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Anna is intense. She loves hard and hates harder. That’s exactly what I like about her.
I want her to take all that misplaced affection for Leo and turn it on me instead.
For all the pleasure I’ve had with Anna—holding her hand, walking with her, talking to her, touching that silky skin and those full lips—I’ve barely sipped from that cup yet. I want to drink her down all the way to the bottom. I want all of her, every last bit. Not a scrap left for Leo.
I made a mistake though, that night when I finally had her alone.
I was desperate. I tried to do whatever it took to take her virginity. I thought that would connect her to me whether she wanted it or not.
But it was a miscalculation.
What I actually have to do is make her choose. I have to show her indisputably that I’m the better man. Smarter than Leo, stronger than him. I have to humiliate and destroy him. And then when she sees how pathetic he really is, then she’ll come back to me. Willingly and fully.
For that reason, I look forward to the second challenge in theQuartum Bellumalmost as much as Leo himself.
He thinks it’s his chance for redemption.
I know he’s about to fail, publicly and spectacularly.
At least if I have anything to say about it.
With the Sophomoresignominiously defeated in the first round, the Freshmen are facing off against the Juniors and the Seniors. They’re confident in their ability to crush us. But there’s a certain level of frisson in the air—the uneasy acknowledgment that this contest isn’t quite as lopsided as they’d hoped.
Damari Ragusa tells me there’s an alliance between Calvin and Pippa. They’ve agreed to finish Leo off quickly, so they can face off against each other in the final round.
The problem is that Calvin doesn’t really want to clear the way for Pippa to sail through to the finals. As arrogant as he is, he must know that Pippa is smarter than him, and she runs her crew of Seniors like a generalissimo. She’ll use Calvin to get rid of Leo, then slaughter him in a head-on match.
I know all these things. I wonder if Leo knows them, too?
I see him holed up with Ares and Hedeon, strategizing.
Despite moping around about the loss of Anna, Leo is still the darling of most of the Freshmen. Through his friendships with Hedeon and Kenzo, he’s got the Londoners and the Yakuza working with him enthusiastically. The Paris Bratva seem to like him too, despite the fact that he abandoned Jules Turgenev in enemy territory.
It’s only my crew who despise him almost as much as I do. But even they feel the allure of an unprecedented Freshman victory.
“Do you think we could beat Pippa? If we made it through to the end?” Bram asked me one night, with pretend nonchalance.
“No,” I say flatly. “And it doesn’t matter anyway. We barely made it through the first challenge. We’re not going to win the second.”
The weather seems to agree with me. The morning of the second challenge is lightning-stricken with thundering rain. The fields around Kingmakers are soaked and muddy as we take ourplaces at the three vertices of a triangular pitch marked out with bleeding spray paint.
We’re all wearing pinnies to show our class colors—white for the Freshmen, green for the Juniors, and black for the Seniors.
Squinting across the field, I see Calvin Caccia staring back at us, his hair plastered to his skull with rain, and his gray gym attire already soaked through and clinging to his bulky body.
Pippa’s team looks even more intimidating. The Seniors on average are significantly bigger than us, and more muscular. Pippa stands in front of them, the smallest of the bunch but the most unsettling. With her dark, wind-blown hair, she looks like a witch commanding an army of giants.
I watch Leo, trying to gauge his mood. He’s pacing back and forth, not in nervousness, but in prowling strides like an animal. He looks like his father. I don’t see anything of my aunt in him.
I know what Sebastian Gallo looks like—he’s not careful to scrub his image online. Not like my father. You won’t find a picture of Adrian Yenin anywhere, not even in our own house.
There used to be a wedding photo on our mantel—my mother trim and pretty and laughing in a short 50s style wedding dress, my father also smiling, his face turned toward her so that only the handsome side of him showed.
I think he burned that photo after she left.
You’d think he’d be afraid of fire, but he isn’t. Fascinated by it, more like. I’ve seen him burn plenty of photographs of himself from his younger years, letting the flames take both sides of his face.
The rain pounds down on my head. My rifle is slung over my shoulder on a strap.
