Preston | Chapter 2

Preston was looking for {{user}} when he found Amara instead.

She came strolling across the quad like she owned this place—which, to be fair, she actually did. Perks of being a Lombardi. Her sunglasses pushed up into dark hair despite the fact that it was nearly six and the sun had given up an hour ago, dragging a suitcase that had clearly been through three airports and zero acts of gentleness.

“There he is.” Amara grinned, wide and unbothered, and looped her arm through his without asking permission, which was the only kind of touch Preston tolerated from anyone. “My favorite psycho.”

“You’re back early.” He let her steer him toward the parking lot, matching her pace, scanning the thinning crowd of students over her head out of habit. Looking for a particular set of shoulders. A particular color of hair. “Vacation didn’t agree with you?”

“Vacation was fine. I need a favor.”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what it is yet.”

“I don’t need to. The answer is no, because the last three favors involved a Ferrari, a Cabo police precinct, and a yacht that is currently at the bottom of something. I’m retired.”

“That was one time.” Amara swatted his arm. “And the yacht thing wasn’t even my fault, the anchor chain was clearly defective—”

“You drove it into a pier, Mara.”

“I aimed it at the pier. Intent matters." She said it with the breezy confidence of someone who had never once faced a consequence that her last name couldn’t dissolve. “Anyway this is smaller. I just need you to tell my brother I was with you this weekend instead of where I actually was.”

“Where were you actually?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Then I can’t lie about it convincingly, can I?” He glanced down at her, unimpressed. “How many times do I have to keep you out of whatever shallow grave Apollo is about to put you in?”

“Excuse me.” Amara looked offended. “I keep myself out of the grave. You’re just the alibi. There’s a difference.”

“There isn’t.”

“There is. I’m very skilled at this.”

“Says the girl who drove a yacht into a pier.”

“One time.”

A group of girls passed them on the path, and their eyes did the thing eyes always did around the two of them — flicked over once, caught on Amara’s arm looped through his, and dissolved instantly into a huddle of lowered voices and badly hidden glances.

It wasn’t a new reaction. The whole campus had long since decided that the Knight heir and the Lombardi princess were definitely fucking, and no amount of denial from either of them would made the slightest dent in that theory.

Amara didn’t even glance over. “Day sixty-seven of being a sex symbol against my will.”

“You could correct them.”

“Could I, though?” She said it like she was genuinely weighing it. “Or I could let them keep thinking I’m dating someone with a face like yours. You know, I’ve started telling people we’re engaged just to watch them combust.”

She grinned up at him. “Last week a sophomore asked me what venue we picked.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“The Eden estate, obviously.” Amara’s eyes glittered with mischief. “She looked it up for twenty minutes before she figured out it didn't exist.”

Preston huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh, mostly at the audacity of it. He didn’t bother correcting the rumor either, because correcting it would require caring what any of these people thought, and he had never once managed to summon that particular emotion on command.

“Anyway, how is Arlen?” Amara asked, in the tone of someone asking about a chronic illness.

“Insufferable as ever.”

She glanced at him, and something in her green eyes was quieter for a moment. More real. "He still riding you about the other thing?"

He knew what the other thing meant. “Mhm.”

Amara’s mouth tightened. “God.”

“You know what it is,” She said as they reached her car. “Other people have mommy issues. Daddy issues.” She gestured between the two of them. “But we have brother issues. And there’s no support group for this. I’ve checked.”

That made Preston laugh.

It wasn’t the camera-ready thing he did for deans and donors and girls he was deciding whether to ruin. It came out low and short and a little surprised at itself, like his body had produced it before his brain signed off, and Amara grinned like she’d won something.

That was when he saw her.

{{user}}, across the lot, with her bag slung over one shoulder. Preston followed her eyes which weren't on his face. They were on Amara’s hand, still curled loose around his bicep, and there was a small, tight crease between {{user}}'s brows that had no business existing if she hated him the way she was supposed to.

Is the little bird, by any chance, jealous?

The thought arrived, and something in his chest went warm and interested in a way he didn’t have a name for and didn’t particularly want one for.

Amara, who missed nothing, followed his line of sight, clocked the girl, clocked Preston’s face, and slid her hand off his arm like it had developed a sudden temperature.

He took one step toward {{user}}, already deciding what he’d say to make that frown deeper, only for her to simply turn around and leave after giving him a look that translated perfectly into I hate your fucking guts.

Preston watched her go.

He watched her until the backpack disappeared around the corner of the building and there was nothing left to watch, and he was still watching the empty space where she had been when Amara's voice came from approximately one inch to his left.

“Okay,” Amara said, “who was that, and why do you look like you want to eat her alive? Just how many chapters did I miss while I was gone?”

“It's nothing.” Preston straightened, smoothing the front of his jacket, sliding the mask back into place so easily it almost hurt. "She’s a charity case. Forgot her place a while back. I’m reminding her.”

Amara’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t believe a single word of that, but she let it go, because she was the one person on this campus who knew better than to push Preston.

“Sure,” she said slowly. “I’lll get my own alibi, then. Since you’re busy.”

“I'll make that call to Apollo. Go home, Mara.”

He was already walking away before she could answer.

---

He spent the next few hours being useless.

That was the only word for it.

He sat through a contract law seminar and retained nothing. He had a call with Arlen’s secretary about some charity function he was supposed to appear at and ended up agreeing to something he didn’t fully hear. He kept checking his phone for a notification that wasn’t going to come, because there was no reason {{user}} would ever text him anything except stay away from me, and he already knew exactly how little that particular request meant.

Friday.

The coordinates had said Friday.

He told himself he wasn’t checking the time. And yet, he checked the time four more times in the next hour.

By nine, he’d had enough of lying to himself. He drove to {{user}}’s dorm with the specific, irritated certainty of a man about to confirm something he already knew and resent being right about it.

Her room was empty. Just as he thought. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the empty room.

Then he turned around and walked back to his car, very calmly, and sat in the driver’s seat. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly that the leather creaked.

Stupid girl.

Stupid, stupid, reckless, stupid girl.

He had told her. He had been explicit. He had looked her in the eyes in that empty hallway and told her that if she went anywhere near that location, he would make everything else look like a warmup. He had been as clear as he knew how to be, and she still went to that hill. Accepted the invitation of Eden.

He knew what that meant.

Once you belonged to Eden, you never really left it. Even the ones who walked out the front gate carried it with them for the rest of their lives.

He started the engine.

The guards at the gate recognized his car. He saw one of them say something to the other as he pulled up.

The window came down.

“Mr. Knight.” The guard’s voice was careful. He was one of Malachi King’s contractors, built like a door and about as expressive. "Tonight is the Hunt night. It would be advisable for non-members to—”

“Move.” Preston looked at him. “I’m not going to ask twice.”

The guard glanced at his partner, and after a half-second of hesitation that Preston would remember and resent later, they let the gate swing open.

The Hunt night. Of course. Of every single night in the calendar year, it had to be the Hunt night.

He left the car crooked in the drive and went in through the main entrance, past the marble and the low gold lighting and the murmur of Patrons who didn’t matter, down into the parts of the estate he knew the way he knew his own house, because he’d been coming here in one capacity or another since he was sixteen years old, hating every second of it, memorizing it anyway.

He checked the lounges. Empty of her.

He checked the observation decks, where men in expensive suits were placing bets on something happening several floors below, screens flickering with footage of the grounds. Empty of her.

With every room that didn’t have her in it, the rage climbed another degree, and underneath the rage was something else entirely, something with no name and a great deal of weight.

He went down to the dungeons last. Because it was the last place he let himself think of.

That was where he found her.

He saw her on the floor. Kneeling. Her clothes were half torn. There were fresh bruises on her face, and half of her hair was in the fist of the man standing over her.

The man had his back to Preston. He was large, expensive-suited, the particular build of someone who had never needed to be physically strong because he had always been able to pay other people to be strong for him.

He was pushing her face toward his crotch.

Preston’s mind went very quiet.

He looked at the room. He took in the small table against the wall. The things on it were mostly ornamental, but there was a letter opener. He picked it up, and crossed the distance without any memory of deciding to move.

The man didn’t have time to turn around. Preston’s arm came around and drove the letter opener into the left side of his waist, angling upward. It was not a clean wound — he wasn’t aiming for clean — and the man made a sound that was not quite a word and folded.

Preston let him fall.

Then he knelt over him on the cold floor and did it again. And again. And again. Past the point where it mattered, past the point where the man was anything but dead weight under his hands, because some part of him that had been silent for so long had finally found something worth being loud about, and it did not want to stop.

“That’s enough.”

The voice came from the doorway, making Preston finally stop.

He knew that voice. He had known that voice for his entire life.

He turned his head.

Arlen Knight stood in the doorway of the room like some kind of dark angel. He was wearing a dark suit, as always. His expression, as always, was nothing at all. There was just that particular blankness that Preston had spent twenty-one years trying to crack and never had.

Arlen looked at the body. Then at Preston. “My office. Now.” His eyes finally landed on {{user}} with the same cold, assessing indifference he gave everything. “You too.”

He didn’t wait to see if either of them would comply. He simply turned and left, because Arlen Knight had never once in his life needed to check if people followed him.

Preston shrugged out of his jacket and crouched in front of {{user}}, draping it over her shoulders without a word, because he didn’t trust a single thing that might come out of his mouth right now. He pulled her up by the arm, and walked her out of the dungeon without looking back at the dead man he’d left behind.

Arlen was already seated when Preston walked into his office with {{user}}. He had poured two glasses of scotch. He had not poured a third.

Preston stopped in the center of the room.

“You understand,” Arlen said, looking at him, “that you just killed a Patron. A protected member of this house.”

“I’m aware.” Preston kept his voice even. “Spare me the lecture.”

“Fine.” Arlen folded his hands on the desk. “Then I’ll skip straight to the part where I put you down like the rabid dog you’re currently behaving as. That is, after all, what Eden does to anyone who harms one of its own. Doesn’t matter whose blood you share.”

Preston said nothing. There was nothing to say. He knew the rules. He’d always known the rules. He just simply never expected to be on this side of them.

He thought about the dungeon. About arriving in that room and being — for the first time in his life — a man without standing in the place that mattered.

He had not liked it. He had not liked it at all.

You have no power here.

"Or," Arlen said. He reached into his desk drawer and set something on the surface between them.

A ring. A black iron ring.

Preston looked at it.

"Eden protects its Archons, Preston.” Arlen continued. “It also cleans up their...messes.”

Preston thought about Arlen’s words at dinner. The blood always calls to the blood. He had dismissed that as his brother being dramatic.

He thought about the estate’s gate. About the guards letting him in not because they were afraid of him but because they had been told to be, which was not the same thing, had never been the same thing, and he had felt the difference tonight in a way he hadn’t let himself feel before.

In Saint Kingsfall, there were powerful men. There were wealthy men. There were men with connections and leverage and the particular informal immunity that came from knowing which judges had which secrets.

And then there were the Archons.

There was no and then after the Archons.

Preston crossed the room and picked up the ring.

It was heavier than he expected.

Or maybe he had always known exactly how heavy it was and had been refusing to hold it for that reason.

He put it on.

“I suppose,” Preston said, “that makes me an Archon.”

“It does.”

“And an Archon,” Preston continued, “can designate a Muse.” He looked up. His eyes moved to {{user}}. “Any Muse he chooses. At any time. Without objection from the house.”

He crossed to where she was standing and looked down at her. He knew what he was about to do was fucked up. But he didn’t fucking care anymore.

Because, there was no version of this where she walked out of this room unclaimed. A Muse belonged to her Archon completely and permanently, and whatever fragile independence she’d clawed together over the last few months would be signed away in a single sentence she had no power to refuse.

He reached out and took her chin in his hand.

“I choose her,” he said. “As my muse.”

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