Kingmakers, Year One

16. Leo

16

LEO

I magine that you’re standing on a cliff, and you don’t realize it’s a cliff. You think you’re on solid ground. Until your feet slip out from under you. You begin to fall. After that first terrifying lurch, you pinwheel your arms, trying to catch your balance. But you keep falling and falling. You think to yourself, I’m gonna smash on the ground any second now. I’m not gonna survive this. Yet you fall and fall and fall. And eventually you realize there is no bottom—you’re plunging down into hell.

That’s what it was like losing Anna.

There is no bottom.

I’m still falling.

Every day that passes is worse than the day before.

If only I hadn’t been so fucking stupid the day after the party. If only I’d begged and groveled and apologized.

But I woke up with my head still fuzzy and throbbing. I rolled out of bed, not even sure how I got there in the first place. I had a vague memory of a girl looking up at me from her knees—a girl with dark eyes and hair, a girl who definitely wasn’t Anna.

I knew I’d fucked up somehow. But I didn’t really feel like it was my fault. It all seemed like a dream, like it had happened to somebody else.

So I waited outside her dorms to apologize, but it was only a half-apology. My head was throbbing, and my stomach was churning. I thought Anna would see as clearly as I did that the night before was just a stupid mess, that it didn’t mean anything. I thought she knew how I felt about her.

I was wrong.

I should have seen how much I’d hurt her.

The pain was clear on her face. If my own head wasn’t pounding like a drum, I would have recognized it.

Instead, I lost my temper.

She told me she walked home with Dean, and I felt this overwhelming wave of jealousy and rage. I didn’t know if she had kissed him or fucked him or just walked next to him, and I didn’t care. I felt that she belonged to me, and that Dean had tried to steal my property.

Looking back on it now, I could punch myself in the face.

I hadn’t done anything to make sure that Anna was mine. I just assumed that I owned her and I always would. I thought I possessed her without actually earning it first.

So I shouted at her. Insulted her. And drove her away, at the one and only moment where I might have been able to convince her to stay.

And now she’s with Dean instead. And I fucking hate him.

But not nearly as much as I hate myself.

I lost the one person in the world who mattered most to me.

And here’s the most ironic part of all. Yes, it makes me fucking burn with jealousy to see the two of them together. To see them walk hand in hand across the commons. To see him put his palm on the small of her back or trail the back of his fingers down her cheek. And when he kisses her . . . I’ve never been closer to murder.

But the thing I miss most of all is my best friend.

I never realized how much of every day centered around Anna. She was the first one I told my news to, the person I most wanted to impress. When I’d tell a joke, I’d look at her to see if she laughed. If I wanted to go for a run, or get something to eat, or go exploring, I always had her by my side. If I needed advice, or comfort, she was the only one I’d trust to give it. She knew me. She knew my whole history, and exactly who I was. She can’t be replaced.

I spend most of my time with Ares now. And he’s a good friend, don’t get me wrong. But he’s not Anna.

I never realized how lonely a day can be. I’m surrounded by friends and classmates, but that’s all they are. Nothing more.

Anna sits by Dean now, or with the two other female Freshman Heirs, Chay and Zoe. She eats lunch with them, and dinner.

We’re not enemies—she’s polite to Ares and me when she sees us. But polite is almost worse than hateful. Because there’s no passion in it. No sense of care. There’s a barrier between us now. I can see her, but not feel her. It hurts so fucking bad to be this close to her, and yet so far away.

My parents can tell something’s wrong. When I call them on the weekend, they can hear that all the joy has gone out of my voice.

This last Sunday, my dad left the call to answer the doorbell when it rang, and my mom said, “Leo, milyy, tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong, Mom,” I said. “I’m doing well in school. My grades are picking up. I’ve gotten back to lifting most mornings. I’ve even been eating salads. You’d be proud of me.”

“I am always proud of you, my love,” my mother said. “But I know you, Leo. I know when you’re hiding something from me.”

“There’s nothing,” I lied. I couldn’t tell her what I’d done.

My mom is clever, though. Maybe even more clever than my dad.

“Has something happened with Anna?” she asked shrewdly.

Even just hearing Anna’s name created a lump in my throat that almost suffocated me.

“No,” I lied again. “I’ve got to go, Mom. There’s other people waiting for the phones.”

I hung up before she could answer, vowing to wait at least two weeks to call her back again. Hoping she’ll have dropped it by then.

The first competition takes place at the beginning of November.

I face it with dread. I seem to have lost that burning confidence that’s always been inside of me like a pilot light, never going out, always ready to flame into a raging bonfire whenever I need it.

The concept is simple: a modified version of Capture the Flag. Each team gets their own base on their own area of the island. And we each have a flag to protect: white for the Freshmen, silver for the Sophomores, green for the Juniors, and black for the Seniors.

“Why’s ours the easiest to see?” Bram grumbles.

“Who cares?” Dean replies coolly. He looks calm and alert, standing in our makeshift base that’s actually an empty sheep pen on the east side of the island.

I hate the look of smug satisfaction on his face. It torments me almost more than the presence of Anna herself.

Anna is leaning up against the fence, arms crossed over her chest, face somber and unsmiling. We made eye contact, briefly, as our team assembled, but it’s been several weeks since we’ve had an actual conversation with each other, and it’s clear to me that she’s dating Dean, even if they aren’t doing anything as obvious as holding hands at the moment.

I know there’s no way Dean could sit here so cheerfully, listening to me lay out the plan if he didn’t feel like the Captainship barely mattered anymore, that he already has something better.

I look at Anna, wondering if she’s missing me the way I’m missing her. Or if she only feels pity for me, because she can tell that I’m hurting.

Not having Anna as my best friend anymore is like having empty sockets where my teeth used to be, or a stump instead of a hand. A hundred times a day I think of something funny to tell her, or a question I want to ask her. And then I remember that we’re barely on speaking terms.

For the first time in my life I can’t eat. My shorts feel looser than normal around my hips, and it pisses me off to see Dean looking healthier, his hair sleek, his skin as clear as Anna’s. I hate that they look good next to each other, that he matches Anna better than I do, both blonde and fair. I feel like he’s sucking the life out of me. As I get weaker, he gets stronger. Anna was my life force, and he stole her from me.

We’re all dressed in our gym attire—gray pullovers as well as shorts, since it’s windy and sunless. The seabirds make harsh cawing sounds as they’re buffeted side to side while trying to take off from the rocky cliffs.

I have the seventy Freshmen spread out around me, like a general marshaling his troops. I know I have to speak confidently and clearly. It’s my first time leading them. Everything hinges on my ability to convince them to follow me, without question, and without hesitation.

Obviously I can’t expect that from Dean. The most I can hope is that he’ll refrain from outright sabotage.

In that case, I guess I should be grateful that he has Anna to distract him. He doesn’t seem to give a shit that Bram is in a foul mood. He doesn’t seem concerned about anything.

I, on the other hand, have the weight of the world on my shoulders.

We each have a white tail tucked in the waistband of our shorts. Like flag football, anyone from the opposing team can steal our tail. Then you go directly to jail. You can break your teammates out of jail, but you risk losing more men to do it. At the same time, we have to protect our own flag while attempting to steal the flags from the other teams.

Our flag stands at the top of a ten-foot pole. We can move the flag, but not conceal it entirely. It has to stay on the pole.

“We should take the flag to the furthest corner of our territory, so they have to advance across the most ground to attack us,” Jules Turgenev says, in an imperious way.

The other Freshmen Heirs aren’t taking too kindly to me being in charge. Jules is in my same dorm, and we haven’t had any conflict up to this point. He mostly keeps to the other Frenchies, be it his roommate Emile, or the Paris Bratva. But like most of the Heirs, he’s fit, good-looking, haughty, and used to telling people what to do.

“No.” I try to sound calm but authoritative. “We’re taking it up on the hill. It’ll be visible, but no one will be able to sneak up on us.”

Jules exchanges a dubious look with Hedeon Gray. I ignore them both. I’m in charge. As long as my orders make sense, nobody will challenge me directly.

Quickly, before anybody else can pipe up with their strategy, I divide the Freshmen into groups. We need jailers, guards to keep the flag safe, and attack squads to go after other flags.

I’m torn because I know how fucking fast Dean is, but I’m not sure if I can trust him to go after a flag. It might be safest to appoint him jailer where the worst damage he can do will be to let his prisoners go too easy—which I think his pride will prevent.

In the end, my need to win overrides my caution. I task Dean, Bram, Valon Hoxha, and three more of their crew with capturing the Sophomore flag.

Gritting my teeth, I assign Anna to their team as well. The last thing I want to do is push Anna into Dean’s arms, but I know how badly he wants to impress her. He won’t fuck up if she’s watching.

My other dilemma is whether to focus on attacking one particular team or try to steal multiple flags at once.

We know the territories of the other teams, but not precisely where they’ll be keeping their flags. The Juniors are north, closest to the school, in a rocky area full of boulders, crevices, and scrubby olive trees. The Sophomores are west of us in the vineyards. And the Seniors have the most defensible area of all: the river bottom.

I decide to send out a second unit against the Juniors, but to leave the Seniors alone, at least at the beginning. Maybe it’s cowardly, but something tells me that stealing Pippa Portnoy’s flag isn’t going to be easy.

Professor Howell is running the challenge. He starts us off by ringing a klaxon that you can hear clear across the island. It blares out, probably startling every last sheep and goat for miles around.

My first two attack teams sprint off north and west, in the direction of the Junior and Sophomore teams. Dean stays put, watching me out of the corner of his eye.

I’m reserving Dean’s team. I haven’t told the first two teams, but they’re the pawns, so to speak. I don’t want to risk my fastest runners first, so I sent out the B-teams, knowing they might be caught. Meanwhile, I set up my defensive players in a perimeter with several perched up in hidden vantage points so they can call out warnings to the players below.

So begins a six-hour sweaty, bloody battle that drags on and on. The territory we have to cover is huge, and it soon becomes clear that this is a battle of endurance and attrition as much as of bold attacks.

Twice our attack squads are captured, once by Kasper Markaj, who put the majority of his players on defense, and who is resolutely hunting down the opposing players and locking them up in his near-impregnable jail, and once by Pippa Portnoy, whose Senior players seemed to melt out of shadows and creep up out of the field grass with supernatural speed.

I soon realize how much more experienced the upperclassmen really are. We almost lose our flag in the first twenty minutes when Calvin Caccia’s Junior team launches a blitzkrieg up our hill. If I hadn’t personally snatched six or seven tails off his attackers, splitting his group in half, we wouldn’t have been able to hold them off.

I have to be in a hundred places at once, sweat running down my face and stinging my eyes as I try to coordinate a dozen different groups, shifting and moving them like pieces on a chessboard, altering my strategy with each new wave of attacks from our enemies.

And all the time, I can’t stop watching Anna. She’s following my instructions perfectly, but I can’t help feeling that we aren’t working together like we used to. She isn’t fighting me, but she isn’t giving me advice either—she’s just obeying. There’s nothing satisfying in that. It feels hollow.

I think she could help me more, if she wanted to.

At least she’s accomplishing her purpose in spurring Dean to his best efforts. He comes back twice from Markaj’s territory, filthy and drenched in sweat, his team decimated to him and Valon alone. The third time he’s recovered Anna and the rest of his men, having successfully broken them out of jail. I wish he’d have brought the flag back instead, but it’s better than nothing.

I hear Professor Howell’s klaxon sound again and a puff of silver smoke goes up in the sky from the direction of the Senior’s territory. That means they captured the Sophomore’s flag. Kasper Markaj’s team is out of the competition.

I’m glad it’s not us, but I feel bad for him all the same. He’s a decent dude, and quite honestly I’d rather face off against him in the subsequent challenges instead of the more aggressive Calvin Caccia, or the more devious Pippa Portnoy.

A skinny spy called Casey Pope groans from inside our jail. “What!?” he cries. “First out? No fucking way. Not possible.”

“Unless I’m colorblind, that’s definitely our shade of gray,” Ozzy laughs. He’s sitting in jail right next to Casey, but he doesn’t seem too upset about it. I got the impression that he and Miles were giving the game about the same level of seriousness they would apply to a rousing round of Monopoly.

Hedeon Gray, by contrast, is treating it like the Battle of Stalingrad. He’s shaping up to be an excellent second-in-command, having shaken off the disappointment of not being Captain himself.

“I don’t care if you’re tired!” he bellows at a couple of Freshman Accountants. “Get the fuck back out there and guard that flag!”

It’s good to have him supervising the defense, because as the game is wearing on, the Juniors are getting increasingly nasty in their attacks. There’s no need for violence—all you’ve got to do is snag someone’s tail and they’re off to jail. But the Juniors are deliberately hitting us with tackles and elbows to the face in an attempt to intimidate and demoralize.

Hedeon and his brother Silas, without actually speaking to each other, are ramping up our defenses in response, Hedeon’s organizing groups of Freshmen to hide and attack from the side as the Juniors rush our flag, and Silas jumps into an all-out brawl with two of the most violent Juniors.

I’ve got to keep an eye on Silas, because he’s brutal, without thought or strategy. He bowled over one of our own teammates while attacking one of Pippa’s Seniors, spraining the kid’s ankle so bad that he had to hobble off to the infirmary.

His face is expressionless as he watches our injured player depart the field.

Hedeon locks eyes with me and gives one slow shake of his head, before returning to the task at hand.

I sent Ares out with my best attack squad to steal the flag from the Sophomores, but now that I’ve seen the silver smoke, I know that won’t do any good—their flag has already been captured. Hopefully Ares saw it as well, and he’s turned his efforts to some other purpose.

If the Sophomores are out, technically we’ve already secured our position in the next round. We’re just battling for bragging rights. But there’s also the little matter of my bet with Calvin Caccia. I don’t fancy coming down to breakfast naked tomorrow.

I’ve got to get that fucking flag—either the Junior’s or the Senior’s.

“You got this covered?” I say to Hedeon.

“Yeah.” He nods. “Nobody’s laying a hand on our flag.”

I look around at my remaining Freshmen. My army is getting thin. Too many have been captured and we haven’t managed to break them out again.

My options are limited. I consider Matteo Ragusa, then discard that idea—he’s clumsy as fuck, and more likely to trip me than help me. Then I see Jules Turgenev, bleeding heavily from the nose thanks to one of Calvin’s goons.

“Jules,” I shout. “You’re with me.”

Jules falls into place next to me, running easily over the uneven ground. He’s filthy with dirt and blood, but that hasn’t wiped the haughty expression off his face, like he’s a prince forced to consort with commoners.

“Where are we going?” he demands.

I hesitate.

The Juniors are the obvious target. I know exactly where their flag is located—on top of a rocky outcropping, as far back in their territory as possible.

By contrast, Pippa has been moving her flag around continuously. She never keeps in the same spot for more than ten or twenty minutes, which means it isn’t always fully protected, but it’s difficult to plan an attack ahead of time without knowing where it will be.

The Junior’s flag is heavily protected. I only have Jules with me. We’re unlikely to make it through alone. Plus, Ares probably switched his strategy to attack the Juniors once he saw that the Sophomores weren’t an option anymore.

“We’re going to the river bottom,” I tell Jules.

He raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything.

The Seniors got the best territory—the area surrounding the one and only river on the island, which cuts through one of the most heavily forested areas. It suits Pippa’s strategy of stealth and mobility.

“How do you expect to find the flag?” Jules asks me.

“By getting a better vantage point.” I nod toward a wind-blasted pine.

Reluctantly, Jules follows after me as I hoist myself up into the tree. We climb higher and higher, the trunk swaying alarmingly under our combined weight. Once we’re as far up as we can go without risking the increasingly thin branches breaking away beneath us, I wedge myself against the trunk and peer around, looking for signs of movement.

Jules seats himself likewise, shaking his shaggy blond hair out of his face and pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

“At least there’s time for a smoke.” He extracts one long cigarette from the pack and holds it to his lips in the European way, pinched between thumb and forefinger.

I pluck it out of his hand before he can light it.

“Someone will see the smoke.”

Irritated, Jules flicks his zippo closed.

That gives me an idea. I doubt Jules is the only student who smokes. It’s been six hours. As scared as they must be of Pippa, I bet her soldiers are getting pretty bored of hiding with that flag . . .

Instead of scanning for a scrap of black fabric, I start looking for a faint gray haze down among the trees. And then I spot it, half a mile to the west of us.

“There they are,” I breathe.

Jules peers in the direction of my pointing finger.

“There’s six of them,” he says. “And only two of us.”

I grin. “But we have the element of surprise.”

Quickly and quietly, Jules and I descend from our position. We creep up on the Seniors, two of whom are sharing a quick cigarette while a third checks his watch.

“We’ve got to move again in four minutes,” he warns them.

Barely whispering, I say to Jules, “Attack from behind. Grab as many tails as you can as fast as you can.”

He nods. Jules is quick, that’s why I brought him.

He circles around to get behind the Seniors. Then he bursts out from cover, snatching off two tails before the Seniors can even turn around. The Senior with the watch tries to grab him, but Jules slips his grasp.

That’s my moment, the second of distraction before they realize that Jules can’t possibly have come alone. Already two of the Seniors are catching on, about to turn and look for the rest of the attackers. Before they can do it, I’m already running full-tilt toward them.

The Senior with the watch dives for Jules, just missing him and falling on his hands and knees. I plant my foot in the middle of his back, launching myself off him like a step-stool so I can leap up and rip their flag off the pole mid-air.

I’m sprinting before I even hit the ground, running away as fast as I can without looking back to see what happened to Jules. He’ll understand—the flag is the goal, no matter the casualties.

The Seniors are chasing after me, howling with rage. I’ve got long legs and a clear shot ahead. That’s the weakness of Pippa’s strategy—her defenders are out in the middle of nowhere, and now they’re all behind me.

It’s almost three miles back to my own base. I run the entire way, leaving no chance for recapture.

Jules never rejoins me—I hope the Seniors didn’t rough him up too bad out of anger.

As I near our home base, I see a horrible sight: no white flag on top of our pole.

Hedeon is pacing around at the base of our empty pole, unsure whether to pursue the flag or wait for me to return. His face switches from guilt to disbelief as he sees me running up with the black flag in hand.

“RUN!” he bellows. “FUCKING RUN!”

He doesn’t have to tell me twice. Even though I’ve got a killer stitch in my side and sweat streaming down my face, I double my speed, trying to get the flag back to base so I can set off our black smoke bomb.

Too late . . .

With a boom, the Juniors detonate their white smoke. They stole our flag and beat me back to base with less than thirty seconds to spare.

I have to drop the black flag where I stand, grimacing in disgust. One of Pippa’s soldiers comes to retrieve it, and twenty minutes later I see a puff of green smoke from the river bottom. They got the Junior’s flag, too.

Ares comes jogging back shortly after, a nasty gash on his cheek and his hands empty. Dean and Anna are close behind him.

“Liam Murphy stole the flag ten seconds before we got there,” Ares says furiously. “We were so fucking close.”

Dean stuffs his hands in his pockets, an inscrutable expression on his face. I can’t tell if he’s irritated that Pippa’s attack dog beat them out. Or if he might possibly be trying to hold back a smile.