Queen to King Three by Jennifer Cody

Robbie: On the most auspicious occasion of my eighteenth birthday, my stepmother drove me to and abandoned me in her brother’s driveway. Allegedly, I’m an adult now, but one day doesn’t make a difference for a guy with an alphabet soup of anxiety disorders, except that it does. The Demesne D’Aquino feels like home, the family here chooses to love me, my step-uncle actively wants to help me. I arrived broken, small, and terrified, but I feel like I can finally start healing.

My Humanities teacher treats me like he believes I have value. I don’t know how Chanda Marduke slipped past all my defensive walls. He’s a towering wall of muscle and strength, and I’ve been conditioned to fear men like him, but I’m falling in love. I know the attraction between us, the chemistry, and the friendship falls under a morally ambiguous standard, but he engages me in ways I have never experienced, he treats me like I have intrinsic, inherent value, and I can’t give that up for social mores that have failed to protect me my entire life. He may be the most terrifying man I’ve ever met, but we fit together too perfectly to let anything stand between us. Lamentably, Fate’s animus toward me followed me to Houston.

Chanda: Until I walked into my classroom to find a pretty little guy reading one of the textbooks, I had no idea what temptation was. He’s my student, and I shouldn’t lust after him, but the more time I spend with him, the more I realize lust doesn’t begin to cover what I feel for him. Robbie may be the strongest guy I’ve ever met, not brute strength like me, but inner strength and damn if that doesn’t make everything about him more appealing.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, some random Diviner has drawn me into a real-life game of chess where every decision I make could end someone’s life. I’m trying to keep my pieces on the board, but free will is a bitch, and Fate has tangled a web of strings to trap me or end us all. How do I keep everyone thrust into this game with me alive without losing the guy I think may be the key to saving us all?