Page 1 of Knotted By the Triad

CHAPTER ONE

ZURI

If you’d asked me what I thought would happen that night, dying wouldn’t have been my answer. At the age of twenty-six, I don’t often think about how I’ll die. We all know we must go some day.

But we take comfort in not knowing when that day will come. It would’ve ruined my mood if I’d known that night would be my last. Especially since there was so much more I’d wanted to do with my life.

I wasn’t done living it up yet. And once I was done, I’d hoped to marry a handsome rich man and have his babies. As for tonight, all I’d wanted to do was hang with my three besties and celebrate the fact that one of them had accomplished her life’s dream.

One of her fantasy romance novels was being made into a movie.

How freaking awesome was that! And to think, the idea for the series had come from a recurring dream CiCi had been having since we were kids. We’d told her to write a story about it years ago.

Finally, she listened. Ciori had worked hard on that series. So many nights she’d called us to run ideas by us. And like the good friends we were, we sacrificed our sleep to help her work through plot holes.

Her hard work had paid off, and I was so damn proud of her. Tonight, we were going to show her a good time because she deserved it. I sat in the back seat of Kenadi’s SUV with Brielle beside me, and Ciori up front.

I was touching up my lipstick in the little mirror on the back of the passenger seat. We’d just picked up Brielle from her place. I won’t lie, I was shocked that she’d actually come out with us.

And she was actually dressed in a sexy outfit, flaunting that curvaceous figure she usually tried to hide because her husband said she needed to lose weight. Bastard! Her husband wasn’t a fan of her going out with the girls. He claimed married women shouldn’t hang with single women too much.

Fuck that and fuck him.

The real reason he didn’t like us was because of that one time, about two years ago, when we’d jumped his sorry ass after we found out he’d hit Bri. We’d hoped Bri would leave him after that.

But she didn’t. She was still with his sorry ass. And for once, I was going to try to hold my tongue and not bring him up. I wanted to tell her that even though she looked cute tonight, and I loved the short, pixie hairstyle on her, she also looked drained.

That marriage was sucking the vitality out of her. I’d rather be single for life than unhappily married. But whenever I brought up her leaving him, it put her in a bad mood and ruined the night.

So, for the sake of Ciori’s celebration, I was going to shut up for once. We were all dressed up tonight and looking good. Ciori had told us that the dress code for tonight was black, grown, and sexy attire. I stared around at my friends in their black party dresses.

We’d all understood the assignment!

What made tonight even better was the Blood Moon. We’d always been obsessed with space and the stars, so seeing one was already a big deal for us. But this one felt extra special since CiCi had written a Blood Moon into Realm of Fantasies.

Seeing one on the same night we were celebrating her movie deal felt like the universe was celebrating with us. Like this night was destined to happen. Like it was fated, if you believed in that kind of stuff. Which we did.

Kena glanced at Ciori. “I still can’t believe your new series is being made into a movie.”

“Only the first book,” Ciori explained, pushing strands of her long, curly hair out of her face. “If the first movie does well, they want to move on to the second book and keep going from there.”

“Book 1 will do great,” I told her as I snapped the cap back onto my lipstick and dropped it into my purse. “I’m happy for you, CiCi. Truly. But I hate that the entire world is soon going to loathe the name... Zuri Bane.”

Ciori groaned. “Oh, my gosh. Are you ever going to let that go?”

“No. You named an evil bitch after me. I can’t let that go. You didn’t make Brielle or Kenadi’s namesakes evil. Actually, you made them the female leads of their books.”

“I’ve apologized about that. Fictional Zuri wasn’t evil in the beginning,” Ciori defended her actions.

But there was no defending what she’d done to my namesake.

“Don’t try to talk around it. The bottom line is that you named the villainess after me. That’s not cool.”

“I didn’t plan to put any of your names in the books. But after I put you in book one, Bri and Kena started complaining about not being in a book. So I put them in a book. I didn’t plan for it to happen this way. As for fictional Zuri, when I was plotting her, I needed her to have a great name. And you have a great name.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I told her, smiling at the compliment.

My name was kind of awesome. The headmistress at the orphanage we’d grown up in had named me. The others had arrived with names already. Only I had been left on the front steps of the orphanage, no name, nothing.