The Kingmaker (All the King's Men, #1)(9)

Good luck with that, you rich prick.

I may not actually live on the rez anymore, but staying with my father in town hasn’t made it any less my home. I’d still be living there if Mama . . .

I shove that thought down to a dark hole where I keep the really painful stuff. Why deal with it now? Save something for the therapist I’ll start seeing in my thirties when I finally decide it’s all too much to handle on my own.

My mother was murdered? Taken? Stolen?

Gone.

One of those “unseen” women, an unheard voice, whose disappearance wasn’t shouted about on the news or fretted over by the world.

And I’ll never get over it. Not ever.

There are days when I go a few hours without thinking about it—without wondering what happened to the beautiful woman who gave so much of herself to me and everyone around her. Yeah, there are those days, but not many. Mostly there are a thousand things every day that remind me of her, not the least of which is my own reflection.

“Good to have those off,” Berkeley T-shirt mumbles, rubbing his wrists and reminding me of our current less-than-ideal circumstances. I don’t know how long they’ll keep us in this holding cell.

“This thing hurts like crazy,” Mr. Paul says, touching the reddened, punctured skin of his hand.

“You need medical attention.” I walk over to the bars and glance back over my shoulder to Berkeley T-shirt. “So do you.”

Berkeley. According to that T-shirt, he’s probably already in college. Yeah, he’s already a man, not a boy. My dad would strangle me and maim him.

“I don’t think I’ll lose it.” He nods to his injured arm, one corner of his mouth tipping up.

Focus on first aid, not his lips.

“Hey!” I yell through the bars. “We need a first-aid kit in here.”

Unibrow takes her sweet time ambling toward the cell.

“You rang, m’lady?” she asks. Oh, the sarcasm is thick with this one.

“Yeah. We have two people here with dog bites, thanks to the Cujos you turned loose on us.” I point a thumb over my shoulder. “Thought I’d do you a favor and spare you a lawsuit. You’re welcome.”

She eyes Mr. Paul, who cups his hand, and then she glances at Berkeley. She lingers there, taking in the fully spectacular male specimen he is.

Can’t blame ya, girl.

“I’ll get a first-aid kit and some antibiotic,” she finally says before turning on her heel to leave.

“You’re a real Florence Nightingale,” I shout after her and turn back to the crowded cell. Another van has brought in more of the protestors. It makes my heart heavy, seeing my friends and neighbors behind bars like criminals. We don’t steal. We don’t disregard the law and break our word. That is what has been done to us since the first ship docked.

“Stars and stripes, huh?” Berkeley asks from the bench against the wall.

He’s the only person here I’ve never seen before. I walk over and take the empty spot beside him.

“’Scuse me?” I ask, resting my back against the wall and pulling one knee up while I wait for him to clarify.

“Stars.” He gestures to one side of his eye. “And stripes. On your face. Is that on purpose?”

Sharp. Observant. He does attend Berkeley. Stands to reason.

“I never claimed to be subtle,” I say with a tight smile.

“Yeah, I picked up on the not-subtle part at the protest,” he says with a straight face, but with eyes twinkling the tiniest bit.

I don’t feel like discussing my complex relationship with this nation’s forefathers and their twisted definition of “we the people.” I settle for the simpler answer to his question. “The stars are for my second name,” I tell him.

“Second name?”

“A medicine man came through our reservation when I was a little girl, and gave me my second name: Girl Who Chases Stars.”

“Wow. That’s some name.”

“Tell ya a little secret.” I lean closer. “I think it may have been rigged.”

“Rigged?”

“When I was little, I wanted to be an astronaut. Well, at first I wanted to be a clown.”

“Obviously. Who didn’t?”

“You, too?”

“No, they’re creepy as fuck. What a weird kid you were.”

“This we can all agree on.” I laugh, surprised that I can laugh in a jail cell having this strange conversation with a guy I met not much more than an hour ago. “So around five or so, I decided I’d be an astronaut instead. Everyone knew it, so maybe the medicine man was simply giving the people what they wanted, so to speak. Chicken, egg. Earth, moon.”

“So if Girl Who Chases Stars is your second name, what’s your first?”

“Lennix. With an ‘i’ because I know you’re thinking ‘o.’”

“Lennix.” He rolls the syllables around on his tongue, and something about the way he seems to test the name, taste it, sends a shiver down my spine. I’ve never been around a guy like him before. Correction. A man. The guys at school leave me cold—cold and uninterested and unimpressed. This guy? Warm, interested. Way impressed.

I’m distracted when the cell door opens and a woman teeters in on skyscraper heels. Her blue wig is longer than her dress, which I’m sure was a cocktail napkin in another life. I think I’ve seen her a few times on the rez and in town, too. She’s Native, and I bet if you sandblasted her makeup off, she’d be quite pretty.