Page 3

Chapter 3

Caspian

This was literally torture.

I was in the car with three of the hottest people I’d ever met in my damn life, and I wasn’t allowed to hit on any of them. Okay, well, “allowed” was the wrong word. Ember wouldn’t kick my ass for flirting with her, and I did so regularly, but she wasn’t into dudes, so it was just harmless flirting with no end goal. Kit . . . well, I might try it if I were really fucking drunk. He was super hot, it was just that I also liked my skin intact, with no extra holes.

And Frost . . . well, we were back to Kit and the stabbing.

The white hair was weird, too. I’d had a conversation with Rain back when we met, about his family and how they were—and weren’t—blood related. It was easy to see now, how Rain, Frost, and Kit were all connected by those Moonstriker jaws and pale eyes and hair, and Ember wasn’t. She did slightly resemble Frost, with their dark skin and high cheekbones, but apparently they shared a non-Moonstriker parent.

It was odd, though, a bunch of young people with stark white hair. Most people in Sunrunner lands only got to salt-and-pepper even in old age, never going stark white, and even then it was . . . it was different. White hair on older people was thin and fine, and this was thick and glossy, just . . . white as freshly painted lines on blacktop.

It looked especially striking on Frost, the way it contrasted with his skin . . .

But Kit was giving me the stink eye again, so I stopped staring at his brother—cousin?—in the rearview mirror. When informed about the change in Kit’s parentage, Ember had shrugged and said he was “still her annoying older brother,” so I assumed the other Moonstrikers would agree with that. Kit might call Cove his father now, but it didn’t change how he thought of his siblings.

Clearly, since he was going to kick my ass for looking at his brother.

When I glanced back again, I realized Ember was looking at me with amusement. Shit. Was it all that obvious?

“So why do Sunrunner car license plates have six letters on them, when everyone else has seven?” she asked aloud.

Almost instantly, Frost perked up. “Oh, it’s because of the machines. And money, of course. Most things are because of money, aren’t they? You see, when we started making license plates, no one really needed . . .”

And off Frost went on an explanation of the history of the Summerlands, license plates, the machines that made them, and some budget crisis in Sunrunner lands that had led to us having shorter license plates than the others.

By the time he got to the modern day and how even Sunrunner now had seven on some cars, he’d been talking for the better part of half an hour. The whole story was probably a good explanation for why bureaucracy was the worst and ruined everything, but there were other lessons in there as well. Like thinking ahead to when there would inevitably be more cars on the road, and of course, the trustworthiness of bureaucrats, seeing as one had pocketed a lot of the money saved by purchasing inferior machines to make those initial plates.

He was still in the middle of talking about that when he trailed off, flushing and staring at his lap. “Ember. You shouldn’t . . . no one wanted to hear about all that.”

“What happened to that guy?” I asked. Not just as a distraction, but because it had been an interesting story.

He glanced up at me in the rearview mirror, then at his lap again, his enormous broad shoulders slumped in what looked far too much like defeat to me. “You don’t have to pretend that?—”

“I want to know too,” Ember agreed. “He went to jail, right? Or at least they took the money away?”

Frost winced, but his body language softened a bit. “I’m afraid not. He, um, he was a second cousin of the Sunrunner at the time. So he mostly got a slap on the wrist and moved to a job where he couldn’t steal any more money.”

I scowled at that. “Seriously? That’s bullshit. Why do people get away with things just because they’re related to rich assholes?”

He glanced up at me, meeting my eye in the mirror, and finally smiled again. “I thought so too. If, um, if it’s any consolation, his wife left him. It turns out she was the one who blew the whistle because she caught him making even bigger plans after having gotten away with it the first time.”

“The least he deserved,” Ember said, crossing her arms over her chest.

Funny. The guy was some fourth or fifth cousin of mine, probably, and I was still amused that Ember wanted him punished. Hells, he should have been punished. Being Caspian Sunrunner didn’t mean I had a right to steal from the people of Sunrunner lands. If anything, it was the opposite. I should be giving to them, not taking. I was supposed to take care of them.

Not that my father had done that in my memory. I suspected that early in my life, his constant absence might have been him off doing his job, taking care of our people. But in the last decade, it had not been that. I hadn’t once found him sober since Mom’s death, so I preferred to think someone else was doing the work.

Aunt Rachel, probably, which might explain why she hated my father so much. I didn’t know why she hated me, but it wasn’t like she talked to me about it, so I was also never going to find out.

On the other hand, I’d been an adult for years now, and hadn’t made all that much effort to step up and help her with the responsibilities of caring for Sunrunner lands, so why shouldn’t she resent me? Yes, she’d hated me since I could remember, even when I was four or five, but I probably wasn’t helping things now by running away all the time.

Just . . . what the hell did I know about ruling a family? A whole land, with millions of people?

Not a damn thing.

The only time I’d tried to do anything, I’d failed miserably and been told I was a naive child.

In the backseat, a symphony started playing somewhere in the middle.

Kit scowled, turning around in his seat to stare at Frost. Ember was also looking at him in disapproval, but it didn’t seem to be personal—the two of them weren’t offended by him. They were offended somehow by the song.

“Don’t answer that,” Kit ordered.

Ember sighed and inclined her head toward Kit, without looking away from Frost. “You probably shouldn’t.”

Frost looked between the two of them, confused. “But . . . I can. Why wouldn’t I?”

That was absolutely fucking adorable. He didn’t comprehend the notion of not answering the phone because you just didn’t feel like talking?

How was anyone in the entire world that . . . pure?

I’d been lying since birth, I was pretty sure. I remembered distinctly all the times Mom let me stay up late and cautioned me to tell my father I’d been in bed at eight sharp. The one time he’d caught me up at midnight and been furious had been enough to convince me that lying was indeed the answer. Lying was the answer to everything.

I glanced over at Kit, who was nodding along with Ember, and lifted a brow at him. If he was going to defend his brother’s innocence, shouldn’t he also not encourage him to lie?

“You already decided not to call her,” Kit said. “Do you think that if she calls you, the conversation will end any differently than it would have if you called her?”

Frost cocked his head, staring at Kit for a moment, eyes flicking rapidly back and forth, as though he was considering how the conversation would go. Finally, he shook his head—just as his phone stopped ringing. He looked down at the object, sitting in one of his hands, and his expression was downright hurt. As though he was worried he’d done something horrible by not answering.

“You know you’re allowed to not want to talk to someone, right?” I asked, trying and failing to meet his eye.

When he finally tore his gaze from the phone, he looked confused. “But she wanted to speak to me. What if it’s important? What if Rain is hurt? What if?—”

“What’s the likelihood Rain is hurt?” Kit asked. “Run the numbers, Frost. What does she call you for?”

Again, he stopped to think for long, silent moments. When he turned to meet Kit’s eyes, his expression had flickered back to almost hurt. “Forty nine percent of the time, she wants to check in on what I’m doing. Forty eight percent of the time, she wants information.”

“And the other three?”

He gave a deep sigh that sounded almost—no, it definitely was miserable. He was once again slumped in his seat, head hanging and eyes sad. “Giving orders. She has only called about an emergency once in my life, when Uncle Cove was in an accident, and she was demanding that I abandon my term at university to come home and help.”

“And we know Dad’s fine,” Kit pointed out. “You want to call Rain and make sure he’s fine too?”

Frost’s eyes went huge, and I couldn’t tell if the emotion was shock or horror. “I couldn’t! What if Mother found out I was calling someone else in order to avoid talking to her?”

Ember groaned. “Fuck’s sake, Frost. You always worry so much.” She whipped her own phone out of her pocket and typed into it for a moment. Then she held it up in front of him. “See? Rain is fine. He said so.”

Frost actually seemed relieved by whatever it was she showed him, and nodded, but slumped down in the seat looking exhausted. “I can’t just ignore her forever. She’ll call again. She’ll assume I was away from the phone, and she’ll just?—”

“And we’ll deal with that when it happens.” Ember reached over and patted him on the shoulder, then sighed and leaned into him. “Promise, Frosty. She’s fine, and she’ll live without you for a minute. She’s a grown ass woman, and you’re her son, not her slave. A grown adult son at that. She doesn’t need you at her beck and call.”

“You could just turn off her ringer,” Kit suggested. “Then it won’t matter when she calls, you won’t even know. Like magic, no more reason to stress over what she wants.”

That all seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but Frost was clearly still on edge, even as he wrapped an arm around his sister and they both quieted down.

“Maybe you should teach him how to lie,” Kit said to me. His tone was conversational, but the whole subject was fucking dangerous, and I could see that from miles away. “He stinks at it. Never been able to lie to save his own life. But I’ll bet you’re an absolute master.”

I glanced at him from the corner of my vision, unwilling to take my eyes off the road, and raised a brow at him. “Far be it from me to stoop to playground rhetoric, but I think the appropriate response here is ‘takes one to know one.’ Don’t you think?”

Behind us, both Frost and Ember burst into laughter.

“You’re so not wrong,” Ember agreed, once she managed to stifle the laughter. “Win—Kit was always the best liar. He’d tell Delta the biggest whoppers, completely straight faced, and half the time she’d buy them because he was just so good at it. Remember the time you convinced her to let you out of a week of school because you swore you’d gotten addicted to aspirin?”

He groaned and let his head fall back against the headrest, as though merely thinking about it was too ridiculous. And seriously, aspirin? That had to be some skill he had.

I shot him a grin. “Oh really? Tell us about it. Sounds like you’re actually way better than me at this.”