“Well fuck all of you,” I said out loud.
“Move forward,” a voice hissed into my ear, and I recognized it immediately.
It was Nikita.
So it was safe to say that she did recognize me. As much as I wanted to turn and kick her ass for daring to pull a blade on me, I was trying to distance myself from trouble, not rush toward it, so I did as I was told. She reached around me and twisted the handle of the door to the classroom, pressing the blade a little more firmly against my side. I stepped forward. She pushed me forward, and when I was through the door, she retreated, shutting the door behind her.
“Fucking bitch,” I hissed.
“Well, that’s not any way to talk to an old friend.”
My heart dropped. I turned to the left, and the person I least wanted to see in the entire world was sitting on top of a desk in the back of the room. He was wearing a pair of peach-colored slacks, navy blue slip-on vans, and a white t-shirt with a navy blue jacket over it. For as much energy as I’d put into remembering Cherri, I’d put in that much energy or more trying to forget this guy.
He crossed his arms and smiled at me, and I turned to face him, crossing my arms as well. “Nathan. How did I not expect that you’d have commandeered the room like some sort of Abercrombie and Fitch Godfather?”
His resulting chuckle was full of malice. “How did I not expect that you’d show up here looking like a cutout from Criminal’s Digest?” he spat back.
“Good to see you’re still a snobby asshole,” I hissed. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
He laughed. “Ah, you’re still as petulant as ever, Deon.”
I smirked. “That makes two of us.”
“So tell me, dear brother of mine,” Nathan started, and I could have gone the rest of his life without him reminding me, “how was prison?”
5
Deon
Looking through the small window that each classroom’s door had, I could see that Nikita was standing in a way that would prevent anyone from seeing in.
“Scared?” Nathan asked.
A chuckle escaped through my lips before I could stop it. “I spent the last four years of my life in prison. Two of those in adult prison. My cellmate was a serial murderer. Your punk ass couldn’t scare me if you were twice your size and holding a blowtorch.” The truth was, if Nathan tried to pull something, I wouldn’t hesitate to body slam him through one of these desks, whether he was my brother or not. The plausible deniability of the fact that no one would see that was only sweetening the pot.
The arrogant smile on Nathan’s face faded. “You shouldn’t underestimate what I could do to you at the drop of a dime if I wanted to.”
“Is that right? Tell me, how exactly are you going to hurt me when I have nothing to lose?” I asked.
“Nothing?” Nathan asked. “Are you sure? There’s not a single thing you could stand to lose?”
Cherri immediately came into my mind. She and my mom were the only people in my life that I cared about, and my mom was beyond capable of taking care of herself. She’d stood up to the Loches once before and won, and if she had to, she could do it again. Cherri was tough as nails, always had been, but Nathan didn’t know the depth of our relationship. Even if Nikita had already told him that she saw us talking during homeroom, he didn’t know how I felt about her. If Cherri truly was involved in The Royal Court now, that inevitably meant that she and Nathan ran in the same circle. The last thing she needed was for me to give Nathan any fuel to dislike her or cast her out. The less he knew about my history with Cherri, the better.
“I can’t think of anything someone like you could take away from me,” I said. “I’ll admit, I’m mildly impressed by the fact that you even have the teachers under your thumb, but I think you and I both know that it’s your last name that scares them much more than your first.”
Nathan’s upper-lip curled into a scowl. “Everything I have, I worked for,” Nathan said. “Everyone here bends to my will because of me and no one else.”
“Sure, bud.”
“Don’t forget, we’re cut from the same cloth. Everything you hate about him is in you somewhere,” Nathan said.
My hands were balled into fists before I could stop them. “That man has nothing to do with me,” I said. “You think spending a year trying to turn me into another one of his carbon copies is going to give me some sort of restored faith in him? For my mom raising me by herself for ten years, that shit was barely a blip on the fucking radar, and now…”
I fanned my arms out to either side of myself, flashing the several tattoos I’d acquired over the last four years. One of my mom’s name, written in beautiful script up the inside of my left forearm. The letters of my mom’s last name, my last name, Keane, on the backs of my fingers on my left hand. The scaly viper, whose tail started just above my right elbow and coiled around my arm down to where its head was sitting in the palm of my right hand—a sigil of the gang I stuck with in the adult prison.
“I don’t think he’s going to be rushing to take any candids with me anytime soon.” I looked Nathan up and down. “You’ve got the carbon copy shtick down pat, though.”
Nathan’s lips pursed as he glared at me. “I’m nothing like him.”
The only thing Nathan and I had in common was that we both hated our father. We were two sides of one coin, and the only reason Nathan
