Kingmakers, Year One

5. Dean

5

DEAN

I wake early, before the sun is even up. I know at once that I’m not in my old room at home. I can tell because the air isn’t musty and enclosed, with that awful lingering scent of neglect I could never seem to shake. Instead I smell sea breeze and the fresh herbs growing in the terraced garden below my window.

Bram is still snoring in the bed across from mine. It’s weird sharing a room with another dude, especially one I barely know. Bram is an ally though, and that’s all that matters. I only just met him in Dubrovnik, but I’ve seen that he’s tough, aggressive, and reasonably intelligent, and that’s what I want in a friend.

In Moscow I always got up early to go for a run while the streets were still empty. I could probably run all over this island in a couple of hours. But I don’t know the rules well enough to know if we’re allowed to leave the school grounds.

Better to just use the gym our guide showed us the day before.

Slipping out of bed quietly, I open my top drawer and pull out the gym attire I purchased along with the rest of my uniforms. I already neatly folded my clothes and stowed them away in the dresser the night before.

When Bram asked if I wanted to room together, I told him bluntly that he’d better keep it tidy if he wants to share space.

“I don’t want to see one goddamned sock on the floor,” I told him.

He shrugged, tossing back his dark hair out of his face. “Fine by me. Guess I better learn to clean up after myself anyway, if we don’t have maids here.”

Like most spoiled mafia children, I’m assuming he has a full-time cleaning crew at his parents’ house.

Anyway, he’s kept to his word so far, and if he doesn’t, I’ll chuck his clothes out the fucking window. I can’t stand mess. It makes my flesh crawl. It makes me want to rip my own skin off.

I pull on the plain gray sweat shorts and white t-shirt that we’re expected to wear whenever we do combat training, or anything else physical. Even the white tube socks are mandatory.

I don’t really give a shit. I’ve never cared much about clothes.

Once I’m dressed, I slip out of the dorm down to the empty courtyard. There’s no one around, the first gray light illuminating the edges of the balustrades.

It takes me a minute to find the Armory again—I take a wrong turn, and end up on the opposite side of the building, over by a cluster of orange trees surrounding a flat, open platform that might once have been used for weapons training.

I would have walked right by, except I hear music playing.

We’re not technically supposed to have electronics at the school, though I guess it doesn’t much matter—there’s no internet connection on the island. Still, it piques my curiosity. I creep over to the orange trees and peer through the branches, looking to see who’s making the noise.

It’s a girl. A blonde girl, dressed in a black leotard and torn-up tights.

She has on a pair of extremely battered pointe shoes, and she’s dancing on the cracked stone platform like a music box ballerina up on its stand.

The music isn’t classical—it’s something wistful and moody that I haven’t heard before.

?? Love Chained - Cannons

The girl is tall, which makes her legs look a mile long, especially up on tiptoe. She’s slim, but I can see the lean muscle flexing on her shoulders and back, and on her thighs and calves.

I see the muscle working, but her movements look utterly effortless. She seems to float across the rough stone. She bends and swoops like a bird in flight.

The early-morning light gleams silver on her skin, and on her long sheaf of pale hair that whips around her face as she spins. The open back of her leotard shows several tattoos on her shoulder blade, tricep, and wrist.

Her eyes are closed. She’s completely lost in the music, making up the dance as she goes along, or so it looks to me.

I’ve never seen dancing like this. It’s vulnerable, it’s raw, it’s emotional. The song is sad and yearning, about a love unrequited. It’s not the kind of thing I would usually listen to—I don’t give a fuck about love, and I certainly don’t listen to maudlin, whiny music.

But in this moment this girl seems to be embodying the emotion of the song to such a degree that I can’t ignore it. I can’t not feel what she’s feeling.

My heart is tight in my chest. My hands feel cold, and I realize I haven’t blinked once since I first laid eyes on this girl.

She’s been dancing with her back to me.

Now she turns, and I can see her face fully for the first time.

She’s stunning. The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. Her features are painfully sharp, with high cheekbones, a pointed chin, and a pouting mouth that turns down slightly at the corners, the top lip the same fulness as the bottom.

She wears too much makeup—white powder that makes her look even paler than she actually is, dark lipstick, and a mask of smoky shadow around her eyes.

Maybe she wants to look tough instead of pretty. It’s impossible. No amount of makeup can hide the loveliness of her features.

She opens her eyes at last, and I can see that her irises are a pale, clear blue, like glacial ice, like blue diamond.

Even through the leaves of the orange trees, those eyes fix on me at once, and her dreamy expression burns away in an instant, replaced by cold fury.

I’ve already drawn back and turned around, striding away from her as quickly as possible. I didn’t mean to watch her like a pervert hiding in the bushes. I didn’t mean to look at her at all. It just happened—the music pulled me in, and then I was transfixed by the strangeness of what I saw.

Now I shake my head, trying to physically shake the memory out of my brain.

It was just a girl practicing a dance, which is stupid and has no place at Kingmakers. She must be a Freshman—otherwise she’d be working on something useful instead of prancing around.

I jog over to the Armory, where I meant to go in the first place.

Pushing through the doors, I’m hit with the not-unpleasant scent of sweat, iron, and rubber mats. It reminds me of the gym where I trained in Moscow, and that makes me happy.

I spend the next hour punishing my body relentlessly. I alternate between hitting the heavy bag and the speed bag, jumping rope, and doing compound lifts in drop sets.

The gym is impressively equipped. There’s nothing I want that they don’t have. As the sun comes up, I’m joined by a few other students looking to get in an early-morning workout—though not quite as early as mine. By this point I’m dripping in sweat, and every muscle on my body is throbbing.

I’m working even harder than usual, trying to banish the image of that girl from my mind.

I don’t know why I’m still thinking about her. Because she was pretty? I’ve fucked plenty of pretty girls before.

I chug down a glass of cold water from the cooler, then head in what I hope is the direction of the showers. It’s obnoxious trying to find anything in this place—there are no signs like there would be at a normal college. Even the doors to the changing rooms lack the usual male and female stick figures.

It doesn’t matter—I’m the only person in here anyway.

The changing room is large and echoing, with double banks of lockers and a dozen showers in one open space.

I strip off my sweaty clothes, folding them neatly and stacking them on top of my sneakers, leaving the pile on a bench for the moment. Then I turn on one of the shower heads, twisting the nozzle till the spray runs hot and steady. I’m about to step under when I realize I forgot to grab a towel.

I hurry across the cold tiles, starting to get chilly now that the sweat is drying on my skin. Though it’s still more summer than fall, all the interior spaces of Kingmakers are well-insulated by the thick stone walls, and the wool uniforms are starting to make a lot more sense. It’s never entirely warm inside this place, especially when you’re naked.

I pull a scratchy, thin towel out of the linen cupboard and hurry back toward my shower. I’m practically jogging, rounding the corner of the nearest locker bay with my head down.

I thought I was alone in here, the loud spray of the shower echoing around in the space, drowning out any other sounds.

So I wasn’t expecting to plow headlong into another person. We hit hard, my bare feet slipping out from under me on the tiles as I crash down on top of a stranger.

The other person is just as naked as me. I quickly realize from the long, slim legs sliding between mine, and the soft, round breast on which my palm lands—not to mention the startled shriek of outrage—that I’ve collided with a girl.

Despite how tangled we are, she leaps up again as quick as a cat hitting water. She crosses her arms over her bare breasts, but not before I get a glimpse of a pair of milk-white tits, the pale pink nipples stiff with shock and fury.

She doesn’t seem to realize that covering her breasts has left her pussy bare. I have to physically wrench my eyes up to her face, to avoid fixating on those delicate pussy lips, clean-shaven, the same shell-pink color as her nipples.

It’s the girl from outside, the one who was dancing. I know that before I even get a proper look at her face.

She recognizes me too.

“Did you follow me in here?” she demands. “I saw you spying on me!”

“I wasn’t spying . You were dancing outside. Anybody could see you.”

“Why were you hiding in the bushes, then?”

“I wasn’t hiding! There were trees in the way. There’s a difference between standing on the other side of a tree and hiding behind a tree.”

“I don’t think there is,” the girl says, her pretty face twisted up in a scowl.

“I didn’t follow you!” My face feels hot and my heart squeezes painfully in my chest, a mix of embarrassment and discomfort, which are two emotions I thought I squashed a long time ago. “I was exercising. What are you doing in here, anyway?”

“What am I doing?” she cries, half-scoff and half-shout. “What the fuck are you doing? This is the girl’s room!”

“No it isn’t,” I say, though I don’t actually know for sure.

“How do you know?” she demands.

In truth, I was guessing. Based on . . . not much, really. The fact that the changing room looked big and gloomy, and smelled like a bunch of dudes might have showered in there.

I’m about to admit that when I catch the flicker of uncertainty in the girl’s blue eyes, and I realize that she’s guessing too.

“You don’t know either,” I say.

“I . . . well . . .” in her discomfort, the girl drops her eyes, which inevitably run down the length of my naked body. I haven’t bothered to cover up, so my cock is hanging there in plain sight, slightly swollen from unexpectedly rubbing up against a sleek female body.

Her cheeks flush pink and she whips her head to the side with comical speed.

“Are you going to put some clothes on?” she demands.

“No,” I say calmly. “I haven’t showered yet.”

“I have to shower, too,” she says.

“So?”

“So, there’s no separate stalls.”

“Go in the other changing room then.”

“You don’t know if that’s even the girls’ room!”

“Neither do you.”

We glare at each other, equally as committed to being stubborn as we are unsure of whether we’re actually in the right.

Neither of us wants to cave. But we can’t stand here naked forever.

“I’m showering right here,” the girl declares, tossing her head so her blonde ponytail swings back over her shoulder. Dropping her arms from their protective stance across her chest, she snatches up the towel she dropped on the ground and marches over to the showers.

I stare at her back, trying hard not to let that turn into staring at her ass, then I pick up my own towel and follow after her.

She’s already standing under my shower head, soaping up her hair with a hefty lather of shampoo. Ignoring her, I turn on a second nozzle and step under it before it’s even warm.

I scrub myself with equal vigor, and an equal attitude of I don’t give a fuck .

The trouble is, it’s hard not to look over at the girl as soap suds run down her naked body. Her little breasts bounce on her chest as she shampoos her hair. I can’t stop thinking how slippery smooth her skin must be, remembering how her bare thigh slid between mine as my cock pressed against her flat, tight stomach.

I turn around and face the shower nozzle, so she won’t see my cock stiffening up all over again.

I’m only halfway through showering when I hear a sound that makes my blood run cold: the voices of two girls chatting and giggling as they stroll toward the showers.

I turn around right as they reach me.

The girls stop dead in their tracks. They look a little older than me, maybe Sophomores or Juniors. They’ve got towels wrapped round their bodies, and they’re wearing identical expressions of surprise and amusement.

“Well, hello,” one of them says to me.

“Are you lost?” the other asks.

Well, fuck. Guess the ballerina was right after all.

I grab my towel and hustle out of there without answering.

They don’t even wait till I turn the corner before bursting out laughing. Their giggles echo off the stone ceiling, reminding me what an idiot I am about a hundred times before I reach the door.

I draw a few more amused glances walking back to the dorms dressed only in a towel, with my duffle bag slung over my shoulder and my gym clothes tucked under my arm.

I’m embarrassed, but I can’t say I entirely regret the experience.

It definitely had its pleasant moments . . .