The Never King (Vicious Lost Boys #1)(5)

The one named Bash comes over. “How are you, Darling? Sometimes the journey here is hard on a girl.”

My throat is raw and dry, my tongue like sandpaper in my mouth. I’m a little queasy and foggy, but other than that I seem okay.

Other than the fact I was kidnapped by someone I thought was a myth or a delusion and now I’m chained to a bed by the ocean. Back home, the closest ocean is several hundred miles away.

Just how far did they take me?

“I’m fine,” I answer.

“Water?” the one by my bedside asks.

“Yes, please.”

For my entire life, my mother prepared me for this moment, sometimes in the most painful of ways, and none of it was enough.

She literally told me this would happen and yet now that it is, it’s still hard to wrap my head around.

Is it real? Or is this delusion how the madness begins?

The bed beneath me feels real. The warm tropical air, real. The space that the boys take up in the room, the energy that fills it—very, very real.

There is something about these boys that is more potent that any of the boys I’ve hung out with before and I’ve hung out with plenty.

Pretty boys always make the time go by faster. I hate being bored. But most of all, I hate being alone.

Bash disappears into another doorway on the other side of the room and returns with a cup of water. Condensation already blooms across the glass.

The gulls cry again.

I can hear waves crashing over rocks somewhere in the distance.

As I drink the water down—it’s crisp and cool and somehow the most refreshing glass of water I’ve ever had—I take in my surroundings.

We’re in a large room with crumbling plaster walls that look like they were once painted a bright shade of emerald. There are three rectangular windows to my right with slatted wooden shutters pulled open. There are no screens on the windows. Light pours in. Beyond, I can make out the branches of a palm tree and below it, a tree blooming with bright red flowers.

I’m on a bed with a thick wooden frame and what feels like a feather-stuffed mattress. The white sheet is clean, bleached to a crisp. There is no blanket.

A wingback chair sits in the corner with a long-armed lamp behind it and an end table.

That would be a nice place to sit to listen to the gulls if I wasn’t chained to the bed.

I hand the glass back. The boy sets it on the floor. He must be sitting on a stool at my bedside because he’s decidedly sitting but with no chair in sight.

“What am I doing here?”

They boys share a look and I swear I hear the distant chiming of bells.

Goddamn. I really am losing my mind.

“How much was your mother able to tell you?” Bash asks.

“Not much.”

Last night was the first time she actually gave me any useful information.

My mother’s boogeyman thinks I, a Darling, can fix him.

What can I possibly do for him? I can barely hold together my own life.

Bash leans against the wall behind his twin, a dark echo.

I went to school with twins once back when Mom and I lived in Minnesota.

The Wavey twins. The most obnoxious, annoying little girls I’d ever met. They used the fact that they were identical to get away with everything. Including putting worms in my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I wonder if these boys are the same.

They look like trouble. They feel like the wrong kind of temptation. Like a pretty tree frog that can kill you with a touch.

I think everyone has a super power, something they’re just inherently good at and mine has always been reading people. Knowing what sort of a person someone is before they speak a word.

I think I need to be careful with these two if I’m going to survive this.

Whatever this is.

“I’m Kastian,” the closest twin says. “You can call me Kas.” He hitches his thumb over his broad, bare shoulder. “That’s my twin, Sebastian.”

“Bash,” the other twin says.

“Hi,” I say to them.

“We’re the nice ones,” Bash says and pushes away from the wall. He comes to sit at the end of the bed and the frame creaks beneath his weight. Even though he’s fully clothed, I can tell by the way the material skims over his body that he’s just as cut as his twin brother, all muscle and bone.

I’ve been alone in dark rooms with plenty of men, but none like the twins.

They could take me easily, in any way they wanted. Fighting them would be like fighting the ocean—pointless, futile.

But why would I?

They look like they’d be a wild ride.

I lick my lips and Bash’s nostrils flare as his attention wanders to my mouth.

When you grow up around prostitutes, you learn a thing or two about tricks.

Mine has always been setting hooks.

“If you’re the nice ones,” I say, “then who are the mean ones?”

The twins share a look.

“Peter Pan?” I guess.

“Meaner than us,” Kas admits.

“Not the meanest,” Bash adds.

“Then who—”

Footsteps sound up the hallway beyond my room. The twins sigh almost in unison.

Bash scratches at the back of his neck. “Get ready, Darling.”

“Why?”