L’Amour
Séverin
I LOVE EASILY—I ALWAYS have.
I loved easily as a child, trusting those around me with wide-eyed innocence. Like my first day of primary school, when everyone was very nice to me, so I brought roses for everyone in the class the following day. Or when I was six and loved my mother so much that I asked her to marry me when I was older, and when she told me she was already married, I burst into tears.
I loved easily as a teenager as well, even when I was told it wasn’t the thing for boys to do. At first, I threw my heart at any girl who captured my attention. Then I threw my heart at the perfect girl —or rather, the girl I thought was perfect for me. Kayana. The girl I thought I would live with happily ever after, like the prince and princess in a fairy tale.
In hindsight, proposing at sixteen could never have ever been anything more than a mistake, but I didn’t realise that back then.
No—it took my heart being torn to shreds to learn from my mistakes. Like any lovesick idiot, I had to be hurt before I learned better.
Before I learned how vile love is, how predatory. The way it attaches itself to a host and infects it from the inside, leeching all life and emotions from it until the host is nothing more than a husk. The way it’s addictive even as it destroys.
And if love is the drug—the poison—then sex is the cure, the crimson antidote.
I’m smarter now than I used to be. I surround myself with girls I can only fuck but never love. Girls who are pretty and polished, the type of girl you see on a magazine cover almost too perfect to feel real.
The problem with always going for girls your type is that they all start to look the same after a while.
They dress well. They have long, curled hair, manicured nails, ethereally beautiful faces. Not just beautiful but impeccably curated, well put together. I don’t date, but I do take girls out, and if I have a girl on my arm for a party, she has to look the part. The same way I carefully select every item of clothing that goes on my body, every piece of jewellery that complements my outfit—the girl I choose must be the perfect accessory.
But I’m a gentleman. If a girl enters a party on my arm, she will end the night more than satisfied. Just because I’ll never fall in love with them doesn’t mean I can’t treat them like goddesses while they’re in my bed. I love pleasure, and nothing pleases me more than pleasuring women.
After all, there’s a reason I can get any girl I want; my reputation precedes me.
But this is my last year at Spearcrest, and it’s getting increasingly more difficult to keep track of names and faces.
I sit on the steps outside the Old Manor with my friends and a girl at my side. My arm is draped around her shoulders, keeping her warm against the autumnal wind.
Later, I plan to take her somewhere private—one of the many secret hook-up spots around Spearcrest—and sweeten the bitterness
of the new academic term with some mutual orgasms.
She’s petite, with long blonde hair in glossy curls. Her eyelashes are long as a doll’s, and her make-up is immaculate. Her nails are perfect, gleaming ovals, the colour of corals. Her skirt is rolled up, a cardigan of fuzzy pink wool replacing her blazer, and a pair of glossy Prada pumps are on her feet.
Her look perfectly complements mine, but for all the croissants in Paris, I can’t remember her name.
Polly? Poppy? She’s British and a Spearcrest student, so I can only assume she’s part of the English upper class or the daughter of a nouveau riche family trying to elevate themselves—a phenomenon I’m far too familiar with as of late. I can only assume she must be named something old-fashioned yet feminine. Elsie, or Harriet, or Maisie.
Does it matter?
I draw her to me and run my hand down one of the delicate golden coils of her hair. Maisie—or whatever her name is—doesn’t care if I remember her name or not. All she cares about is how I’m going to make her feel at some point today and the prestige of being able to tell everyone she fucked a Young King.
Talking of which.
Zachary Blackwood ascends the path up to the Old Manor, his vintage leather satchel slung across his chest, books under his arm. Zachary is the smartest student in the school and the heir to one of the most powerful families in England—and he looks the part. His brown skin is free of flaws, his tight black curls are perfectly coiffed,
his shoes polished to a high shine. A whole garden of badges adorns the lapel of his impeccably pressed blazer.
He’s courteous, cultured and quick-witted—
“Well, Sev!” he calls, climbing the flat marble steps in long strides. “What’s this rumour everyone’s talking about? Did you get engaged in the summer and somehow forget to tell us? I wanted to be the first to personally congratulate you on your matrimonial endeavours!”
and he’s the most arrogant know-it-all I’ve ever met.
The girl next to me, Maybe-Maisie, stiffens under my arm. For fuck’s sake. I have no intention of marrying the girl—but I don’t want to make a fool out of her in public either. A few steps away from me, Evan Knight, the golden boy of Spearcrest, raises his head from where it was lying propped against his backpack, his blond hair catching the sunlight.
“What?” he asks in a tone of consternation. “You got engaged? Does that mean you’re going to get married?”
Evan, athlete extraordinaire and all-American dreamboat, has never been the brightest bulb in the pack, no matter how golden his reputation is.
I roll my eyes at him. “No, people generally get engaged for shits and giggles.”
Evan frowns. “Who pissed in your cornflakes, man?”
“Nobody pissed in my cereal, asshole.”
“Then why are you in such a bad mood?” Zach asks, leaning against one of the marble pillars supporting the elegant arch that keeps the Old Manor stairs shielded from the rain.
“I’m not in a bad mood.”
Well, I wasn’t. But that was before my engagement was unceremoniously brought up. In front of my closest friends and the first girl I was intending to fuck this year.
“Right,” Zachary says, his lip curling ever so slightly. “Sure. You’re perfectly calm and in excellent health and so on and so forth. Glad to hear you’re doing so well. So who’s your fiancée?”
“I don’t want to talk about her,” I snap, glaring at him. “She’s little more than some insignificant gold digger as far as I’m concerned.”
At my side, Maybe-Maisie is looking more concerned by the minute. I have nothing to prove to her—but I do have a reputation to uphold. A reputation as a carefree, fun-loving playboy—not an angry, emotional, engagedman.
From her gaze, I can tell she’s not happy with this, and when she opens her mouth to say something, I hurry to clarify things.
“As for the engagement,” I add quickly, “it means nothing at all. It’s not going to last. Ididn’t even choose her.”
“Your parents pulling your strings again?” Iakov asks.
Iakov “Knuckles” Kavinski, the enigmatic son of an obscure oligarch, sits the furthest away from us, near the bottom of the steps, smoking a cigarette. Although his buzz cut and bruises scream at you to keep away from him, Iakov is the most principled person I know, with a strict honour code only he seems to know but still follows stringently. Although he’s a man of few words, the empathy in his voice is clear.
Out of all of my friends, Iakov can relate the most to having to deal with controlling parents.
I sigh. “They arranged this whole thing and sprung the news at the end of the holidays. I’m engaged, it’s going to be a four-year engagement, and then we’re getting married after university according to them.”
Maybe-Maisie finally cracks and pulls away. “You’re actually engaged?”
Her eyes are big and shiny. Although most girls I sleep with tend to understand and accept the unspoken arrangement between us, there are always exceptions. Girls who think they’ll be the one to capture my attention, to keep it. To make me a one-woman man, to make me commit to them.
But that’s never going to happen.
Especially not to Maybe-Maisie.
I give her shoulder a squeeze. “I’m sorry you found out this way, chérie, but this engagement isn’t my decision or my choice. But I do think you should probably be on your way now. I don’t want you to get hurt.” She opens her mouth, but I smile. “Be a good girl, now. Run along.”
With a tragic sigh, she stands and leaves, descending the steps while my friends watch her silently. I watch her stride away from the Old Manor with a twinge of guilt in my chest but say nothing.
“Why’s your family forcing you to marry this girl, then?” Evan asks, looking truly aghast at my situation. “That shit sounds mediaeval as fuck!”
I suppress the urge to make a tart reply. Evan, of all people, shouldn’t be judging anybody for their decisions. Not Evan: the guy
who could have it all—so decided he wanted the one person he couldn’t have.
“The Montcroix house hasn’t finally run out of money, has it?” Zachary asks in a fake scandalised tone. “Mondieux!”
Sometimes, I have the irresistible urge to slap the smug look off his face. But Zachary’s family are close-knit and powerful—they look after their own. If I touched so much as a hair on Zachary’s head, I’m pretty confident his parents would have me vanish off the face of the earth without a trace.
So I contain my annoyance as best I can, leaning back against the flat marble steps with a sigh. “No—far from. I’m an only child, so my parents think they can use me to make alliances, which is how I’ve ended up engaged to the daughter of the Nishiharas—”
“The Nishiharas?” Luca finally pipes up.
Luca Fletcher-Lowe is sitting with his back against a pillar and has been watching the conversation unfold without commentary. Luca is simultaneously at the centre of the Young Kings—he’s the one our group built around—and yet he’s the most aloof one in our group.
He’s also the scariest person I know. His father owns Novus, the biggest chem tech company in the world. Where I’m full of burning emotion, Luca is a cold void. He might look unearthly with his pale hair and grey eyes, but if you look into those eyes, you’ll see exactly what’s inside him: nothing at all.
“You know them?” I ask, surprised that he’s actually paying attention.
Luca is generally uninterested in anything we discuss unless it’s to do with sex or violence. More than any of us, his tastes are…
peculiar.
He shrugs. “They’ve worked with Novus before. They’re not just crazy rich—they’re building an empire.”
This doesn’t surprise me. When my father told me about the engagement, he mentioned the Nishiharas were acquiring some of our biggest businesses. The engagement is really my father’s way of keeping some power and control since he doesn’t have the wealth to compete with them.
He called it a “mutually beneficial” engagement, but he should really have called it a “damage control” engagement.
Not that I’d ever admit that to my friends.
I look up to find Zach’s clever eyes fixed on mine. He gives me an arch smile.
“Oh, so you’remarrying into the Nishihara family, then?” he asks.
“No.” I throw him a dirty look. “The Nishihara girl is marrying into the Montcroix family.”
The Nishiharas might have all the money they could ever need and be rich for generations to come, but climbing the top ranks of France’s entrenched, centuries-old social hierarchy isn’t pay to play.
“The Nishihara name means fuck all in France,” I explain. “It’s the Montcroix name they’re after. We could marry into any family for money, but there are only so many six hundred-year-old names they can marry into.”
“Wow,” Zachary says, nodding slowly. “The wonders of the French class system. So, an arranged marriage, huh? To be fair, I would have been more shocked if you’d proposed to this girl out of love.”
Well, he’s not wrong about that.
I scoff. “I didn’t even propose.”
“That’s so shit,” Evan says, shaking his head. “Imagine getting married to someone you haven’t even proposed to. I actually can’t get my head around how mediaeval this is. You guys need to start living in the twenty-first century like the rest of us.”
“Ah, yes, of course, advice from an American.” I raise my eyebrows at him. “Because Americans are so renowned for their sophistication of thought and progressive ideals.”
Evan frowns at me. “Hey, come on, now. You’re starting to sound just like Zach.”
“What are you going to do, then?” Iakov interrupts. He doesn’t raise his voice, but when he speaks, everybody always stops to listen. “Marry the stranger?”
I sigh. “What choice do I have? I don’t have any other siblings my parents can offer up, and they would disown me if I broke this engagement. They think we have too much to lose. They even had her shipped over to Spearcrest just so I could get to know her.” I pull out a tiny velvet pouch shoved in my pocket. “Look what they made me bring with me.”
I throw the pouch at Iakov, who catches it one-handed. He tosses what’s left of his cigarette at the floor and stomps on it, then turns the satchel upside down over his open palm. An object falls out with a glint.
Iakov looks up. “A ring?”
“It’s a family heirloom. Opals and diamonds from before Napoleon was even born.”
Iakov nods and tosses the ring at Zachary, who looks at it with an appreciative frown.
“It’s a nice piece,” he says. “What on earth do they want you to do with it?”
“Give it to her—to the Nishihara girl. Like we’re going to meet and fall in love or some shit.”
“Fall in love?” Zachary gives a dry laugh, tossing me the ring back. “I think they know better than to expect you to do that. You don’t love anybody but yourself.”
His tone might be mocking, but Zach is telling the truth.
I loved too easily in the past. I made my mistakes and paid for them. Loving Kayana blew up in my face—proposing to her was the most humiliating mistake of my life. It was a painful lesson—but I learned.
Now, I know that loving myself is the only safe bet. Because ultimately, I’m the only person I can depend on, the only person I can trust. The only person who can never betray me or reject me.
As for everybody else in the world… they are either an ally, an adversary or a pawn.
I just need to work out which of these Anaïs Nishihara is going to be.
Le Plan
Anaïs
I SPREAD MY ACRYLICS out in front of me. I pick out my favourites: monestial blue, sap green and cadmium yellow. Bright, vivid colours, full of life and emotion. Then I place them back inside their tin box with a sigh.
The little alcove I sit in is cold and grey. Outside the window, Spearcrest Academy stretches below: ancient façades of red brick, spiky turrets, grass and trees.
Even though it’s still early autumn, the sky is grey, the sun little more than a ghostly blur behind the wall of clouds. The wan daylight saps the colours out of the trees, the grass, the buildings.
Before I left home, I was given a whole collection of warnings about England. How cold it can get, how much it can rain. I was told how different people were going to be and food was going to taste. I was even warned that the air would smell damp and that the water would taste strange.
But nobody warned me about how grey everything would be.
Picking up my canvas, I prop it on my lap and start sketching. My pencil moves with ease, tracing the outlines of the trees, the plumes of clouds, the spiky skyline.
It’s easy with a pencil, the grey graphite echoing the greyness of the world.
I’ve been here for almost a week now. It took me several days to find this little nook, a broad windowsill by an isolated third-floor staircase in a corner of the oldest building. I’ve come every day to paint the view out of this window.
Every time, I outline, I sketch, and then I look through my paints, and nothing makes it to my palette.
My colours are made for my old life. For Aurigny. For the white villa on the cliffs, the sun on the terracotta tiles of the garden, the green of the old sycamores, the fields of lilac and mustard, and beyond those, the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean.
But I don’t have the colours for this new life. I don’t have the colours for the brick façades of Spearcrest, for its twisted oak trees, its marble fountains and manicured lawns. I don’t have the colours for the students in their dark uniforms, all looking exactly the same. I don’t have the colours for the curious looks and arrogant sneers of everyone I pass.
A raven bursts out from a tangled thicket outside the window, startling me. I look up, following its lurching flight across the campus until it disappears beyond the looming shadow of the clock tower.
“Take me with you,” I whisper.
“Who are you talking to?”
I turn with a start. A girl is standing in the staircase, leaning slightly to peer at my canvas over my shoulder.
She is strikingly beautiful. Dark skin, long dark braids down to her waist. The Spearcrest uniform looks different on her than it does on me: she wears thigh-high stockings with her school skirt and highheeled shoes. Small gold rings adorn the shells of her ears, and her lips are glossy as the glaze on strawberry tarts.
Two girls stand behind her, waiting patiently. It’s not hard to tell this girl is in charge. She smiles at me, waiting for me to answer her question.
“A crow that was flying by,” I answer.
“Oh, really?” She tilts her head, her smile widening. “How odd. What’s your name?”
“Anaïs.”
“Ah-nah-ees,” she repeats with perfect pronunciation. I nod, and she sticks out her hand. “I’m Kay.”
“Nice to meet you.”
I take her hand. Her fingers are long, her fingernails shaped into perfect points and painted to imitate the iridescence of pearls.
“It’s lovely to meet you,” she says sweetly. “We don’t get many new students in the upper school.” She lets go of my hands and gestures to her friends. “This is Matilda, and this is Aine. Say hi, girls.”
Both girls give me a little wave, and I wave back. So far, this is a friendly encounter. If beautiful, queenly Kay is hiding a secret tyrannical side to her, she’s doing a great job of keeping it concealed.
“Are you an artist?” she asks, pointing at my canvas.
I smile. “I try. It’s not earning me a living yet.”
“Earn a living!” She laughs airily, waving her hand at me. “You’re so funny!”
I wasn’t trying to be funny, but I keep smiling anyway. My time in Spearcrest doesn’t need to be unpleasant if I play my cards right. All I need to do is get the qualifications I need. Aside from that, my plan is to make my life as easy as possible.
“So,” Kay says, clapping her hands together and startling me once more. “Are the rumours true, then?”
