The Kingmaker

by Ryan, Kennedy

  “I’m all set,” he finally speaks, a small quirk at the corner of his lips, “but thank you.”

  “You think you are.” She leans forward until I’m sure her poor neckline will rip open any minute now. “Ever had your dick sucked with Pop Rocks?”

  Berkeley coughs into his fist, but I detect the smile he’s hiding. “Excuse me?”

  “Pop Rocks,” she says with a smile wide enough to reveal a missing tooth near the back. “The candy. It’s one of those ‘kids, don’t try this at home’ kinda things. You need a professional for it.”

  “Um, I don’t . . . use professionals,” he says. “So I wouldn’t know.”

  She flicks a glance over at me and narrows her eyes. I narrow mine right back, a silent dare to mess with me. She rolls her eyes and stands with a flourish, making sure to run those gold-tipped talons over her body before walking across the room and sitting down beside another unsuspecting man.

  “Well, well, well,” she drawls to him. “Ain’t you something?”

  Berkeley makes a choked sound and I swing a glance back his way.

  “What are you laughing at?” I ask, even though my lips are twitching, too.

  “Pop Rocks,” he whispers, grinning. “Who knew?”

  We’re both sitting on the bench, leaned back, our shoulders shaking in silent laughter. Humor crinkles the edges of those beautiful eyes, and I’m suddenly sad I’ll probably never see this man again. I know it’s crazy. We’ve only shared a few words in not much more than an hour, but I’m the kid so often trapped between worlds, split in two and finding my place. On rare occasion, you come across someone who just gets you, and you don’t have to figure out your place. Wherever you are is okay.

  I think he could be a “wherever you are” person.

  His laughter fades, too, and I don’t know how long we stare at one another, but the seconds stretch into a perfect tension. Not uncomfortable at all. It’s a just-right tautness that draws between us and sends fireflies over my tingling skin, lighting me up.

  “Did your daddy know you were protesting today, Lennix?” Mr. Paul asks.

  His pointed question shatters the tension and scatters the fireflies. Berkeley blinks, looks away, and folds his arms over his chest. Mr. Paul flicks a suspicious, avuncular glance between Berkeley T-shirt and me.

  Wow. I think calling my elementary school teacher a cock blocker goes a little far since I’m barely flirting with this stranger, but still . . . did he have to bring up my “daddy?”

  “Uh, he knew I was speaking today, yes, sir,” I reply.

  Not exactly what he asked, and the look he gives me says he knows it.

  “Will your father be upset that you protested?” Berkeley T-shirt asks.

  “Probably.” I release a not-so-long-suffering sigh. “He’s super-protective since . . .” Since my mom disappeared.

  She left like she had a dozen times before, off to a protest in Seattle, and then . . . nothing. And ever since, my father has tried to roll me in bubble wrap and cotton, but I’m not having it. He’s right. This world is not a safe place, but playing it safe all the time is not how I make that better.

  “Sorry about your mom,” Berkeley says.

  I glance up to find sympathy darkening his eyes to forest green. I’d forgotten he would have heard me talk about her today.

  “Thanks.” I swallow the hurt and helplessness that lodge in my throat when I think about Mama. “Anyway, my father’s really protective now. This will probably get me grounded for weeks.”

  Man. Way to sound like a twelve-year-old in front of the finest man you’ve ever encountered in real life.

  “Grounded?” His dark eyebrows sky rocket. “Exactly how old is the Girl Who Chases Stars?”

  Well, so much for the short-lived not-flirtation we’ve been enjoying. He’s probably like us. Someone behind bars who shouldn’t be. I seriously doubt he wants messing around with an underage girl to land him here for good.

  Smart guy.

  Resigned, I drag out the one word I know will shut this down. “Seventeen.”

  3

  Maxim

  Seven-fucking-teen?

  She’s jailbait. And I’m literally already in jail.

  While I’ve been wondering if it would be too awkward now that we’re both out of handcuffs to ask her out, she’s been sitting over there completely underage.

  Shit and double shit. I’d be arrested again for the things I was imagining while she sat across from me. She doesn’t look seventeen. Someone should pop a warning label on this girl.

  It’s not her appearance. It’s the things she said at the protest. It’s the gravity in her eyes when she looks at you. I don’t know how to name the color of her eyes—have no idea what I should call them. No way are they just gray. They are silver eyes. Not just the color, but the metal. Tough and tried and smelted beyond her years into this indescribable hue. Metal and mettle.

  “You’re, um . . . very mature for your age,” I finally manage, surreptitiously inserting an extra inch between us on the bench.

  “My godmother says I’m an old soul.”

  At least something is of age.

  Jesus, the girl’s not even a freshman in college and I’m getting my master’s. I may be a lot of things, but a perv isn’t one of them, at least under typical circumstances.

  The Girl Who Chases Stars is not typical circumstances. She is atypical. Unusual. File this under “won’t find another like this one.” I bet those high school idiots have no idea how to handle her. A part of me really hopes they don’t.

  “It’s not fair,” she says, tilting her head slightly and sending a river of dark, pin-straight hair swinging behind her. “You know both of my names, and I don’t know yours. I’ve literally been calling you by your T-shirt in my head for the last hour.”

  I hesitate, hopefully not long enough for her to notice. I’ll never see this girl again. Hell, I probably won’t see any of the people in this holding cell again, but they’ve left a crater-like impression on me. Her most of all. I’m ashamed of my last name—ashamed of my father and how he’s like every other entitled son of a bitch who has stolen from them, disregarded their rights, and diminished their humanity. Cade is a name that opens doors and closes deals, but I want nothing to do with it today.

  “Maxim.”

  “Like the Gladiator movie?”

  “That was Maximus.”

  “Still. It means ‘the greatest,’ right? That’s a lot to live up to.”

  “Let’s just say my parents had high hopes.”

  “Had?” she probes, those indefinably gray eyes searching my face. This kid is so not a kid.

  She’s a kid, asshole. Remember that or get comfortable behind bars.

  “I think I’m kind of a disappointment,” I admit, forcing my mouth into a casual grin at the sympathy in her eyes. “It’s okay. They’ve disappointed me, too. It’s a family trait.”

  “I’m sure they’re proud of you,” she insists. “I mean, if my kid traveled from California to Arizona protesting for indigenous people, I’d make bumper stickers with his face on them.”

  Yeah, about that . . .

  “Lennix Moon,” one of the cops who booked us yells. He opens the barred door and gestures for her to go out into the corridor.

  “Well, that’s me.” She laughs and casts an if-I’m-not-mistaken wistful glance my way.

  “Yet another name?”

  “Middle name.” She stands up and smooths the golden skirt. “Lennix Moon Hunter. Quite a mouthful, huh?”

  I’m still scrubbing my mind of the dirty thoughts I had about her mouth before I found out she was seventeen. Out of the question.

  “Well goodbye and good luck.” I extend my hand for a parting handshake.

  When she takes it, her fingers feel small and sure in mine. Our skin conducts a charge between our palms. That volt hits me somewhere between my chest and my stomach. I wonder if I’m imagining it, but when I look up, her eyes fix to that one poi
nt of connection. She glances up, a mixture of curiosity and pleasure right there to match mine.

  Except she’s seven-fucking-teen, and there is no place for pleasure or even more than the vaguest curiosity between her and me.

  I drop her hand abruptly, breaking the electric link.

  “Nice meeting you, Lennix Moon.”

  Our stare holds an extra second. I dropped her hand, broke that connection, but it doesn’t seem to matter. There is still something linking us. She seems to know it, to feel it, too, because even with the cop waiting at the open cell door, even with her father out front presumably ready to ground her, she’s still standing here looking at me, a question mark hanging in the charged air.

  “Lennix, your daddy’s waiting.” It’s the guy who was talking with us earlier. He’s glaring a narrow-eyed warning my way.

  I drop my glance to the holding cell’s dirty cement floor.

  “Oh, yeah,” Lennix says and clears her throat. “Guess I better go. I’ll, uh, see you later, Mr. Paul.”

  I don’t look up again, but watch from beneath lowered lids as her moccasins take her out of the cell and away. It feels like I missed something or never had something that I’m sure would have been good. I know it’s unreasonable because I met her no more than an hour ago. We’ve had one conversation. Some people leave an impression. Lennix Moon Hunter has left more than an impression. She’s left her mark on me.

  And it’s shaped like a star.

  * * *

  “I’m prepared to forgive you.”

  These are the first words my father has spoken since he “collected” me from the police station in town. I’m glad the other protesters had all left by the time the officer came and called for “Cade.” Even though I’ll never see them again, I didn’t want that name clinging to me like slime. When I climb into the back of the Escalade, my father sits with folded arms and a ticking jaw, his head turned away from me. His outrage fills the air-conditioned space. His fury and mine silently wrangle as we head toward the airfield.

  I ignore his ridiculous opening line, and swallow my irritation and indignation to respond. “Are you flying me back to Berkeley? I have shit to do.”

  The frosty look on his face cools even a few degrees more. It’s his subzero face.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he demands, the anger he’s checked roaring, snapping in my face with teeth. “Do you have any idea how much damage you could have done? What a black eye it would be for Cade Energy if anyone had realized who you were? That my own son protested my pipeline?”

  “I agree with you there. I wouldn’t want anyone to know I’m a Cade either.”

  “Boy, it’s your damn future I’m protecting,” he thunders, veins straining to get out through the skin of his neck.

  “Taking away sacred land? Endangering a tribe’s water supply? Stealing all over again from people who have been done wrong by this country at every turn? That’s not my future, Dad. I don’t want any part of it.”

  Hurt flashes through his glare, and for a moment I feel bad, but then I recall the stinging eyes of those in the cell with me. I see the dogs biting Mr. Paul. I touch the bite on my arm that was intended for Lennix. My father’s hurt is a shallow, temporary thing compared to how they have and will continue to be wounded. His is mostly dislocated pride.

  “Well you won’t have a part of it then, but there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

  “Do this, and I’ll never work at Cade Energy.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m not threatening you, Dad. I’m saying if you go forward with this pipeline, there’s no chance in hell I’ll ever work with you.”

  He stiffens, his eyes slits of reptilian green.

  “We didn’t need you to build this company, and we won’t need you to keep it. I’ll be damned if you’ll manipulate me into anything. You wouldn’t know how to run a business if your life depended on it. That’s the problem, you ungrateful welp. You’ve had the Cade name all your life. You don’t have what it takes to make it without it.”

  “Oh, like Owen became a senator without using the Cade name? Give me a fucking break. He’s your puppet. Your hand is so far up his ass, you have to wipe for him.”

  “You’re jealous of your brother’s success. That’s pathetic, since you won’t do what it takes to succeed yourself.”

  “I am doing what it takes to succeed. I have been. You just haven’t cared because it’s not your plan.”

  “You don’t have a plan, boy,” my father sneers. “What plan is that? Saving whales and Indians? Walk away from me, and we’ll have something the Cade family has never had before.” He fills his pause with deliberate cruelty. “A failure.”

  I let his words hurt. I let myself feel the full weight of his contempt and his disappointment. His eyes gleam darkly like volcanic glass. Even in defeat he looks simultaneously frigid and like he might drown you in hot lava at any second.

  “I won’t fail.” My words carry no bravado, only confidence, because I have every intention of proving him wrong.

  “You will,” he counters with as much certainty. “You are unsalvageable.”

  Unsalvageable.

  I should have known he’d find a word that went beyond disowned. Beyond disgraced. A word that would cut to my core character as if it was something he’d tried to save and failed miserably. And now there’s no hope.

  The car comes to a stop. Our fight has frosted the air. Tension coats the interior of the car. I’m surprised the windows haven’t fogged.

  We both exit our respective sides. The Cade jet idles on the tarmac, awaiting my father’s bidding like every other subject in his kingdom.

  He starts walking, stopping to turn when he realizes I’m not with him.

  “Come on,” he snaps. “I have more important things to do than indulge your temper tantrum.”

  “You have never paid one tuition bill,” I say, not addressing his insulting words. “Never paid my rent or room and board. And you haven’t even noticed.”

  The look on his face should bring me some satisfaction, but it only reiterates how little he cares about me as a person; he hasn’t seriously concerned himself with the details of my life because I’m not where he wants me to be.

  “Grams left me a little money that I received when I turned eighteen, if you remember,” I say with a painful, wry smile. “Not much by your standards, but it lasts if you’re careful. I’ve been on my own for years and doing better than fine.”

  “You wouldn’t last a year without my name.” His thin smile relishes the probability of my failure.

  “You know what? I might fail. I might end up broke, but I’ll be my own man. It’ll be hard, but I’m determined to make a life for myself that has nothing to do with the Cade name.”

  And then I see it on his face, in his eyes. This is the moment that breaks us. It comes as suddenly as the gargantuan icebergs I’ve been studying. One moment, whole and solid, and the next, severed into two distinct walls of ice estranged from each other. That’s what we are. Separate. Frozen.

  “Say what you really mean, Maxim. It’s not just the name or the company you want nothing to do with, is it?”

  “I want nothing to do with you. You’re not cutting me off, Dad,” I tell him, slinging the words like stones catapulted over a wall. “I’m the one cutting you off.”

  I have no idea where we are. The airfield is in the middle of nowhere, but I turn away from my father and his private planes and corrupt kingdom, and start on a path I can’t even see in front of me. I don’t exactly know how I’ll do it, but I’ll prove him wrong, and all while leading a life free of him and his expectations and his constant disapproval.

  I walk away, and I don’t look back.

  4

  Lennix

  Defeat and dust mingle in the clear morning air. We gather on a cliff overlooking the sacred ground we fought so hard to keep and watch helplessly as the bulldozer’s sharp, jagged teeth devour the earth. T
he trucks plow a careless path over our memories and sift through our holy soil like a conquering soldier pillaging the pockets of the fallen.

  This battle is over. The field, lost.

  Mena clutches my hand, tears streaking her cheeks. She has been there for me since she stood as godmother at my Sunrise Dance. She wiped away the sweat when I thought I’d die from dancing, from kneeling, from running those four days. She reassured me through every grueling hour. And when we realized Mama was gone, was never coming back, she held me, wiped my tears, and shed her own for her best friend. It wasn’t always easy for my father raising a teenage girl alone, especially one with a cultural history as complex as mine. I had to navigate his world, but also be a part of my mother’s. The community embraced me fully even after Mama was gone and I was attending the private school miles away from the reservation. And this woman, her best friend and my auntie, has been my greatest guide.

  Mr. Paul bows his head, shoulders slumped and despondent. Dozens from the reservation and many of the Apache who live in town like I do have come to witness one more desecration. One more broken promise.

  “Senator Middleton should be ashamed of himself,” my father mutters, his gray eyes as pained as if this is his land, too. “We can only hope the voters make him pay at the polls next year.”

  “They won’t,” Mr. Paul says. “The politicians, the corporations, the government—they take and take and take. They promise and they lie and they trick and betray, but they never pay for crimes against us. We never get our due.”

  “How ironic that the pipeline is here,” my father says. “So close to Apache Leap.”

  I imagine those brave Apache warriors, with the U.S. Cavalry and certain defeat before them and certain death behind. They chose death over surrender, leaping over the cliff’s edge and into the next life.

  “How much has really changed?” I ask, cynicism clogging my throat. “Death, defeat, sickness, poverty. These are the choices they always offer us like they’re doing us a favor.”