These three years have worn on her even worse than on me. She was bound to my father, body and soul. They never spent a single day apart if they could help it. She’s been in constant misery without him.
The only thing that keeps her going is that fire inside of her. It never goes out, not even for a second. My mother never gives up.
Even now, at this moment, she’s poring over maps. She’s scoured every fucking blueprint in the archives beneath the library, and now she’s searching them all again. Because even though she hasn’t found what we’re looking for, she won’t stop.
“Hello, Miss Robin,” I say quietly.
She looks up, her eyes red and exhausted behind the thick frames of her glasses. She doesn’t seem to have slept.
“Hello, Ares,” she replies.
She says we always have to use these names, even if we know for certain we’re alone where no one can hear.
She says it’s the tiny mistakes that get you caught—the errors that don’t seem to matter until all of a sudden they do.
I look around once more, to make sure there’s nobody within earshot.
“She’s here,” I tell her. “I saw her with Chay and Anna, and Sabrina Gallo.”
My mother nods slowly.
“Good,” she says. “I thought he might not send her, even after they signed the contract. Predators have a sense for traps.”
I try to swallow the burning acid in my throat.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say.
She sets down her pencil and takes off her fake glasses, so she can fix me with her ferocious dark eyes.
“You can do whatever you decide to do,” she says sternly.
“I hate her,” I hiss. “How can I get close to her when I want to strangle her on sight?”
My mother tilts her head to the side, showing the sharp curve of her jaw.
“You get close to her by any means necessary,” she says.
My face is hot. “You mean . . . seduce her?”
My mother laughs softly. “Befriend her. Help her. Earn her trust. If she’s already associating with Sabrina Gallo, it should be all the easier. Manipulate the circumstances if you have to—create a need and then fill it.”
I feel like she’s asking me to cuddle up with a viper.
Marko Moroz is the most treacherous counterfeit of a human being I’ve ever encountered. I don’t want to get close to his daughter any more than I’d want to roll around in a pile of his dirty laundry. The thought disgusts me.
Reading my face, my mother says, “She’s his weakness. His one vulnerability. You know this can’t be done by force—only by subterfuge. Or we’ll lose everything. All the time, all the money, all the suffering . . . for nothing.”
I force myself to nod. “I’ll do it. Whatever it takes,” I say.
“I know you will,” she says, unblinking. “You are his son through and through.”
I swallow hard.
“Loyalty in Blood,” I say.
It’s the motto inscribed on the gates of our monastery. And on the band of my father’s ring, wherever that might be.
“Loyalty in Blood,” my mother replies.
6
Nix
My first week at Kingmakers is not at all the scintillating hubbub of social expansion that I’d hoped. If anything, I’m even lonelier than I was at home.
The only Freshman who will talk to me is Sabrina Gallo.
Everybody else avoids me like I’m infected with the plague.
At first I didn’t want to believe what Sabrina said—that it was all because of my father and his reputation.
But by the tenth, or twentieth, or thirtieth brush-off, it was pretty fucking clear that my father is feared and loathed to an unusual degree, even by mafia standards.
It’s messing with my head.
I don’t understand how the man I love and respect more than anyone can be known as a monster.
“What did he do, exactly?” I demand of Sabrina, after yet another class where one of my fellow students hissed at me like a medieval villager warding off a demon.
“I don’t really know anything about it,” Sabrina says, keeping her steady pace across the commons as we walk from the Armory to the Keep.
Her tone is light, but I can’t help feeling that she’s lying. She doesn’t want to get into it. She’s willing to be my friend, but she wants nothing to do with my father and his sordid history.
It’s infuriating, feeling like everyone around me knows more about my own family than I do. Feeling like everyone is in on the secret but me.
I suppose I could ask Estas Lomachenko. He seems to think his family was wronged by mine. He’s certainly spreading that story to the very few people who weren’t already prejudiced against me.
And I’ll admit, it looks pretty fucking bad that I don’t have friends or allies even amongst the other Ukrainians. At Kingmakers, most of the cliques revolve around mafia groups: the New York Italians stick together, likewise the Taiwan Triads, and the Dublin Irish.
I have no friends from my father’s Malina. In fact, none of his men are allowed to marry or have children. Their loyalty is to him alone.
I’m starting to realize how odd that is compared to other mafia groups that center around family.
This is what really has me twisted up in a pretzel: my father told me that he didn’t want me coming to Kingmakers because it wasn’t safe. He said he had too many enemies.
Well, that fucking much was true. But I think the real issue is that he didn’t want me to know what everyone says about him: that he’s a snake, a backstabber. That he has no honor.
I tell myself it can’t be true.
After all, there’s bad blood between plenty of families. Grudges and feuds are as common as Swiss bank accounts amongst the mafia.
Still, I can’t shake this nagging feeling that my father hasn’t been completely open with me.
I’m his heir, his only child.
I thought I was his protégé. I thought he trusted me.
Now I worry that he only viewed me as a kid, feeding me the Disney version of his life and business.
My paradigm is cracking. It feels like my skull is splitting apart.
My only release is exercise.
Thank god we’re allowed to leave the campus grounds whenever we want. I’ve been tramping all over the island when class is done.
It makes me feel less alone to hike the paths along the cliffs or to run through the forest trails in the cool green shade of the river bottoms. There I’m surrounded by birds, butterflies, rabbits, and squirrels. Even the occasional deer.
I feel alive when I’m surrounded by living things.
Some people think that hunters don’t like animals—nothing could be further from the truth. I see myself as an animal. I only kill like a bear or a panther would do—to eat.
I run around like a wild thing until I’m scratched and filthy, until the sky is dark. Only then do I come back to Kingmakers, to the confinement of stone walls and cold stares.
I sleep like the dead, because I’m exhausted in body and brain.
Our classes are incredibly difficult. The Heirs are expected to learn most of what the students in the other divisions will know—everything from bribery and extortion to interrogation and foreign investment. After all, we’re the ones who have to run the whole operation. We can’t manage our people if we don’t know what they’re doing.