Page 30 of The Tenth Circle
I give him my best scowl. “No, I couldn’t care less. Just stating facts.”
“That is quite the angry fact.”
With a deep growl I shove Saint, and it’s only for my sake that he moves back. “God, you are insufferable!” I stomp over to the emergency button and finally do what I should’ve done from the beginning. Use it.
Saint approaches my side, looking straight ahead at the door as he says, “You should consider it a mercy that I don’t give you my attention.”
I slam my thumb repeatedly against the open button. “You think so highly of yourself for literally no reason.”
“Oh, I have some pretty good reasons.”
After one final attempt with the elevator, I let out an exacerbated breath. “Yeah, well, I don’t want your mercy or your attention.”
The doors finally slide open, revealing freedom in the form of mascara stained tissues on fancy white flooring.
Halle-fucking-lujah.
“Trust me. You’ll want my mercy,” Saint quips behind me as I march out of the elevator.
With a roll of my eyes, I turn around to find him reaching for the buttons, then shoving both hands inside his jacket pockets.
“Oh, yeah, Letterman? And why is that?”
Right as the doors slide closed, Saint fixes me a grin holding volumes of sexual experience. “Because, Jimi, once you have my attention…you’ll doanythingto try and keep it.”
4
SAINT
CURRENT DAY
Riverside Preparatory School is the oldest and largest standing educational facility in Manhattan. Dressed on the outside in cathedral style pillars, stained glass, and ogival arches, the building was labeled “Chelsea’s Palace” by some mayor back in nineteen seventy-six.
But a palace can’t be a palace until royalty dwells inside it.
So, in eighteen ninety-three, four deep rooted families from multiple parts of the country took on the role.
The Shaws, Lavells, Bishops, and Creeds.
The Shaws and Lavells from the northern parts and the Bishops and Creeds from the southern.
Each family having thick ties to church and states, with enough money and power to rule over all.
Including good old New York City.
It may have been years after the civil war ended, but the men in these families did not quite approve of the light at the end of those tunnels. So instead…they built their own underneath the school.
Government officials in their pockets turned a lot of blind eyes and churches with their hands out called many of their transgressions a necessary evil.
The blood. The sweat. The tears.
The sin.
This school was built on the labor of many backs, all of which suffered to ungodly extremes at the hand of political tyrants and zealots making up for lost time.
On the surface, Riverside may look like a castle in the center of Chelsea, Manhattan…but the history of its supremacy is not one that falls easy on righteous ears. Then again, what hell bred by heathens, evenroyalones, actually is?
Because if there’s anything a heathen loves more than his throne…it’s a challenge.
