Kingmakers, Year One

35. Dean

35

DEAN

I watch from the common room window as Leo and his team of Freshmen run into the ground floor of the Keep. They’re followed less than five minutes later by the Seniors. I can tell from Pippa’s expression of fury, and their lack of haste, that they already know Leo won.

For me, it’s like watching a demon be resurrected for the sole purpose of torturing me all over again.

I fucking killed him. I drowned that motherfucker. How is he still alive?

I had him trapped way down deep in those caves with no air.

It’s impossible.

And yet there he is, not just alive but triumphant.

I go into my room and lock the door and sit down on my bed.

Outside I hear the ruckus as the other Freshman realize that we won the Quartum Bellum for the first time in anyone’s memory. They’re all celebrating, loudly at first, and then the noise fades away as they leave the Octagon Tower and head out onto campus so they can hear the whole story.

I don’t care about the details. I only care what this means.

For one thing, I might be in a fuck of a lot of trouble. Leo knows I tried to kill him. If he tells the Chancellor what happened, if he has proof . . . I don’t know exactly what they’ll do to me, but it won’t be good.

That should be my primary concern. But it isn’t.

I have an entirely different realization occupying my brain.

I sit alone on my bed, reliving everything that happened this year. What I tried to accomplish, and how I failed every time.

I was wrong in thinking that there are good and evil people in the world.

There’s no good and evil.

There’s only the people blessed or cursed by fate.

Fate smiles on Leo. It gives him everything he wants. I killed him, I know I did. And yet somehow he was saved. I loved Anna . . . she loved Leo instead.

“Good people” are simply favored by fate.

“Evil people” understand that the world works against us. So it doesn’t matter what we do. We have to survive by any means necessary. We have to fight and claw to take a tiny fraction of what fate denies us.

I thought I could have love. It was impossible from the start. The universe doesn’t want me to have love. I’ve never been given it, not from my father or mother, not from friends or lovers.

I give up on love. I give up on kindness, friendship, integrity, mercy.

If all I can be is brutal, vicious, cruel, if that’s what I’m meant to be . . . then I’ll be the most brutal. The most vicious. The most cruel.

In a way it’s a relief.

I’m tired of fighting it.

It’s time to be who I really am.