Damaged Elite (The Darlington Elite Book 2) Read online

  Copyright © 2020

  Waverly Alexander

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Resemblance to actual persons, things, living or dead, locales or events is entirely coincidental.

  This book contains mature themes and is only suitable for 18+ readers.

  Editor: Kate DellaVecchia, KDV Editing

  Cover Designer: Olivia Pro Designs

  Beta Readers: Daisy, Hope, Elysha, Cylaine, Sue and Anastasia

  Interior Formatting: Kate Hawthorne

  Contents

  Author's Note

  Damaged Elite Playlist

  1. Kennedy

  2. Zach

  3. Kennedy

  4. Zach

  5. Kennedy

  6. Zach

  7. Kennedy

  8. Zach

  9. Kennedy

  10. Zach

  11. Kennedy

  12. Zach

  13. Kennedy

  14. Zach

  15. Kennedy

  16. Zach

  17. Kennedy

  18. Zach

  19. Kennedy

  20. Zach

  21. Kennedy

  22. Zach

  23. Kennedy

  24. Zach

  Epilogue - Kennedy

  Thank You

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author's Note

  Please note that Damaged Elite is book TWO in the Darlington Elite Series. Book one, Broken Elite, must be read first. Books one and two should be read as a duet, all subsequent books in the series can be read as interconnected standalones.

  Dedication

  For my friend and editor Kate DellaVecchia

  “Okay, hear me out…”

  All of my books would be a dumpster fire without you. :)

  Damaged Elite Playlist

  The Weeknd “Blinding Light”

  Juice WRLD & Halsey “Life’s a Mess”

  Lewis Capaldi “Before You Go”

  Blue October “Everlasting Friend”

  Billie Eilish “Everything I Wanted”

  JP Saxe & Julia Michaels “If The World Was Ending”

  Kygo & One Republic “Lose Somebody”

  Taylor Swift “It’s Nice To Have a Friend”

  Dua Lipa “Break My Heart”

  Halsey “Graveyard”

  NF “Time”

  Shinedown “Better Version”

  5 Seconds of Summer “Red Desert”

  5 Seconds of Summer “Lover of Mine”

  1

  Kennedy

  "You've got Miles and me choking down dairy-free ice cream, and you're out here with a whole ass rotisserie chicken?" I freeze when I hear Tommy's voice boom as he approaches me in our backyard. Spinning on my Converse, I glare at him.

  "Keep it down. You're going to scare it away!" I use my free hand to reach out and pinch his nipple through his t-shirt, and I'm pleased when he yelps.

  "Scare what away? It's already dead." He knits his brows, gesturing toward the container now cradled in my arm like a football. My stomach rolls at the smell of the cooked bird. I haven't eaten meat since 4th grade when a substitute teacher decided it was a good idea to tell a bunch of nine-year-olds, in detail, how they slaughter the animals raised for meat. I gave up dairy when I was in high school and heard enough about the treatment of dairy cows to make even mozzarella sticks unappealing. Now, at twenty, the smell of any kind of meat makes my stomach queasy, which is a little difficult when you live in a house with five boys who would still be eating bacon on ice cream if Everly hadn’t put a stop to that. I shift, moving to hold the chicken out in front of me. If I don't get this over with soon, I'm going to puke all over Tommy's pristine trainers.

  "Before you start.” I point a warning finger at him. “I saw this injured fox limping around. I think he might have a broken leg, and his eye looks pretty messed up. He could have been in a fight," I say, squinting from the sunlight as I look up at Tommy.

  "So you're telling me that you're going to feed a whole chicken to a fox, but you give me the stink eye and gag when I eat chicken nuggets in front of you?" He grins, purposely bumping into my shoulder as we walk toward the shed at the very back of the expansive yard, heading for the spot where I saw the fox curled up earlier sleeping in the sunshine. It’s bitterly cold, and I’m worried he might not make it through the Colorado winter without some help.

  "No. I'm saying that if you break your leg, I'll hand feed you whatever you want," I shoot back as I kneel in the grass, looking around for the fox. Tommy mimics my pose and lets out a genuine chuckle as if watching a vegan holding a hunk of meat is the funniest thing he's ever witnessed in his twenty years on this planet.

  I don't see any sign of the fox, but my bickering with Tommy probably scared it away. I called the local wildlife rescue to find out what to do when I realized it was injured, but they said they wouldn't come unless the animal was a danger to us. I couldn't just let it suffer out in the cold, and the sympathetic woman told me that chicken would have the best results if I had any chance of helping it at all. I couldn't stomach cooking it, and I knew I'd get a bunch of shit for it if I did, so I bought a cooked one on my way home.

  My hands hover over the chicken, and I hesitate twice before screwing my eyes shut and finally putting my fingers on it.

  "Ah, shit, Kennedy. Gimme it." Tommy swipes the plastic container and begins picking the chicken off of the bones. I plug my nose and swallow down the bile rising in my throat. "You look as uncomfortable as I do when some chick starts dropping the L-bomb."

  “You’re such a romantic. You should have your own greeting card line,” I say absently, leaning forward to look around the back of the shed. I need to go to the store and get some kind of bed—maybe a dog bed or something. I’ll need to get Patrick to help me build a cover for it because even though I’d never stroke his ego by telling him, he’s really good at stuff like that. And even though he’ll be sour about it the whole time, he’ll do it if Everly asks him to.

  Tommy lets out a “hmm” at my career recommendation before he replies, “Roses are red, violets are blue. I’m kinda drunk, so I guess you’ll do.”

  I smack him on the back of the head, then instantly regret it when he holds up his hands that are glistening with chicken juice. I squeal and fall backward, trying to shuffle away from him. He stands, holding one of the chicken legs out toward me like I’ll burst into flames if it touches my skin. “Ah! I’m sorry! Don’t wipe that on me. I’m gonna puke.”

  Tommy’s belly laugh increases as I try to crab crawl away from him, bumping right into a pair of solid legs. I fall on my back and cup my hand over my eyes as I look up, trying to see who foiled my escape.

  My best friend.

  “What’s going on?” Zach reaches out a hand to help me up, and the tight line of his lips tells me he’s not amused by the playfulness that he’s seen between Tommy and me. Heat zings through my fingertips, up my arm, and warms my entire body as Zach pulls me to my feet. He confuses me so much. We’ve agreed we’re just friends, and he seems to think that’s all we can ever be, yet I get the distinct vibe that jealousy courses through him whenever he thinks someone else is paying too much attention to me.

  “Kennedy's been holding out on us,” Tommy says just before he bites into the drumstick, and then holds it out toward me. “I hope you catch your fox or whatever. I gotta head out. I
t’s my turn to pick up Beth and Cassandra.” He bumps his elbow with Zach’s fist because his fingers are still dirty. He nods toward me, smirking because I’m holding my nose again, trying to ward off the smell of his pilfered snack.

  I busy myself with the already dismembered chicken, and silently thank Tommy for that unexpected act of kindness while the boys make small talk about their upcoming hockey game. I hear them mention that stupid-ass coach of theirs. Gosh, I wish he'd do us all a favor and choke on his lunch or something. I'm not super close to Cassandra yet, but I'm glad she's been staying with us. It’s hard to believe that Coach Leary is her dad, or that she could even be related to the Leary boys because she's such a nice girl.

  “Hey, I brought you something,” Zach says as he kneels down beside me, a fluffy dog bed in his hands. “I know it’s a fox, but I figure it probably would enjoy something soft to lay on…” he trails off when I just stare at him, open-mouthed. I hadn’t told Zach my plans for helping the fox, I’d only called him to tell him Miles and I were stopping off to get something to feed it. He confuses the hell out of me. Some days he can be the most stubborn, selfish guy on the planet, and then other days, he shows up with a fancy dog bed because I came in the house this morning all upset over the fox.

  I throw my arms around him, and almost as if on instinct, he pulls me to his lap, and I nestle my face against my best friend’s neck. His presence brings me a sort of comfort I’ve never experienced before, not even with my parents. He squeezes me to his chest, and I feel his mouth at the side of my head, speaking against the hair covering my ear. “It’ll be okay.”

  I pull back from him and squeeze his cheeks between my palms, making his glasses shift slightly with the movement of his face. “Sorry I’m so emotional. I just hate seeing anything suffer,” I say, because I know I’m a bleeding heart when it comes to animals. I always have been, and it wasn’t something that was learned, either. No one else in my family is that way, in fact, my brother Adam used to live for hunting before he passed away. He loved to torture me about it, and I learned at a young age to hide how much it bothered me. If I didn’t have an outward reaction, people tended to move on and leave me alone about it.

  “I like that you care about every little thing,” he says, a little too gently for this “best friends” facade we’ve had going on for quite a while. He holds me like I’m his everything, and then in the next moment, says we can never be more than platonic friends. I watch his eyes drift from mine down to my parted lips, and I already know what's coming, but I can’t force myself to pull away from him.

  As if he’s reading my mind, Zach looks away and clears his throat. He removes his hands from my hips, leaving a coldness in their absence that I can’t shake. I take his cue and move off of his lap without so much as a word about what just happened. I busy myself with setting up the fox’s new bed near the shed, picking a spot where the morning sun will beam down on him if he chooses to sleep in it. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Zach setting out the chicken for the fox, and I want to ask him so badly why he holds back around me. I know he feels something more than friendship for me, I can see it, feel it. But he turns it off as soon as he starts to let go. This weird back and forth is nothing new for us, this is us now.

  When Zach and I first met, he never brought me around the other Elite boys. I always thought maybe he was afraid they would think less of him because of how close we are. The way he’s perceived on campus was so different from the way he was when we watched movies in my dorm room and goofed around. When I finally confronted him about it, he said that I was his best friend, and he didn’t want anything to ruin that. And for a while, that was enough for me—to be his secret friend—because I had zero interest in hanging around a bunch of asshole jocks who don’t think about anything other than scoring on and off the ice. But after I met Patrick, Henry, Miles, and Tommy, I can’t imagine my life without all of them in it. Even Patrick. I haven’t been part of their little world for very long, but now that I’m in it, despite all the drama, I don’t want to be anywhere else.

  “We make a pretty good team,” he says, finally breaking the silence. He stands up, wiping his hands on his Darlington Hockey hoodie before reaching out to help me stand. I smile at him because, despite the fact that he doesn’t give me everything I need or want, I know him well enough to understand that he’s giving me all that he can. And that’s more than he gives anyone else.

  Once I’m up, he awkwardly tries to initiate our super-secret, and not at all complicated, handshake. It never fails to make me smile, remembering the night we made it up. He had drunkenly burst into my dorm room at three AM, demanding that I wake up and watch his favorite movie, The Lion King. Thankfully he’d ended up settling for Die Hard, which has been my favorite movie since I was ten because I don’t watch movies where animals are sad, get hurt, or die. There’s enough sadness in the real world, so for that simple fact, I won’t watch The Lion King, not even for Zach. That night he tried to fist bump me when we finally agreed on the movie, which turned into weird finger holding for an awkward beat. We tried again, slapping hands instead, which resulted in me demanding that we have our own private best friends only handshake. Like with most things, he’d said I was ridiculous but did what I was asking.

  “I had to see it for myself. None of us believed Tommy.” I turn at the sound of a new voice and see Henry approaching us. “Patrick and Miles are going to be pissed. He bet them fifty bucks you had a cooked chicken out here.” His green eyes are shining, and he’s clearly amused that I’ve been out here crawling around the back of a shed trying to lure a fox into a dog bed with a dead bird.

  “You didn’t take the bet?” I laugh, leaning down to pick up the plastic lid to the chicken container. I swipe a hand through my blonde curls. It’s at such an awkward length—too short to pull up and be aesthetically pleasing, but long enough to get in my face. I need to do something about it soon.

  “I only bet on sure things,” Henry says dismissively, in that tone that only he seems to manage. He reminds me of an eighty-year-old aristocrat trapped inside the body of a tall, finely muscled hockey player.

  “If it’s a sure thing, it’s not a bet,” I counter, and it’s then that I feel Zach move to stand closer to me, his hand moving out to slide across my lower back. I glance up at him, but his attention is on Henry, and his features are neutral. Is he even aware of the way he touches me? Or that friends, even best friends, don’t act this way?

  “Exactly.” Henry has the last word, reaching into his pocket to get his buzzing phone as the three of us turn to head back to the house. I’ll come back out early in the morning and check to see if the fox is curled up in the bed, or if any of the food or water is gone.

  “Calm down, I can’t understand you when you’re yelling belligerently in my ear.” Henry almost barks the words at whoever is on the other end of the phone call. The difference between Patrick and Henry is that when Henry speaks like this, there’s something really big happening. For Patrick, well, it’s his personality.

  “Where are you?” Henry holds up a finger to Zach and me, telling us to either be quiet or to wait on going inside the house. “We’ll meet you at the hospital. Give me a few minutes to round everyone up. Call me if you find out anything.”

  “The hospital?” I blurt out the minute he ends the call, and once again, I feel Zach’s arm slip around my side, his fingers kneading into the flesh of my hip like he often does when he’s nervous.

  Henry gestures for us to follow him into the house, explaining as he strides quickly toward the door. “Tommy went to pick Beth and Cassandra up from class, but he passed their car on the way there. There was some sort of accident, he said police were surrounding the vehicle, and there’s blood everywhere. They’re not telling him anything other than the girls have been airlifted to Denver.”

  2

  Zach

  In the hospital waiting room, Everly’s kneeling in a chair next to Miles, while Patrick sits in the next one
over. He keeps a close eye on her while she tries to soothe Miles, and I know it’s not jealousy that has him stuck to her side. Now that they’ve made amends, he doesn’t get too far from her. I certainly don’t blame him, not with all this shit going on.

  Everly is trying to get Miles to sit up straight, instead of hunching over—he’s mildly asthmatic, and she’s clearly afraid he’s going to go into a full-blown attack. If he gets too worked up, it can trigger his asthma and turn bad pretty quickly. He had an attack on the ice last year, and it was really scary. He’s been freaking out since we got to the hospital and they told us no one is permitted to see Beth or Cassandra. We’re still not sure what happened to the girls, but we do know that they’ve both been admitted. We’re all used to getting our way with most things because of who we are at Darlington, so it’s frustrating here where the Elite holds no clout.

  Henry’s outside on the phone, probably with his father again. He won’t give us any details on his father or who he is. The guy is always helping us get information, cars, houses, whatever it is we need, but he’s not able or maybe not willing to intervene and do anything about Coach or his asshole sons. Or apparently, get any information on Cassandra or Beth’s status.

  When Patrick threatened to snap a doctor in half for not giving us any updates on the girls, we realized Tommy was going to have to take one for the team. We sent him over to sweet talk a few of the younger nurses who were staring at us when we barged in. If any of the staff is going to give up info, it’ll be them. I look over at the three nurses beaming at him, giggling at whatever he’s saying. His charm must be working, because Tommy is not that goddamn funny. My eyes drift back to Kennedy, and I find myself smiling as she hurriedly pushes a button on the vending machine. I don’t have the heart to tell her that cookies won’t fix what Miles is going through right now. We all care about Cassandra, she’s become one of us, but there’s something between them that Miles doesn’t talk about, but it’s so transparent that it’s impossible not to see through his facade.