Kings of Lockdown: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep Book 2)

by Caroline Peckham

  “You fucking dickbag, good-for-nothing son of a bitch!” I screamed as he did a wheelie, one hand slamming down on my ass to keep me in place. When the front wheel landed again, we sailed downhill and the wind had mercy and blew my skirt back down to cover my panties, but fuck if it did anything to lessen my fury. My hate.

  This bastard, this absolute piece of shit bastard!

  He pulled off of the path and the rain stopped drenching me as he parked the bike under a tree. I got up, ripping the helmet off and smacking him around the head with it. He snatched it from my hands, tossing it to the ground as he swung his leg over the seat and came after me. There was a demon living in his eyes and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I turned and ran, racing for the path as I realised we’d arrived at the Willow Boathouse.

  His heavy footfalls pounded after me, but I was quicker, I just had to put some distance between us. Fuck him and his stupid fucking face.

  My foot slipped on the wet grass and I cried out as my ankle twisted at an awkward ankle and I hit the ground on my knees.

  “Fuck,” I hissed and Kyan plucked me up like I weighed as much as a feather, tossing me over his shoulder as he carried me into the boathouse.

  It was a state of the art place with gleaming white walls and three ports where rowing boats and jet skis sat bobbing in the water. Lined up on one wall were kayaks and oars, all perfectly aligned as if Saint had personally overseen the job. Kyan took an iron spiral staircase up to the second level while I pounded my fists into his back, his footsteps ringing off of the metal as he made it to the top and pushed through a glass door.

  He carried me to one of the rattan ottomans that filled a corner of the room, gently placing me down on it and dropping onto the floor in front of me on his knees. He took my foot into his lap, peeling off my shoe then sliding his fingers up my calf to grip the top of my knee-high sock. He refused to meet my eye and as much as I wanted to kick him for what he’d done back in the library, my ankle was still throbbing and I didn’t think it would do it any good. I still had the other foot though…

  He peeled off my sock, his rough fingers trailing against my skin and making my heart race as he skimmed his thumb along the arch of my foot.

  “It’s fine,” I said throatily, lifting my head to look around the room.

  It was an incredible lounge with a boat theme, a life ring hanging on the wall between incredible artwork of the lake. The far end of the room was full of shelves with boating equipment filling every space in neat piles, and there was a huge table with a model of the Everlake campus on it.

  I winced as Kyan ran his thumb over my ankle, putting pressure on my Achilles’ tendon.

  “What are you doing?” I asked irritably despite the fire in my veins which told me how much I liked his touch, even if it did come with a pinch of pain. But everything about Kyan always hurt me, so I wasn’t surprised.

  “I’m tending your wounds, like you tended mine.” He lifted his eyes and I forgot to hate him for a full heartbeat. Jesus fucking Christ how does he always get so deep under my skin? “Where does it hurt?”

  “Everywhere,” I whispered before I realised I’d said it out loud.

  He frowned, rubbing his thumb into the tendon and I winced again.

  “There,” I agreed, wanting to move on from what I’d just said. Because it was horrifyingly true. He made me hurt in every corner of my body, from the tips of my toes to the deepest regions of my soul. Kyan Roscoe made each piece of me feel bruised.

  As he massaged my ankle, it started to feel better and I sighed, dropping my head so my soaking hair fell forward to frame my face. “You shouldn’t do that, Kyan, not if you don’t want me to run again.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” he taunted. “Prey is no fun caught. I like it alive and fucking kicking.”

  I shifted my other foot, kicking him in the leg with a smirk. “That so?”

  “That’s so,” he agreed, continuing his surprisingly gentle work with my ankle.

  “I feel like the most typical blonde bitch in the world right now,” I huffed. “Running away from a psycho only to fall and twist my ankle.”

  “Lucky I didn’t have my Scream mask and butcher’s knife.”

  “You like old school movies?” I asked with a note of laughter at his joke, not admitting that I liked them too.

  “Nineties horror is fucking hilarious,” he mused. “Doesn’t rival the gore of today though.”

  “I don’t like gore.” I wrinkled my nose.

  His thumb pushed a little harder into my tendon and it didn’t hurt this time. “You can avoid stuff like that all you like, but I prefer to look life in the eye and show it that it doesn’t scare me.”

  “That’s not real life,” I tutted.

  “Blood and gore and death are as real as it comes, baby. No one wants to look behind the walls of a slaughter house, but they all queue up to buy their freshly packaged meat at the market. If people faced the truth, do you think they’d eat it?”

  “Well I don’t eat it.” I kicked him again. “Because knowing the truth is the same as seeing it.”

  “Not for most people,” he said, his eyes burrowing into mine like he wanted to crawl inside my head. “What makes you different?”

  “Who knows? Maybe I’m a fairy from a faraway land.” I leaned back, my hair dripping onto the rattan either side of me.

  “Well you’re a bit late picking up this lost boy, Tinkerbell. Wish you’d taken me to Neverland long before I had to grow the fuck up.”

  Those words cut into my soul and I reached out to cup his cheek. I knew he’d never tell me about his life outside of Everlake, but it was clear how affected he was by whatever life had thrown at him. I couldn’t even picture him as a young boy. I could more clearly imagine him crawling directly out of hell as a fully grown man, tattoos, muscles and all.

  My mind drifted back to what he’d done to Deepthroat and I pulled my hand away from his face, my stomach knotting.

  “Why do you torture them?” I asked coolly as he placed my foot down on the floor. I pressed my weight into it and it felt good enough to walk on. Probably run too if I had to.

  He stood up, holding out a hand to me. “I’ll tell you, but I wanna show you something first.”

  I frowned, eyeing the same hand which had just healed my ankle, reluctantly sliding my palm into it. He tugged me upright, waiting as I tested my foot until I nodded to say it was alright. I leaned down, taking off my other shoe and peeling off my soaked sock before he led me toward a sliding glass door across the room. He unlocked it, pushing it wide and guided me onto a covered balcony that looked out over the lake.

  The rain was still pouring, rushing down over the edge of the overhanging roof which sheltered half of the balcony. There was a large, white net hammock strung up to one side of it and Kyan guided me to it, falling down into it and pulling me with him. I was forced to press against his side and lay my leg over his. He kept one foot out of it, using it to push off the floor and make us swing back and forth.

  His arm was locked around my shoulders and he took hold of my hair, tugging to make me look up. Above us on the ceiling was a collection of wooden arrows, hundreds of them, all decorated with beautiful coloured feathers as they pointed in varying directions, crammed together across the roof. At the heart of them were words in curling lettering.

  May your arrow fly to the ends of the earth,

  May it taste all the colours of the sky.

  May it lead you to your wildest adventures.

  And may it always point you home.

  “It’s beautiful,” I breathed. “Who made it?”

  “The quote is by Cedric Forsythe, the founder of the school. The arrows have been added for years by students who graduate from Everlake. It’s a tradition.”

  “I love it,” I whispered, curling closer to him as the cool air swirled around us.

  Silence fell between us and it became heavy as both of us were too stubborn to break it.

>   I sighed eventually, prodding him. “So? Are you going to explain yourself?”

  He kicked the floor again so we swung faster in the hammock, refusing to look at me.

  When he didn’t speak, I used his chest to push myself up, a huff of annoyance leaving me. “Forget it.”

  He dragged me back down, forcing me under his arm again as he refused to let me leave. “Here’s the truth then, but remember what I said about that. It’s going to change everything.”

  “Show me the slaughter house, Kyan,” I insisted and he caught my chin, angling my face up to look at him so I couldn’t escape the sincerity in his gaze as he spoke his next words.

  “Deepthroat used to be one of the popular girls. She hung out with Pearl and Georgie and the rest of the mindless rich girls who think their shit don’t stink. She had a thing for me, always did. She used to run around after me at parties, always getting too handsy even when I told her point blank I wasn’t interested. Then one night she slipped something in my drink. I was fucked already, but I’m never too wasted to know what I’m putting my dick in.”

  My heart stopped working as his words fell over me like a ton of bricks. She roofied him??

  He took a breath as he went on, releasing his grip on my chin, but I kept looking up at him all the same. “She managed to get me back to her room and Blake and Saint didn’t know where I was. I never hang around parties all that long, so they probably thought I’d gone off to seek a fight. But not this night. I have no fucking memory of lying down on her bed, but if you haven’t noticed, I have a truckload of willpower, so when my brain kicked back into gear for half a second, I focused on what the fuck was happening.”

  “What was happening?” I whispered, knowing I wouldn’t like the next words that came out of his mouth.

  “She had my jeans pulled down and my boxers too,” he gritted out. “Her hand was wrapped around my fucking cock as she opened her mouth to suck me off. I wasn’t even hard, I was practically in a coma.”

  “Fuck, what?” I gasped, my mind spinning as I dropped eye contact with him, going from shocked to furious in half a second. That bitch, that fucking bitch!

  Kyan grabbed my chin again, making me look at him. “I managed to get her off of me and pull up my fucking boxers, but she kept trying to seduce me, combing her fingers through my hair as I tried to hold onto the inch of clarity I had left in my brain. I was going to pass out, I could feel it. I was about a minute away from losing all fucking consciousness, but I couldn’t let that whore do whatever she was gonna do to me. I tried to get up but she straddled me and all I could smell was her expensive perfume and the scent of strawberry daiquiris on her breath.” His upper lip curled back and a tear slipped from my eye. I was so angry, I was shaking and Kyan held me closer as he felt my reaction. “I managed to shove her off of me, I think I slammed her into the wall but I dunno if I just want to think I did or if that’s a real memory. Either way, I made it to my feet, ripped open her door and stumbled away before she could drag me back inside. Thankfully, I made it back to The Temple before I passed out for good.”

  Darkness ebbed and flowed through my veins as I hungered for the end of this story.

  “The next day, I told Blake and Saint what had happened and Saint was ready to get her ass expelled and the cops hauling her off to juvie. But I didn’t want that. I wanted her here where I could torture her daily. So we went to her room and frightened the hell out of her, cast her into the Unspeakables and have put in place very careful plans to ruin her reputation and her life the moment she graduates.”

  “Like what?” I asked, a sick satisfaction filling me at the idea.

  “Like us anonymously buying up half the shares in her family’s company so before she tries to step in as Little Miss CEO after graduation, we can sell them to her competitors and rip out her future from under her feet. We’ve planned out a bunch of shit to systematically destroy her life after she leaves this place. Within a year she’ll be broke, homeless, have her reputation in tatters, and if I get my way, her family will disown her too.”

  I rested my hand on Kyan’s pounding heart, leaning up to press a kiss to his cheek as another fat tear rolled down my skin to collect in my hair.

  “Don’t cry, baby,” he said in a hoarse voice. “She’s not worth your tears.”

  I’m crying for you, idiot. But I didn’t manage to say the words out loud. They were too raw, too real. And maybe Kyan was right. Maybe I didn’t like the truth after all. But that didn’t mean I didn’t need to hear it.

  “Ask me,” he said, his voice gruff.

  I took a steadying breath, knowing exactly what he meant. “Squits?” I whispered.

  “That piece of shit was going around sneaking laxatives into the meals of anyone he took a dislike to. People all over the school would randomly fall so ill, they nearly shit a lung. The dosages were high. Too fucking high. It wasn’t just some joke. A guy even ended up in hospital for it. He targeted the popular kids, jealous I guess. He snuck into a party at the Oak Common House one night, put laxatives in a bowl of punch that Pearl and her friends had made. Blake saw him thankfully. And holy fuck, did he give him hell. He made him drink every last drop of that punch and exposed him for the scumbag he was. Squits didn’t make it to the bathroom by the time he was about to blow, diving into the cloakroom instead. Suffice to say, Saint still has not forgiven him for ruining his coat, or for any of the other awful shit he did.”

  I didn’t feel cold anymore. I felt too hot with this knowledge that I’d been befriending Deepthroat and Squits for weeks, felt sorry for them, defended them. “What about the others?” I whispered, fearing what he was going to say, but needing to know too.

  It turned out Pigs had bought a couple of piglets onto campus to scare some girl who’d rejected his advances and planned to leave their mutilated bodies outside her door. By the time he got to the girls’ dorms, one of the cheerleaders had tipped off the Night Keepers after spotting Pigs sneaking into their accommodation. Kyan had beat him within an inch of his life and the piglets had been taken to a sanctuary in Saint’s fucking car no less.

  Pirate had been bullying a scholarship student into giving him her work, forcing her to try and redo the essays before each of her deadlines. She ended up losing her spot at the school for being unable to get her own work in on time. And all the while Pirate got straight As on every paper he took from her, essentially ruining her life for the sake of his fucking laziness.

  Freeloader had apparently ridden through this school on a scholarship even though her parents were wealthy doctors. She’d given her auntie’s name as her guardian in her application, making out she couldn’t afford the fees and fiddled the system, costing someone else their place at this school who actually needed the help to pay for it. Being on the school board, Saint’s mom had gotten wind of the truth, but had told her son there wasn’t much they could do about it now she was here. He had obviously disagreed. Freeloader was apparently coming to the end of her term as an Unspeakable though. For smaller crimes, the Night Keepers let them pay their dues then welcomed them back into society.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I snapped, fisting my hand in Kyan’s shirt as anger welled up in me. “Why didn’t you tell me!”

  More tears ran down my cheeks and Kyan lifted a hand to wipe them away but I smacked it aside, climbing out of the hammock and walking straight out into the rain.

  It chilled me to the bone, but it didn’t come close to cooling the fiery rage in me. I clutched the railing at the end of the balcony and screamed out at the lake, releasing my hate and pain into the storm. The people I’d fought for, sat with every day, encouraged and looked out for…they’d been nothing but monsters. Un-fucking-speakable monsters.

  My mind hooked on Bait and I turned around as I realised Kyan had never mentioned him, finding him right behind me, his shoulders slumped.

  “What about Bait?” I asked, my lower lip quivering. “What did he do?”

  Shadows co
iled through his eyes. “It stands for jail bait,” he growled. “He pressured a fourteen year old girl into having sex with him last year. He groomed her, got her to send him photographs of her body then told her he was considering giving them to a teacher because he was going to get into trouble if they were found. He manipulated her into thinking everything would be alright so long as she gave him what he needed and said he would get rid of the pictures for her if she just did as he asked. After she let him take her virginity, she realised he wasn’t going to stop harassing her. She finally came to us for help, I just wished she’d come fucking sooner. But she’d already asked to transfer schools. She said she was too afraid to go to the police and press charges, but she knew we’d take care of it. Those photos have now been destroyed and Bait will be punished always and fucking forever for what he did. We took our Night Keeper vow to protect everyone in this school, that wasn’t a lie, Tatum,” he said fiercely, his voice loud enough to battle the wind. “We don’t bully people who don’t deserve it. Not until…” He sighed, running a hand over his face to wipe the water away.

  “Not until me,” I finished for him and he nodded, hanging his head.

  My tears mixed with the rain, hot and cold, icy and burning. My heart crushed in my chest as I tried to take this all in. What it meant. How it changed things. Changed everything.

  “I’d say I’m sorry but that’s not really good enough, is it?” he growled, his eyebrows knitting together, his pain written into his rain-smattered face.

  “No,” I spat, stepping toward him. “It isn’t good enough, Kyan. None of it is good enough.” I slapped him, making his head wheel sideways.

  He looked back at me with dead eyes, his chin tilted down. “Better?”

  I shook my head, turning away from him again and staring out at the turbulent world which felt exactly like my heart. Nothing would make it right. Nothing could. Even getting my revenge wouldn’t take back what they did to me. How they’d treated me as badly as the Unspeakables. Worse maybe. Like I was deserving of all their hate in the same way they were. “You banded me in with them. Is that how you feel about me, Kyan? Are you as disgusted with me as you are with them? Do you think I’m as despicable as they are?”