Savage Prince

Chapter One

Cayde

The sun is beating down on me. Hot, burning, sweating.

Fierce, relentless. Just like my father.

It doesn’t stop. It never stops. Every damn day after school, he’s got me out here. Running, push-ups, sit-ups, boxing, weight-lifting. Shouting at me to hit harder, run faster, get the fuck back up when I go down, exhausted. I had a trainer for a while, but my father said he wasn’t pushing me hard enough. So instead, he’s out here, screaming at me, cursing at me, forcing me to push my body past the limits of what it can take.

Who knew that the head of the St. Vincent family could be such a fucking drill sergeant?

Not me, until six months ago.

It doesn’t even end when he finally lets me go inside to clean up. At dinner, the cook is instructed to fill my plate with double servings of protein-filled meats and starchy carbs, which I can hardly force down because I’ve already been told to drink a protein shake after the workout. In the morning, there’ll be another one with breakfast. I tried throwing away my lunches because I couldn’t stomach any more food, but somehow my father found out. I don’t know how, but he did.

That was the first beating.

The first time I learned that if I step out of line, he will always find out.

He’s trying to make me big, strong, he tells me. This is how you grow muscle. This is how you become the best, the hardest, the one that no one will fuck with. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought he was building me into the left hand for the next ruler of Blackmoor, the enforcer. Six months in, I’ve already got more muscle than every other guy on the team. I’m getting made fun of for it, but my father says that’s good, too. Builds character, he says. People bully others because they want what they can’t have. Because they know they’ll never be good enough, so they tear others down.

What my father doesn’t realize is how easily the bullied become bullies themselves. And how badly I want to take out the hurt that I feel on others. How much rage is building up inside of me, day after day, every time he screams at me to get up, every time he calls me a fucking idiot because I can’t recite my lesson from English class or do math problems while lifting weights or throwing an uppercut on the bag or doing my hundredth push-up of the day. Every time he brings down the belt across my back, my ass, my thighs, because I got a B on a test or an assignment or because I failed to finish a rep of my workout.

Every time he tells me that it should have been me that died instead of my brother.

As if I don’t already fucking know that.

“You weren’t supposed to be the heir!” he screams at me today. “Fucking Prince. Cayde ‘Prince’ Blackmoor. What a fucking moronic name. I only let your mother name you after that fairy rock star because you were the second son. Nothing more to me than a future cog in the wheel. Her little boy. She could coddle you to her heart’s content, make you into the fucking daughter she couldn’t whelp, for all I fucking cared.”

I wasn’t supposed to be the heir. It’s drilled into me a dozen times a day until I hear it in my sleep. Not good enough. My brother was everything. Taller than me, faster, stronger, good at every sport and every subject in school. Devoted to the family. Ready to be the actual prince since he was old enough to walk. The accident hadn’t even been his fault.

A drunk driver. Someone else’s mistake. The driver hadn’t died in the crash, but I know he’s dead now. He was found dead in his attic a few months ago. The news reported it as a suicide. He’d even left a note, saying he couldn’t stand the guilt, that he’d been responsible for snuffing out a life in its prime.

I know better. I know he didn’t kill himself.

I know because my father told me. Because he took me with him. He made me watch while one of his biker goons strung the man up. While he told the man how lucky he was to be getting a quick death, that if it didn’t need to look like a legit suicide, he’d have the Sons kill him slow. Take off pieces, one for every year that Daniel doesn’t get to live, until the man would have been nothing but pieces, scattered across a dirty warehouse floor.

But instead, he got the noose. Quick, easy. My father made him write the note himself. Handwriting, he said. They’d check it, make sure it matched up. Every little detail was thought of. I watched, and I thought how cold and calculating my father was. How carefully he made sure that his revenge was executed in such a way that it could never be traced back to him. I watched the man plead and beg and say how sorry he was, promise my father anything in exchange for his life, but it was never going to matter. He could have given him everything—his money, his house, his fucking firstborn kid if he had one, and my father would still have told his guy to string him up. 

I had to watch as the man kicked and screamed and clawed at his neck until finally, it stopped. Until he was just hanging there, face purpling, swinging from the attic rafter. 

I had nightmares for weeks afterward. My father beat me for that, too, for waking him up one night because you could hear my screams all through the house. It got to where I couldn’t change in the locker room because you’d see my back and thighs all striped from the belt, red and raw and weeping in places. My father was careful never to hit where you’d see it in clothes. Only places that could be hidden. But of course, I got bullied for that, too, for hiding out in the bathroom stall to change.

I learned there’s nothing that kids won’t bully you for. So by the time I made it to high school next year, I’d promised myself one thing.

I’d be the one they were too afraid of to bully. With the other two heirs at my side, I’d make sure no one was willing to cross me. And if anyone did? I’d make their lives so miserable they’d wish they’d never been born. Just like that man hanging in his attic probably wished, because at least if he’d never been born, he’d have never had to die that way, terrified and pissing himself at the end.

Middle-schoolers don’t care about power and money and who your parents are. But high-schoolers do. All they care about is appearances and making the right friends and being seen with the right people, and fucking the right people. So today, as my father screams at me on one of the last days of the summer between eighth-grade ending and my first day at Blackwood Academy, that I have a plan in place to make that school my bitch.

I might never be as good at serving revenge cold, the way my father is, slow and calculated. But I’ve got so much rage simmering in me now that I don’t need to.

If anyone stands in my way, I’ll just burn that fucker down.

* * *

I sit up in bed, gasping, my fist stuffed in my mouth, so I don’t scream from the nightmare. Another trick I learned, a reflex born of how many times my father beat me for screaming in the night. It’s been a long time since I’ve had my back laid open with a belt. However, I can still feel the phantom pains, the fire licking down my spine and across my ass and my thighs, the ache of it the next day, the way the skin feels swollen and tight after as it bruises, and the way it itches as it heals. I know exactly how it feels to get a thrashing, and that’s part of what made it so fucking good watching Jaxon cane Athena, because I knew how every blow felt. I should have had him use a belt, but a cane hurts worse. I learned that a few times later on.

I jerked off so many fucking times thinking about the welts on her ass, the swollen, red, bleeding flesh. I’d wanted to take her virginity doggy-style, so I could get a good look at them while I fucked her, hear her cry out while I slammed my hips against that sweet ass of hers, and ground against the healing welts. 

But she went to Dean, instead.

Correction. She went to Jaxon.

Fucking bitch.

Jaxon turned her down, which means he’s even more of a fucking idiot than I’d thought. But it does give me an argument as to why Dean’s victory is invalid. The rules say that the heir who takes the pet’s virginity, with her permission, is the next ruler of the town. The bloody sheet is displayed at the next ritual. If the pet gives in before then, the title is formally ceded, to be official after graduation.

But Athena didn’t choose Dean. She chose Jaxon. She only went to Dean because he rejected her. Which, in a roundabout sort of way, means that she didn’t choose Dean.

Dean, of course, is going to fight that to the bitter fucking end. But so will I.

Because I didn’t spend all of my teenage years being worked and beaten half to death, forcing protein shakes and mashed potatoes down my throat to satisfy my father’s twisted idea of what a man should look like—when he doesn’t even fucking look like that, the man has a fucking pot belly for god’s sake—for Dean fucking Blackmoor to win the town back for his fucking arrogant-ass family.

And I didn’t spend all these years dreaming about the day I’d get my revenge on Athena Saint for her to spend her nights in Dean’s bed, either.

Which is exactly where I’m guessing she is right now.

It’s fucking torture, thinking of her with him. Thinking about him taking the thing that I’ve obsessed about for so long. Even if I got to fuck her now, it wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t be the first. I wouldn’t get to ruin it for her, make her beg and cry, make her plead for me to go easy, only for me to rip her open on my fat cock for the first time. She’s used up pussy now. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t still want her. I just need to think of some other way to make it satisfying for me. Some way that will fuel the revenge that I’ve been dreaming of for so long.

Since my brother died in that fucking accident, I’ve had to be the best at everything. Sometimes, in my darkest, angriest moments, I hate him for dying, even though I know he’d rather be in my place and alive. I wonder how he would have treated Athena, how he would have felt about all of this. He was always weirdly nice to girls, I remember. He had a long-term girlfriend since his freshman year. Would they have kept dating in college? How would she have handled him being required to fuck the house pet? Would he have gone along with it, or would he have fought back, like Jaxon? Argued about why things are the way they are?

No one is ever gonna fucking know the answers to that. All I know is that there are two places I’ve felt out of my brother’s shadow—on the rugby field and when I’ve been pursuing Athena. Because both of those are things, he would never have wanted to do. He played sports, but football, golf, tennis—palatable, nice sports. He was a gentleman to women, and I think he actually meant it. Not like my father, who makes a show of it, but deep down probably loved degrading my mother during their time in the house. Hell, maybe he still does.

Since Daniel died, all the pressure has been on me to keep the town from the Blackmoors. The Kings are a fucking joke; we never needed to worry about them. But Dean Blackmoor was always a real contender. And now he has the thing that might hand it to him on a silver platter.

Athena’s virginity.

If I’d stayed the second son, the extra, I could have done whatever the fuck I wanted, within reason. Played rugby for a national team, maybe. My father would have let me do it for a while, until he needed to reel me back in and install me at some stupid company. But even then, it would have been easy work. Not much responsibility. Just showing up at board meetings and saying a few words and then enjoying my money and all the pussy I would have been drowning in. I could have done whatever I wanted to whoever I wanted in bed.

Instead, I’m here, in this house, thinking about another guy’s dick in the girl that was supposed to be mine. And it’s making me fucking furious.

It’s making me want to take revenge on both of them. And that pisses me off, too.

Dean and Jaxon are the closest thing I’ve ever had to brothers.

I lost one brother already. And now there’s a wedge driven between the ones I have left and me. Not brothers by blood, but fucking close enough.

Which reminds me, all over again, why I can’t get too close to Athena. Why my desire for her, my need for her, has to be about revenge and possession, nothing else.

Because I can’t ever let something get so close that it hurts to lose it again.