Page 12 of Nikola

A cold November breeze tousled my hair, but I didn’t feel it as flames licked my skin at the memory of his mouth on me. Bonfires raged across the clearing, flames clawing skyward and flickering showers of embers that lit up the night.

I stood there, my eyes burning from the smoke and my body buzzing with anticipation as I scanned the painted faces of every criminal faction.

Legacy events took place at the very edge of Jean D’Arc’s boundary line, in a wide-open clearing surrounded by towering pines, their gnarled, skeletal branches twisted upward like grasping hands, clawing at the night sky and strangling every last thread of moonlight. The trees loomed like silent sentinels, casting the clearing in a suffocating, ink-black darkness.

In other words: it kept curious eyes away.

Shadows spilled out thick and heavy along the edges, watching from the tree line like creepy predators. The air was dense with the scent of damp earth, smoke, and copper.

“Welcome to the freakshow,” Penelope uttered and signed at the same time. The skulls painted on people’s faces were a reminder to the legacies, and everyone connected to the mafia, of the skeletons our families had buried.

My girlfriends and I stood in the forest, watching the scene with the same uneasy feeling we experienced the first time we saw this happen. But instead of walking back to our dorm that was a mere walk away, we stayed glued to our spots.

Anya shot her a look. “We couldn’t let Skye come alone. What kind of friends would that make us?”

I flashed her a grateful look.

“Agreed, but those skulls… fire… it’s all just too much.”

Penelope stared at the skulls with rose thorns that represented the Omertàs. And, given that she was arranged tomarry Enzo Marchetti, who was practically Omertà royalty, I could see why they made her the most anxious. Not that Enzo was present. He never attended D’Arc, but his minions could be present among us.

There were also the black-and-white skulls with golden crowns reserved for the kingpins, as well as masks with silver accents representing the mobsters who fought the Belles and Mobsters agreements two decades ago. The Yakuzas were my least favorite, with their ominous symbols and dark colors.

“Would you rather we leave?” I offered reluctantly.

“No, I’ll get over it.” She shook her head, but I knew Penelope hated any reminder of her impending marriage. “It’s not like he’s even here.”

I nodded in agreement.

“We could still kill him, you know,” Anya grumbled, picking up on our friend’s stress. “It would be easy.”

“I really wish I didn’t hate violence,” Penelope huffed. “But I might have to resort to it.”

“We,” Amara corrected her. “If it comes down to it, we’ll find a way to do it together.”

“We go down together,” I agreed, then gestured toward the clearing. “Maybe we tie him up like that guy and torture him.”

Haunted expressions marred my friends’ faces, all eyes turning on the guy tied to a tree like he was about to be burned at the stake.

I’d seen a version of it play out half a dozen times—some freakish game of cat and mouse would be played until he was caught, and then he’d be killed.

“Do we know who he is?” I signed to my girlfriends.

Penelope shrugged. “Organ trafficker.”

I winced. There’d been more and more cases of attempted kidnapping and organ trafficking lately.

What happened to the Morrellis at the beginning of the semester had been a warning to us all. The group attacked Arianna and kidnapped Hannah, extracting an organ from her body. Thankfully her father had found her before she could be slaughtered for even more organs and left for dead.

It was no wonder the legacies took torturing of the organ traffickers to the extreme, as was evidenced by the man howling in pain and terror, his skin rubbed raw from his restraints.

I wasn’t sure what it said about me, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to protest the cruelty of what was about to happen.

In fact, I was glad for it. Maybe because I grew up in this mafia world or maybe because it was the lesser of two evils. Our families fought fire with fire when it came to human and organ trafficking, knowing that at any moment the world surrounding us could be burned to ash because of it.

So yes, I understood that our friends and families were fighting the battles law enforcement couldn’t.

I suspected my friends felt the same, especially because of how close we were to the Morrelli twins, neither of whom would be returning to D’Arc. Instead, they’d opted to finish their degrees from the comfort of their homes.