Fuel the Fire (Calloway Sisters 3)

Prologue

CONNOR COBALT

“Name?” Behind a desk, a woman shuffled through white cards with crimson lanyards attached.

“Richard Connor Cobalt.” I gave her an amiable smile.

She procured the corresponding nametag. “Welcome to this year’s Model UN, Richard. Good luck.” Her last phrase—while nothing more than a meaningless farewell—punctured a part of my head, poking at a nerve.

Good luck.

I liked having control of my fate. And luck meant that I had none. That I’d have to let someone inferior decide my outcome. I understood that some judges were biased, most of which I could likely outwit. But climbing over people was my specialty. I wasn’t battling a slot machine or a computer.

People were malleable. People were predictable.

I would beat the judges. I would win.

Instead of wearing my irritation, I gave her another relaxed smile and put the lanyard around my neck. She was staring at me like I was a teenage boy trying to play the role of a grown man. It was that look that dug beneath my skin, the expression that said I was small and undeserving because I was only just fifteen.

“You should remember my name,” I said.

She laughed hesitantly. “I’ll try, but there are a lot of you.”

“And yet, I’m the only one you’ll see win every year.”

Her uncertainty only grew like did I hear you right? Did you mean what I think you did?

My eyes barely flickered to her laminated pin and then I gestured absentmindedly to her stack of cards. “The twenty-seventh nametag is out of place. Rolland comes before Rose.” I smiled again. “Good luck, Marianne. You’ll need it.”

I was a prick.

An asshole.

A conceited, arrogant son of a bitch.

But to me, there was nothing more frustrating, more exasperating than being deemed unworthy for the pure fact that I was younger than whomever I faced. My thoughts, my ideas never mattered to most adults. To have someone seriously listen to me, as an equal, was nearly impossible. I was simply “a kid”—an intelligent kid but not one whose thoughts superseded theirs.

I would never talk down to an infant the way that people talked down to me, a fifteen-year-old.

I knew that I’d gain respect with age. I had to wait on some absurd timeline created by society. Bullshit, I thought. Life was bullshit, and the only way for it to not grate at me was to play along.

And so I always did.

She stared at me, open-mouthed and unsure.

I waved her goodbye, and my grin spread across my face as I walked down the lobby hallway, my leather duffel slung on my shoulder.

After I signed in, I headed towards the elevators. The hotel had sectioned off a number of floors for competitors. Faust Boarding School for Young Boys would take the sixth floor with three other preparatory schools.

Fourteen to eighteen-year-olds already rode up and down the glass elevators in boredom or with actual places to be, like me.

Guys in burnt orange blazers shuffled off the elevator. I entered and pressed the sixth floor button, tempted to hit the “close doors” button as well. But I waited, watching two girls approach. The taller one with glossy brown hair had these hellfire eyes that struck me as malevolent, pinpointed and blazing. No matter which direction she turned. Her mouth moved at a rapid pace, gesticulating angrily as she talked.

I couldn’t hear her, too much noise interference from people congesting the hotel.

I scrutinized the girls from afar. No nametags, so they hadn’t signed in yet. Both wore navy-blue plaid skirts, their white-collared blouses tucked in. I caught sight of the embroidered insignias along the breast pocket: Dalton Academy.

I didn’t have any preconceived notions of the co-ed private school. Last year, we beat them. And the year before that, we had no trouble. I assumed this year would be the same.

“No, I’m not letting it go. It’s utter bullshit, Lydia,” the taller girl cursed. They slipped into the elevator, the girl too pissed to realize that she needed to press a button, and I was too curious to interrupt.

“The manager had a point,” Lydia said with resignation. She had a slender frame, freckles, and one long, red braid.

The other girl placed her hands on her hips, fuming. She choked the elevator with each heavy inhale.

I grazed her from head to toe: black high heels, dark red lipstick, sleek brown pony and those tyrannical yellow-green eyes, burning holes into the glass. I was sharing an elevator with a tempestuous, electric storm that I refused to calm. I always wished to be swept into madness, if only for a moment, to truncate the mundane, ordinary moments of my existence.

“His argument was that three girls can fit in a king-sized bed, but three boys can’t. So we have to take the worse room when management booked the same suite twice. Do you see how ridiculous that is?”

“It’s true though. Boys are bigger than us.” Lydia shrugged.

The elevator doors slid shut and we rose.

“We’re sleeping in the suite we were assigned,” the girl refuted. “They can take the smaller room.”

“They won’t agree to it,” Lydia said.

“You just don’t want to argue with them about it,” the girl retorted. “If you want to stay quiet, that’s fine, but I can’t let the Faust boys win. Half of them believe they piss gold and the other half walk around like they created the earth and sky.”

I lowered my head to hide my grin. I was part of the latter half.

She continued, standing taller, “Their heads are so inflated that I will cheer when someone decapitates them at the neck.”

I could barely hold back from laughing. I stared at the ceiling, my lips curving upward even more.

I’d never heard a girl like her before.

Never in my life.

I had most of the details I needed to understand the events. Management double-booked the same suite with Dalton and Faust and now they were telling one of them to

move.

Lydia softened her voice. “The Faust boys are intimidating for a reason. Sebastian said they win Outstanding Delegation every year.”

“Every year that we weren’t here,” the girl rebutted.

That pushed me to speak. “I don’t think we’ve met.” I turned towards them, and the girls shifted their stances, finally acknowledging the third person on the elevator.

They both perused my towering frame. At fifteen, I was six-foot and still growing. My wavy brown hair was styled perfectly, my brow arched in mock contemplation, and I wore a black blazer with a crimson tie.

Faust’s uniform.

The girl’s nose flared, especially as she eyed my nametag, Faust Boarding School for Young Boys typed in small script below Richard Connor Cobalt.

Lydia paled.

I held out my hand to her first. “Nice to meet you.”

She shook it, her palm clammy and her grip limp.

When I turned to the other girl, she crossed her arms over her chest and tapped her heel repeatedly. I waited for her to introduce herself. I wanted to know her name. Badly. I ached to hear it. Any part of it.

I told her, “You’re my greatest competition.” I hoped she’d soften at the compliment. Whether I spoke true or not, I had no clue yet. She remained tense, and the doors began to slide open on the sixth floor, my floor.

She didn’t answer me. She pushed past to exit.

Lydia sprinted to catch up to her friend. “Rose,” she called out.

I stepped into the hallway with a wider grin, and Rose glanced over her shoulder with a scathing glare, knowing Lydia just unleashed what Rose denied me. I didn’t have to check my room card again. I was 643, one of the balcony suites that overlooked the café and courtyard in the middle of the hotel.

I thought, for a split second, that maybe I was in the double-booked room too. The chance was microscopic, but it wasn’t improbable.

As soon as I saw Dillon and Henry waiting at the door marked 643 with another Dalton girl—all of them glowering—I realized that I belonged to this fight too.

“Management gave you a new room,” Rose lied to Dillon, passing keycards to the blond-haired sixteen-year-old.

The second I approached, her brows knotted in confusion.

“Dude.” Dillon nudged my arm. “They double-booked us with these Dalton girls.”

I didn’t take my eyes off Rose. “I heard.” I grabbed Dillon’s keycards and passed them back to Rose.

Realization washed over her face.

This was my suite too. And no one ever took what was mine. Not unless I willingly gave it to them, and I wouldn’t just give her this room. I didn’t want to cram in the same bed with Dillon and Henry. I wanted the living room, the extra desk, the couch, more quiet space to study.

But so did Rose.

“Just switch with us,” Rose tried it this way. “It’s the polite thing to do.”

“Why?” I asked. “Because you’re a girl?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Richard.”

“Rose.”

She let out a small growl. “What do you want for it?”

My brows lifted. Be careful, Rose, was my first thought. I knew she was fourteen, if this was her first year competing, and maybe, just maybe, she was willing to do anything to win.

Maybe she was just like me.

“Let’s play a game,” I said, dropping my duffel on the ground. “The winner will take the suite. The loser gets the smaller room.”

“Smaller room?” I heard Henry huff behind me, realizing that Rose was going to fool him into switching.

“What kind of game?” Her voice was frosted with ice.

“Trivia.” It took us another ten minutes to sort out the details. All six of us wrote down categories on slips of paper and put them in Dillon’s baseball hat. Only Rose and I would compete. Dillon and Henry knew my IQ was higher than theirs. And both girls, Lydia and Anna, pointed immediately to Rose. Whether they were scared to go against me or whether she was merely smarter than them, I didn’t know yet.

“Who’s going first?” Dillon asked, holding the hat.

Rose opened her red handbag on the crook of her arm and acquired a quarter. “We’ll flip.” She called tails, and I lost to chance. But I wouldn’t lose to anything else.

She plucked a paper from the hat. “Egyptian Mythology.” According to our rules, we had to create questions without using any reference material.

I wondered if she could even do this part.

I waited. And her eyes met mine in a harsher glare. “God of wisdom and learning,” she challenged.

My lips twitched into a smile. “Thoth.”

She knew I was right, but her shoulders still pulled back, not giving up.

“Is he right?” Dillon asked Henry who sat on the ground with his laptop propped open.

“Yeah,” Henry said into a surprised laugh.

Dillon patted me on the shoulder. “Good job, Cobalt. Keep it up.”

Off the same category, I asked her, “Wife of Akhenaten?” I watched her think about it. I could stop here, stump her with little information, ending the game quickly. Or I could test her, to truly see how much she knew.

I wanted to prolong this.

So I added, “Step-mother of Tutankhamen, known for attempts to change polytheistic religion to mono—”

“Nefertiti,” she cut me off.

She was right.

It was my turn to pick the next category at random. I read the paper aloud, “Medical Terms.”

Her chest rose and fell heavily.

I couldn’t hide a burgeoning smile. “Rapid breathing,” I challenged.

“Tachypnea,” she retorted. “Stop smiling.”

“Now she doesn’t like smiling.”

“Not all smiling.”

“Just mine then?” I questioned.

“Mainly yours.” It was like she was saying, don’t think you’re that special.

I rubbed my lips, trying not to laugh. “And what’s mine like?”

She glared. “Like you’ve already beaten me. Like you’re halfway up my skirt. Like you’re the ruler of every free nation and every free man. Shall I go on?”

“Please do,” I said, amused. “I was wondering what else I rule. Could it be every free animal? Or just the ones in zoos?”

“Oooh,” people heckled. More students had gathered around us, not only from Faust and Dalton but other schools. They packed around the balcony and hallway, having to cram in while we continued this game.

She ignored me and challenged, “An abnormal growth of tissue caused by the uncontrolled and rapid multiplication of cells.”

“A tumor.”

“Also known as you,” she retorted.

“Oooh,” the crowds jeered again.

I actually laughed. And that merely wound her up all over again. I could practically read her enraged eyes that said, shut up.

Fifteen minutes passed and both of our questions were becoming more difficult. We drew closer together somehow, only a couple feet separating us as we spewed questions and answers to star constellations, composers, aesthetic theories, philosophy and American history.

She was much smarter than I initially thought. Perhaps, even, the smartest competitor I’d encountered in my adolescence. She liked facts, random knowledge, as much as me.

“Your turn, Richard.” She said my first name with spite, venom seeping into each letter, as though she was slaughtering the syllables. I didn’t care to correct her, to tell her that everyone called me Connor. I was taken by her passion, so I wouldn’t stop her. Not once.

I looked down at my slip of paper. It was in neat, precise cursive. It had to be her handwriting. “Characters from Shakespeare’s Plays.”

She tried to force back a smile.

So she liked Shakespeare. “Sir John Falstaff,” I told her a character. Now she had to name the play.

Without a beat, she answered, “The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part 1 and Part

2.” She was quick to ask me a question. We no longer waited for Henry to confirm answers that we knew were correct. “Ariel?”

“The Tempest.” I assumed it must’ve been her favorite.

She plucked the next paper. “Birthplace of Ancient Civilizations.”

I tried not to gloat since she was already heated. I was the one who wrote down that category.

She took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling, racking her brain for a trivia fact. “Mesopotamia…1800 to 1686 B.C.” Her voice was quieter, more uncertain about this category than the others.

“Old Babylonian,” I told her in a hushed voice too. It felt like we were the only two in the hallway for a minute. Our eyes met, and I could see the defeat in hers before I even asked a question. She had no confidence in this subject.

I waited to ask her something. There was a long string of silence except for Henry’s fingers hitting the keyboard.

“He’s right,” Henry exhaled.

Every Faust boy cheered. The Dalton girls and guys whispered amongst themselves and tried to pump Rose with encouragements.

I didn’t want to bring her down as much as I wanted to build her up, but I also liked to win. And I wouldn’t lose this game. “Crete, 3000 to 1100 B.C.”

After one minute, she frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know.” Each word sounded wrong from her lips.

“It’s Minoan,” I announced.

Everyone groaned behind her. Everyone cheered behind me.

I tried to tune them out, leaving just her and me. I craved more time, maybe even alone. I wanted to talk. I wanted to explore her. I wanted so many things in that moment that my brain went five directions at once. I was overwhelmed.

More overwhelmed than I’d ever been.

“Congratulations!” she said, having to raise her voice through the applause and groans. She pushed the keycards in my chest. I thought she’d put up a bigger fight than this. I would’ve tried a different avenue, an alternate path, to obtain what I wanted.

“That’s it?” I asked, dipping my head towards hers so she could hear me.

“You won fairly. But I’ll beat you fairly this week.” She wasn’t willing to make a bargain, a barter, something more. She wasn’t giving up. She just played by the rules, whereas I always searched for loopholes.