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 four of us had headed down to the catacombs, wrapped the body in a tarp, mopped up the blood with towels he’d stolen from the laundry room and then carried everything out via the beach exit and up through the woods to this grave.
Saint and Kyan had exchanged a dark look when I showed them it which made me think I was in for a tongue lashing at some point, but the more urgent task of disposing of our problem had taken precedent for now.
Saint had returned to the catacombs to bleach everything again. He was such a clean freak that he even had a blacklight which he usually used to double check his cleaner had done a thorough job, but had come in really fucking handy for tracking down blood splatter.
The rest of us had doused the body in lighter fluid and Monroe was the one to strike the match. And then we spent the next few hours making sure we stayed upwind of the rancid smoke and kept feeding the fire until we were sure that as much of the evidence as possible had burned away.
So now, as the embers burned low and all that was left was the charred remains of bones which wouldn’t burn down, the four of us sat together and waited for the fire to go out.
“I never realised how easy it was to kill someone,” I muttered, breaking the silence we’d maintained for most of the night.
“I was well aware,” Saint deadpanned.
“Never thought I’d do it, though,” Monroe muttered.
“We did it for her,” Kyan growled. “There’s beauty in that.”
We al
l looked at each other for a long moment. Her. Tatum Rivers. The girl who’d changed everything. There were a lot of unspoken words hanging between the four of us about her. Because no matter what had passed between all of us and the girl we’d claimed for our own, it had led us all to a place where we were willing to kill for her. And there weren’t many people in this world who I could claim to care about like that.
None of us said anything else on the subject, leaving it there for later.
Aside from Saint barking orders and the odd question, the whole night had been a pretty quiet affair.
But as far as I could tell, we held our silence for different reasons. Saint was in OCD heaven. Never had control and compulsive cleaning been so important. I could practically see him creating an impossibly long list of things required to destroy all the evidence and the light in his dark eyes said he relished the challenge. I didn’t think he had particularly enjoyed killing the asshole, but I didn’t think he was affected much by it either. It wasn’t that he was a straight up psychopath – though I guessed a lot of people would beg to differ with me there – but with Saint it was more that he found it hard to care about people. He struggled with empathy to the point where I was fairly sure he didn’t have any. He struggled with sympathy because he tended to believe that the world dished things out to people who deserved them for not being strong enough to force another destiny. And he struggled with grief because he hadn’t had many people he cared about enough to grieve them. And he certainly didn’t think many people were worth grieving. Saint cared about himself first of all and then me and Kyan. That was it. Although I had to admit that Tatum seemed to be getting under his skin. And the way he’d instantly stepped in to stab this guy in solidarity with her made me wonder how much he was beginning to care for her.
Kyan was in his element here. He was violence embodied and was the most emotional about this whole thing out of us. Not emotional in the way you might expect someone to be – regret, panic, guilt – no, Kyan was amped up. He was a ball of energy. He’d spent most of the night pacing around the fire, collecting all the wood needed to stoke the flames almost single handedly with this crazy smile playing around his lips.
He was waiting for his next part in this with so much energy coiled in his muscles that I expected him to spring forward at any moment. Monroe had gotten a sledgehammer from the maintenance building to deal with the last of the bones and Kyan laid claim to it instantly. He’d wedged it against the dirt with the handle sticking up and was crouched with his chin resting on the top of it, looking to all intents and purposes like a mountain lion waiting to pounce.
I, on the other hand seemed to be the only one of us who was borderline freaking out about this whole thing. Was I wracked with guilt and regret over killing some deadbeat wannabe rapist when he’d been trying to hurt our girl? No. But was I envisioning some version of the future where police came, evidence was discovered and somehow we found ourselves locked up in a supermax for the rest of our miserable lives? Yeah. That thought had occurred. Repeatedly.
When I’d dragged Tatum up here with thoughts of killing her, I’d been out of my fucking mind with grief and heartache and so much fucking rage that it had consumed me. I’d cracked. I knew that now. It was the culmination of all the helpless, useless agony I’d been bottling up until it festered into something so much more potent. So much more dangerous.
I couldn’t even remember planning it. Something in me just broke and I lost it. But I knew exactly what had dragged me back, what had reached me through all the layers of pain and suffering and misery.
Tatum Rivers had called my name in the dark and I’d come crawling up out of it to worship at her feet. She might not have realised it yet, but she owned me now even more thoroughly than I owned her.
I’d killed for her. Fought for her. And now I wanted to be free for her too.
Monroe was the only one of our group who I couldn’t entirely figure out. He certainly didn’t look to be grieving or losing his shit, or appear really present here at all. Since we’d started to let the fire burn down, he’d taken a seat in the dirt and cast his eyes out over the trees and stayed in silence as he was lost to his own thoughts.
Whatever was spinning through his mind, he didn’t seem to be happy about it. His mouth was set in a savage slash across his face and his eyes narrowed to slits. But whatever was haunting him, he clearly had no intention of voicing it.
There was that saying about secrets. Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead. So how were five of us supposed to keep this hidden? Me, Saint and Kyan weren’t the ones I was concerned about. But Monroe? Tatum? We were bound together in brutality and death and I supposed I could only assume that the blood on our hands was enough to keep us all silent. But we needed to keep them close, stoke the flames of our bond as much as possible. Indoctrinate them into our group so deeply that they’d never want to leave.
When Tatum had made her vow to us, we’d told her it was for life but I hadn’t given much thought to that. Now I could see that it had to be the case. She was ours forever and we were hers too. There was only one way out of this circle of five. And I didn’t relish the idea of more death.
“Go get a rowing boat, Blake,” Saint commanded. “Bring it around to the shore by the catacombs entrance.”
I stood wordlessly, glancing at Kyan as he got to his feet too, hefting the sledgehammer into his grasp with a wicked smile on his face. I wondered if anyone else could see it was a mask. Not that I thought he was panicking on the inside. More like he was never really sure what to feel about anything anyway. His emotional range was limited at best. And sometimes I wondered if he’d ever fully recover from the horrors his family had subjected him to as he grew.
Saint was ready to clean this place with sulphuric acid and bleach just as soon as Kyan was finished his part. I just hoped that the janitors didn’t notice the sudden dent in their cleaning supplies.
I strode away through the trees, taking a deep breath of the fresh, morning air as I caught sight of the sun rising over the lake between the thick boughs.
It didn’t take me long to reach the Willow Boathouse and commandeer one of the rowing boats. The lapping of the deep blue water against the oars was soothing as I began to row and I fell into the rhythm of the movements with ease.
It was peaceful out on the water and each tug and pull of the oars worked like a balm on my racing heart.
Saint had thought of everything. We’d followed his instructions to the letter. Monroe had ensured that all of the staff and students were safely locked up tight in their rooms on the far side of campus so there was no chance of witnesses. We were on the home run.
The boat bumped up onto the sandy beach as I came ashore and Kyan strode from the trees to meet me. He had a battered-looking potato sack swinging from his fist and a dark grin on his face which said that everything was still going well.
He strode straight out into the water, wading towards me before tossing the sack inside and pushing the boat back out.
“Did everything go to plan?” I asked.
“Saint and Monroe are just washing down the last embers with the bleach and acid. Once they’re sure that’s done, they’ll fill in the hole and meet us back at the dock,” Kyan replied before hopping up into the boat with me.
I rowed us out towards the centre of the lake and Kyan pulled his shirt off as he leaned back and let the sun kiss his tattooed flesh.
“My heart hasn’t stopped racing since last night,” he said with a lazy smile on his face as he closed his eyes like we were just out on some leisurely boat trip. He sounded pretty damn thrilled about that statement.
“Do you think anyone will come looking for him?” I asked. Because really, that was the one hole in our plan.
“Naw. Merl was a nasty drunk and a fearsome asshole. He lived alone in a trailer out the other side of town and didn’t have a job. There were plenty of rumours about him breaking into homes all over town and stealing from the hardworking folk to
keep himself funded. Other than that, he’d show up for fight nights and either get shit faced or stay sober and fight for cash. He was a mean bastard when sober too. He’d come close to beating me in a fight once or twice. Ain’t no one gonna miss that sack of shit. My guess is they’ll assume he got a good haul from us here and took off with it. It could even be worth starting a rumour that a wedge of cash went missing so that the townsfolk assume he stole it and split. Either way, they won’t mourn him. Good riddance to bad rubbish and all that.” Kyan draped a hand over the side of the boat and let his fingers skim along in the water, looking so fucking relaxed it was untrue.
The knot in my chest loosened at his words. Kyan wasn’t one to bullshit me. If he thought someone gave a shit about the guy we’d killed, he’d say it. No point hiding from the truth of things. But it turned out piece of shit rapists didn’t end up with a whole lot of friends. And I couldn’t say I was too sad about that.
“This will do,” I said as I stopped rowing near the centre of the lake and looked out over the pristine water.
Kyan sat up and lifted the potato sack into his grasp. He shook the fine dust out of it which was all that was left of the man we’d killed. It scattered over the water and was soon swallowed by the gentle lapping of the waves.
I watched as Kyan pulled a lighter from his pocket and set the sack alight for good measure, the dry material flaring up instantly as he held it out over the water.
Kyan cursed as the flames licked his fingers, but gritted his teeth against the pain for another few moments before releasing his hold on the tiny corner he still held. The flames consumed that before it hit the water and Kyan dunked his burnt fingers into the lake to soothe them.
“It’s done,” he announced with a dangerous glint in his eyes.
“Just like that,” I agreed.
I started rowing back towards the Willow Boathouse where I could see Saint waiting on the pier with yet another bottle of bleach to clean the boat down. I had to wonder if I’d ever be able to smell that chemical odour again without thinking of this day. But maybe it was okay if I couldn’t. Because today was the start of something new.
Kings of Lockdown: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep Book 2) Page 1