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“As I should. Especially since Iakov’s only sin was to do me a favour and look after my ungrateful brat of a sister.”
“Ungrateful brat?” She raises an eyebrow. “Sorry for not kissing the floor at your feet because you decided to get your friend to spy on me.” Before I can reply to remind her we’ve already had this argument, she adds, “Anyway, I’m pretty sure your Iakov would rather spend Christmas in our nice house and the Ritz in Paris than live in that horrible shithole in St Petersburg waiting for his dad to smash his face in.”
A horrible lurching feeling sinks through me, like suddenly falling into a sludge of ice-cold mud. It’s not a feeling I’ve felt often, but it’s exactly the same feeling I got when Theodora told me she couldn’t be happy around her parents. For a second, I can do nothing but stare at Zaro. She frowns at me, and then her eyes widen, and then her face drops.
For the first time in a very long time, a look of true devastation and regret darkens her features.
“Oh. You don’t know?”
I don’t even know what to say.
The sad, appalling truth is that I don’t even know what I don’t know. When it comes to the Young Kings, our friendship is a thing with its own set of rules. We party together, we hang out. We’re closer to each other than to anybody else in Spearcrest.
But our friendship is like a ghost tethered to a house. Once we leave Spearcrest, our friendship becomes ephemeral. At most, I’ll text Evan and Sev. Iakov is too busy, and I dare not even imagine what Luca gets up to when he’s not limited by the restraints of being on school grounds.
Those of us who want to talk about our personal lives, our family lives, or our holidays, do. Those of us who wish to keep our privacy, do. We don’t push one another for intimate details—we don’t have that kind of friendship.
If anything, some of us go out of our way to keep secrets, like Evan falling in love with his prefect or the way Sev quietly obsesses over the fiancée he claims to hate.
Or me hiding Zaro from everyone.
So why shouldn’t Iakov have secrets of his own?
Except that my secrets are harmless. Iakov’s bruises and scars are as much part of him as his tattoos and black combat boots—but I never really questioned them before. I’ve seen Iakov on nights out, I know how bloodthirsty he can get once the night gets dark and there’s more vodka than blood running through his veins.
But who am I kidding? Assuming that Iakov brought those injuries on himself was the easy assumption, the safe assumption. The assumption that holds me the least accountable for not giving a shit about my friend.
“He told you about this?” I ask Zaro.
She seems genuinely crestfallen about accidentally revealing what she thought I already knew about Iakov, and that makes me feel so much worse.
“No.” She shakes her head. “No, but it—well, it was so obvious. He’d disappear for a weekend to go see his dad or do a job for him and then come home looking like meat. I asked him about it one time, half-joking, half-wishing he’d deny it, but he didn’t. He just shrugged and said his dad was angry at him. God, what an arsehole. Makes you think how nice we have it with ours, right?”
I stare at her. The cold, muddy feeling inside me spreads. I’m almost nauseous with it.
“I never knew,” I say. “I never thought to ask.”
“Don’t say anything,” she says quickly. She squishes the rest of her cigarette against the marble bench she’s sitting on, tosses it inside the bush of rhododendrons behind her and sprays herself with a bottle of Miss Dior. Then she stands and rushes to me, grabbing my hand. “Please, Zach. Don’t say anything to him. I don’t want him to think—” She shakes her head and waves her hand impatiently. “Just don’t say anything, alright?”
“No, Zaro, I’m not going to ambush my friend and ask him all about his abusive father,” I say drily. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “You don’t need to snap at me. It’s not my fault you don’t communicate with your friends.”
I glare at her, even though I can’t deny that she may have a point.
“If this is going to be a respite from his shit family,” I tell Zaro as we leave the pavilion, “can you at least be a little more polite towards him? I’m being deadly serious, Z. Make an effort.”
“Ugh. I told you, he doesn’t mind! But fine. In the spirit of Christmas… I’ll stop calling him dog names.”
“You call him dog names? On a regular basis?”
“It’s an inside joke,” Zaro says unconvincingly.
“You’re the worst.”
She rolls her eyes and scampers away from me.
MyconversationwithIakov,much later that night, also sees me enduring the stench of cigarettes.
