FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

4

Chapter 4

Draven read the note over my shoulder.

I had not invited him in. He had simply followed the envelope into my room the way a man follows something he already feels responsible for. He stood close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him, close enough that I could smell something clean and faintly like cedar, and he read every word of that single line with the same focused stillness he had brought to the classroom.

He straightened.

"You need to call Axel Storm," he said.

"I know."

"Tonight. Not tomorrow."

"I know, Cole."

He looked at me then. Really looked, the way he had across the classroom when I walked in late, like he was cataloguing something. His dark eyes moved over my face and whatever he was reading there made his jaw tighten.

"Are you frightened," he said.

The question was so direct it knocked something loose in my chest. Not are you okay. Not do not worry. Just the clean, honest question with no cushioning around it.

"Yes," I said. Because he had asked like he deserved the truth.

He nodded once. "Good. Frightened means you are paying attention." He moved toward the door. "Call Storm. Do not go anywhere alone tonight." He paused with his hand on the frame and looked back at me. "And Sienna. The essay outline is still due Friday."

He was gone before I could respond.

I stood in the middle of my room holding an envelope that someone had routed through my literature TA specifically so he would have to stand in my doorway and hand it to me personally.

Someone knew exactly what they were doing.

I called Axel. He arrived in eleven minutes, which told me he had not been far. He took the envelope, photographed the note, asked me four precise questions, and told me to keep my door locked. His eyes stayed on my face the entire time with that unblinking focus that made me feel simultaneously safer and more exposed than I had any interest in being.

When he left I texted River.

Still coming, I sent.

His reply was immediate. I will be outside in ten minutes.

He was outside in eight.

River drove a dark car that suited him better than the charm did, quiet and fast, and he did not tell me where we were going. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the console between us and the city peeled away into roads I did not recognise.

"Are you going to tell me," I said.

"When we get there."

"River."

He glanced over. In the dark of the car his face was different, the performance stripped away, just the real thing underneath. "I need you to see it rather than hear it," he said. "Because if I tell you first you will argue with me the whole drive and we will both arrive in a bad mood."

"I am already in a bad mood."

"A worse one then."

I looked out the window. "The note said they are all in danger. All of them. Does that include you."

Silence.

"River."

"Yes," he said quietly. "Probably."

"And you are still involved in whatever this is."

"I was involved before you arrived," he said. "That is what I am taking you to see."

He pulled off the road twenty minutes later onto a private drive I would never have found alone. It ended at a property set back from everything, low and modern, lights on inside. He parked and came around to my side before I had the door open.

He did not offer his hand. He just waited beside the car while I got out and then walked with me to the front door.

Inside was a room with a long table covered in photographs and printed documents. My name was on three of them. So was Kane's. So was Axel's. So was Draven's.

I stood at the edge of the table and looked at it all.

"Someone has been building a file on all of you," I said.

"On all of us," River said. "You are in it too. You have been in it since before the semester started."

I turned to look at him. "Who owns this property."

"Kane," he said.

Of course.

"He knows you brought me here."

"He told me to."

I looked back at the table. At my own name printed on a page I had never written or agreed to exist. Photographs of me at the coffee bar. On campus paths. At the security office this afternoon, which meant someone had been watching within the last six hours.

"How long," I said.

"We think six months. Maybe longer."

"Why me. I am no one. I am a scholarship student who works a coffee bar."

River moved to stand beside me. His arm pressed against mine, warm and steady. "We do not know yet. But Kane is working on it." He paused. "We all are."

I stared at my name on that page until the letters blurred.

I do not know which of us moved first.

One moment I was standing at that table with cold dread sitting in my chest and the next River's hand was at my jaw, tilting my face up, and he was looking at me with something that had nothing to do with charm and everything to do with the man underneath it.

"I have got you," he said quietly. "Whatever this is. I have got you."

I kissed him.

Or he kissed me. It did not matter. His mouth was warm and certain and his hands came to my face like I was something he had been thinking about holding for longer than tonight. I felt the tension break in my chest, all of it, the fear and the exhaustion and the weight of three days of watching my back, and I pressed into him and kissed him back with everything I had been keeping locked down.

He walked me backward until I met the wall.

His hands moved from my face to my waist, my hips, pulling me closer with a deliberateness that made my breath short. I grabbed the front of his shirt. He made a low sound against my mouth that moved through me like current.

"Sienna." My name on his lips like a question.

"Yes," I said. I did not wait for him to finish asking.

What followed was not gentle. It was not slow. It was relief and want and the specific desperation of two people who had been circling each other for days finally closing the distance. He was attentive in the way that mattered, reading every response, adjusting, giving more where I needed more, his hands and his mouth moving with total focus until I forgot the photographs and the notes and everything except his name and the wall at my back and the way he said mine like it meant something.

Afterward we sat on the floor against the wall with our shoulders touching and the table full of photographs in front of us and neither of us spoke for a long time.

"That was not supposed to happen tonight," he said finally.

"Was it supposed to happen another night," I said.

He turned his head to look at me. That grin, softer than usual. "Every night since the coffee bar," he said.

I looked back at the table. At my name.

"What do we do now," I said.

"Now," he said, "we figure out who built that file."

He drove me back to campus an hour later. He walked me to my building without being asked. At the door he looked at me for a moment in the low light.

"Get some sleep," he said.

"River." I hesitated. "The four of you. You, Kane, Axel, Draven. You know each other. Not just as people on the same campus. You actually know each other."

He said nothing.

"How," I said.

He looked at me for one long beat.

"Ask Kane," he said. "Tomorrow. Ask him how the four of us know each other."

He walked away.

I stood at my door with the question sitting in my chest like a stone and I already knew that whatever Kane Hargrove told me tomorrow was going to change everything I thought I understood about why I had come back to this campus at all.