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Bright Virginia princelings were little interest and less consequence to Kavinsky. There was some idle entertainment in toying with them. Kavinsky had dethroned more than one in his year at Aglionby; they didn’t know it yet, since he had not wrenched their crown’s violently from their hair or brazenly challenged their titles. The long game was a tool he used far more often than he was credited. He loosened a brick here and weakened a strut there. He introduced pot as a small rebellion against absentee parents. He started raucous parties and seeded ideas of status used against townie girls who thought themselves above princes. He could be insidious like that.
He had considered inducting Gansey in his games when they’d met. This was a princeling whose fall would echo across the ages. But, Gansey was a squire already, and though he knew the manipulation game and played it well, his appetite for power was well sated. Gansey was already on a path to lose his birthright without Kavinsky’s help. Gansey, in short, was boring.
His chosen company was less so. His court of a ghost and a lesser prince. Ghosts are of no consequence to gods. The lesser prince had potential. He was pretty and bright, seeming less bright next to Gansey only because he would burn longer. The lesser prince was competitive, confident, curious. It would be satisfaction of the purest sort to bring him to heel.
Niall Lynch was murdered, and the lesser prince descended. He turned his creation to self-destruction. His scorn grew teeth, his curls shorn in warning. When school resumed following the new year, his armour included a spreading and seductive tattoo. The steady star of his life grew, a red giant, shaking with impending collapse.
-
There was a time, not years or months or even weeks ago, when Kavinsky didn’t want anything, he wanted everything. He wanted power to wield. He wanted lackies to direct, bootlickers to crush. He wanted to be a god among men – hell, he was a god among men. He wanted to be feared and revered for his mortal skills, to know he was even more than that. Kavinsky did not want to be known, or valued, or desired, not as a person. He wanted the immortal span of an idea, a demon.
He had all he wanted. He was more at sixteen than most could hope to be by their death, and he would be even greater when he spun off into aether and flames. Anything that caught his eye was his, or would be.
And then Niall Lynch was murdered. And then he totaled the Mitsubishi in grand fashion. And then Kavinsky, jeans still undone, was dragging Prokopenko’s limp body from the wreckage. And then. And then.