AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He’s so disgusting, I can’t believe he’s a King here.”
“Birthright?” I offer, still hyper-aware of everyone’s attention, no matter how they try to mask it. Eva shakes her head no.
“It doesn’t work like that. Their families play a major role, yes. They all need to be some kind of royalty, and have a long tradition of running big businesses, of ruling the world, basically. But they also need to be individually badass, beyond human, if you know what I mean.”
I slow down to a trudging pace as it dawns on me.
That’s right. Eva must have been debriefed about the Kings when she started out as a professor here. We just never talked about it before because the Kings were so far out of our league, like stars on the firmament, that there wasn’t any point to even discussing them. We weren’t among the giggling fan girls that jumped and whisper-screamed whenever they threw a glance in their direction. I wasn’t supposed to be one of the girls ready to suck Sade’s dick under the stairs without asking for anything in return but the honor of it. As much as I craved him, I had more sense than that, and stuck to my fantasies. The fact that I ended up on his radar still feels surreal.
And being on their radar is like having a spotlight on you the entire fucking time. The attention this begets me is overwhelming, and it’s not just because I’ve become Afterparty Justine. I’ve piqued the interest of a mega starboy, that’s why the other students are so intrigued. They’re wondering what’s so special about me, a nobody, that he picked me of all girls.
“What is it then?” I press. “What makes a King, exactly?”
Eva throws a look around, then picks up pace.
“Not here,” she whispers.
We talk about all kinds of nothings until we reach the back alcoves.
We find Annie in our usual alcove, a gothic looking tourette in the wall padded with a circular cushioned wooden bench. A high window through which you can easily imagine ghosts wafting in at night rises from the ancient-looking stone nearby. The library at Norton King’s was built over two centuries ago–when the families of today’s Kings first came here. It’s one of my favorite places in the world, or at least it would be, under less tense circumstances.
The sight of Annie sitting at the table with her legs folded under her and typing away furiously on her laptop seems anachronistic, however quaint. Those big black-rimmed glasses hang heavy on her fine, Barbie-doll nose, her eyes wide behind them and filled with the biggest intelligence I’ve ever seen. The pretty nerd girl with a dirty mouth, sunken in her studies.
Eva and I slide onto the arched bench next to her, our backs to the window. Annie looks up once, then back at her laptop, then her fingers halt and her eyes fly up again.
“Justice!” she chirps, pushing those huge glasses up her tiny nose as if to see me better. “You’re out and about again, girl!” She throws her arms around me, and I hug her back, even though I wince from the bruised feeling between my legs.
“Good Lord, the relief,” she says in that sweet accent of hers as she releases me. “Lying to someone to their face like I did with your daddy is shit. So glad I don’t have to do it anymore.”
“Well, you weren’t exactly lying,” I offer. “I was fine and safe at Mel’s, I just needed some time for myself, and you helped me get that need met.” Okay, I should stop talking now and gulp down the knot in my throat.
I explained the roses and burnt paper to the guards and Mel’s parents the next day as one of my own feats during the night. They didn’t poke further, considering what I’d been through, and wrote it off as a form of catharsis. I got evasive when they asked where I’d been before the guards found me sleeping soundly in my room.
Sade wiped all of the other traces of what happened between us at Mel’s place, but I still feel like it’s written all over my face. It’s the reason why I’ve been staying away from the girls these past few days. If anyone can read me like an open book, it’s this bunch of sherlocks. They didn’t get into Norton King’s because there’s anything normal about their brains. These women may be mere mortals on the outside, but on the inside? They’re freaking geniuses. Especially Annie, she’s a world-class brainiac.
I have to tread carefully around them, lest they discover my secret–that, only a few days after I ran to them whining that two guys used me, I came all over the masked man’s mouth and cock at the house. Mel doesn’t know that he violated her family’s premises that night, which is why it’s a small mercy from the universe that she’s not here now. She’s got two classes in a row on Roman Law and she wouldn’t miss those if her life depended on it.
“We were talking about the Kings?” I nudge Eva, diverting Annie’s focus and avoiding landmines.
“Yes.” Eva glances at her watch before she settles in her seat. One of the golden nuggets we’ve learned at Norton King’s–don’t carry your phone around unless you absolutely have to. They are permanent surveillance devices, the instrument of the devil, and should never be trusted, so she always relies on her watch to check how much time she can take from her busy schedule.
“Wait, you’ve got intel on the Kings?” Annie whispers, closing the lid of her laptop and leaning in closer over it. With how nerdy she is, I’m pretty sure the device is secure.
Eva nods, confirming what I thought about having been debriefed. “All professors who work here receive specific instructions about the Kings, especially how to behave around them.” She shrugs a shoulder. “I mean, we do remain professors and can slam their grades, no consequences will come out of that, but we are to stay out of their way outside of class.”
“A rule you just broke for me downstairs, with Dogg,” I put in with a frown, growing worried.
“It’s not like we can’t tell themanything,” she says. “This is, after all, an elite university, on par with Harvard and others of its caliber. The only way to keep that status is not to let your students or their powerful families intimidate or influence the professors. The university is sort of like sacred ground, neutral territory. These people may run the world outside of its perimeter, but here they have to play by the rules. At least in the academic sense.”
Annie lets out a low whistle, looking as if she’s just had an epiphany. “Run the world. That’s such a big thing to say. Not that I doubt what you’re saying. It’s just...” She doesn’t need to spell it out. We all know. She’s here on a scholarship for brainiacs. Like me, from one day to the next, she woke up in a whole new world that she didn’t even imagine existed before.
Eva nods, leaning back against the cushioned, arched bench and folds her arms over her chest.
“The kind of power that these people wield, it’s hard to wrap one’s head around it,” she says. “It’s beyond fashion brands, oil princes and even bankers. They own the entire financial sector, they configure the entire economy, and they even control wars.” Her eyes fly over to me like she knows I’ll want to hear this. “We were talking birth rights earlier. Your Sade? He didn’t have one to become a King. His and Micah’s adoptive father, Duke Romano Royales, is the one who brought that right into the family, and passed it on when he adopted them.”
“But Romano’s family was broke,” Annie puts in, confident in the gossip she heard from Mrs. Jones, her aunt. She often refers to the woman as the information bureau but, frankly, I believe that’s an offense to Mrs. Jones. She’s the Pentagon Intelligence. “How can someone who’s broke run the world?”
“That was indeed an unusual turn of events,” Eva says. “Apparently, warlords from the Far East took advantage of Romano’s father’s addictions to take control over his money and connections. So Romano was forced to inherit his way back to riches, so to say. He needed control over someone else’s money the way others had taken control over his. So he went after a rich heiress–also from Norton King’s, I might add–who was pregnant before marriage. He started courting her just days after the baby’s father died.”
