KINGS OF LOCKDOWN
Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep
Book 2
Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti
This book is dedicated to toilet paper.
May we never take you for granted again…
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Welcome to Everlake Preparatory School.
This series is set in the fictional U.S. state of Sequoia and centres around a pandemic similar, but more extreme than the coronavirus.
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Contents
DEDICATION
EVERLAKE MAP
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
I didn’t know if the stench of bleach or smoke was worse, but both clung to me in equal parts as we stood in the woods, watching the bonfire burn down to embers in the grave I’d dug for Tatum.
The memory of spending hours out here digging this hole seemed separate to me somehow. Yeah, I could remember the way my muscles had bunched and burned and trembled with fatigue as I’d driven the shovel into the soil over and over. I could remember the way my shirt had clung to my body as I was coated with sweat and how dirt had clogged beneath my fingernails. The way the damp soil had smelled and how the sky had gone from dark to light as I worked. The pain of blisters that formed and burst and bled along my palms while I tried to make the agony in my body match what was in my heart. All of that was clear as day. But the rage I’d felt towards Tatum? The sense of betrayal, the hurt, the hatred? If there was one thing killing this asshole had taught me, it was that blaming her for my mother’s death wouldn’t help me deal with my grief. Saint had told me to find an outlet for my rage, but if killing this scumbag hadn’t made me feel any better, then I knew hurting Tatum wouldn’t either.
After the students had gotten over the excitement of putting those thieving scumbags back in their places, Monroe had sent them all back to their dorms and told them to isolate themselves for forty eight hours. Everyone had been exposed to outsiders now and Tatum wasn’t the only one who had come into contact with someone who was possibly infected. He’d set the rest of the staff the task of delivering enough food for the duration to each dorm and then told them to isolate themselves too. The added bonus was that none of them would be out and about to see what we were up to.
While he’d organised that, the three of us had brought Tatum back to The Temple and Saint had surprised all of us by giving her the use of his room so that she could isolate herself from us. We’d all stripped, showered and smothered ourselves in hand sanitiser until it made our eyes burn and then the bleaching had begun.
Saint’s OCD had never come in so handy. He picked out any and every little thing that the intruders had left behind and we tossed it all in a trash bag before he moved on to cataloguing everything they’d touched from memory alone.
We’d lost two hundred and seventeen rolls of toilet paper. But he’d counted one hundred and eighty four amongst the stuff that we’d recovered up by the main gates. Twenty six had been ruined beyond use which left seven unaccounted for. And I honestly thought Saint was going to crack a tooth with how hard he ground his teeth about that. There was food and cash missing too, alongside a few other random things that the intruders had clearly thought held value. We’d recovered most of it before they could escape, including our Xbox and a few expensive watches. Luckily, most of the stuff with real value had been in the safe anyway so we hadn’t taken much of a hit all in all.
Tatum sat up in Saint’s room, her legs hanging between the railings which fronted the balcony as she looked down at us while we worked.
I wasn’t going to think about the fact that she might be contaminated. I wasn’t going to give it a moment’s thought. Because I’d seen what the Hades Virus could do. I knew too well. And I wasn’t going to watch it happen to anyone I cared about ever again.
Saint had cleaned his room while Tatum showered in the en-suite and he even stripped the bed and made it up fresh for her. Someone else might have mistaken his thoroughness for caring, but I doubted that came into it much if at all. He just couldn’t stand the idea of anyone other than us being in his private space and he needed to scrub the entire place clean before he’d satisfy his need to feel that he was in control of it again.
Kyan had set the TV playing episode one of The Walking Dead and angled it so that Tatum could watch from the seat she’d made herself at the top of the stairs where she’d curled up with Saint’s comforter around her. That asshole had hit her head hard enough to give her a concussion so we’d left her with strict instructions not to go to sleep and Kyan had been messaging back and forth with her ever since we’d left her there alone to make sure she hadn’t dozed off.
Monroe had appeared around two am and together the
