratva-connected oligarch Boris Tsavakov.
I’m still trying to calculate the best plan of attack for dodging that Russian motherfucker’s south paw, when Higgins opens his office door.
“Ah, Mr. Cross.”
“Mr. Higgins.”
He grins. Behind him, I can already see the paperwork he wanted to go over with me last week. It wasn’t school related. It wasbusinessrelated.
“Shall we?”
“Absolutely.”
* * *
Two hours and a very meaningful handshake later, I’m headed to my afternoon lecture. After that, I’m stepping outside again. It’s raining again as the sun is going down. I mentally tick off the schedule for the evening:
Home, to change. Then dinner with Thomas at Chesterford’s, our usual Friday night steak spot. And then to the Red Dragon pub, where we’ll first have a pint and then head through to the private back room to which only we hold the keys.
Through there, it’s down the stairs to the old sub-basement beneath the pub. And that’s where kings and villains will collide for the evening.
The rain is coming down harder as I jog across campus back to my townhouse. My head is down, my eyes stabbing at the dreary darkness ahead of me to find the next streetlight around the corner. When suddenly something small, drenched, and gasping comes slamming into me.
I snarl, gripping the person by the arms, ready to shove them away—or fight them, if they insist upon it. When suddenly, we both stumble under a streetlight, and the glint of it on her dripping wet, stricken face takes the very ground out from under me.
