Shagging was therapy i swear to fuck

While Teal was all hooked in Ronan Astor’s dick, i was free bloody man, not like my twin and my step sister

Elsa had been married to Aiden the prick King from the day we walked through the doors of REU, Teal and Ronan weren’t, just yet, and here’s the thing, I couldn’t be more happy to be the black sheep in the family, marrying at eighteen, what the fuck?

I’d perfected the art of detachment by twenty.

Not emotionally, mind you—that would imply I gave enough of a fuck to feel anything deeply in the first place.

No, I meant strategically.

Keep your heart out of it, your name off the papers, and your body in expensive sheets with people who knew the rules.

No promises. No rings. No royal expectations.

Just pleasure, whiskey, and an endless parade of distractions.

Unlike my siblings, I had no bloody interest in crowns or legacy or marriage.

Elsa?

She was tangled in Aiden King’s darkness so deeply it was practically stitched into her veins. Always had been. They were chaos wrapped in obsession, the kind of love story that looked romantic until you noticed the blood on the roses.

Teal?

My once a weirdo twin had become the queen. Married to Ronan Astor, the arrogant bastard heir to some shit, and somehow content playing house while the rest of us burned.

Me?

I’d rather choke.

Ethan Steel hadn’t pulled me and Teal out of the wreckage of our childhood just to watch me chain myself to someone else’s expectations.

I still remembered that day, though I rarely let myself linger there.

Five years old.

Teal clutching my hand so tightly it hurt while we ran from mum’s shitty house— screw that

I know, I know I should’ve stayed away from the King’s U college, that my brothers-in-law and his fucker friends were in some elite club in REU that had some bad blood with king’s U, i mean underground fights and illegal races and all that shite, i also knew, that while in REU we were all posh kids, in King’s U their money was more… corrupt, let’s say, mafia heirs and all that bullshit.

King’sU was depraved in a designer suit.

The kind of place where Bentleys lined the campus gates, students wore blood money like cologne, and everyone smiled like they didn’t have bodies buried beneath their family estates.

Naturally—

I fucking loved it.

The moment my Aston Martin rolled through those iron gates, I could practically hear Teal’s voice in my head calling me an idiot.

Knox, for once in your life, don’t start a war.

Cute.

At first, I was just there, sipping my vodka when a flash of blonde caught my eyes, i never went for blondes so i simply looked away and went back to my shit, but then, i saw her again being dwarfed by a very intimidating dude, mind you i’m quite tall and strong, but when i say that motherfucker’s built like a wall, i’m not lying, there was something familiar between the two, not like a boyfriend or a fuck-buddy, he was angled protectively towards her

Now again, the bloke had danger stitched into his bloody bones.

Dark hair. Broad shoulders. Tattoos creeping up his throat like they were trying to strangle him, but it was the coldness in his expression that truly screamed don’t fuck with me.

And yet—

There she was.

Tiny in comparison. Blonde hair like spun gold, sharp blue eyes.

“Ilya” she huffed, russian accent thick “i can handle myself”

Wall-man—Ilya, apparently—barely blinked.

“You say this,” he replied coolly, his own accent deeper, smoother, lethal in a way that felt expensive, “yet every time I leave you alone, Solnyshko, you find trouble.”

“I’m nineteen, brother” she snapped back

brother, huh?

That should’ve been my first bloody clue to walk away.

But I’d never been particularly gifted at self-preservation.

Instead, I leaned back against the marble bar, swirling vodka in my glass like I wasn’t suddenly fascinated.

She wasn’t just pretty, pretty was too soft a word.

This girl looked weaponized.

Like someone had taken diamonds, arrogance, and recklessness, then wrapped it all up in a silk dress and Russian couture.