Page 15 of Brutal King

I snorted at the thought. Back then I was happy to have her stand up for me, after all she was several inches taller than I was... back then.

But as I grew older, I came to resent how she had protected me. It was emasculating and demeaning. The more I thought about it, the more I hated it.

No, I admitted to myself. That wasn’t it... exactly. The more I thought about it, the more I realized just how intimidated I was by Kat. She was so strong, so confident and so freakin’ popular. Everyone loved her. She was so incredibly put together, so mature for a kid in middle school.

I’d always suspected that she could see right through my perfect son to the perfect father act. And that was all Axel’s fault. He had always been something of a daddy’s boy, and I, as his twin, was expected to be just like him.

Why? Why did everyone assume we were one and the same? For crying out loud, we weren’t even identical twins. We were fraternal... although we did look a lot alike. Hell, if we did our hair the same and dressed the same, few could tell us apart. But personality wise... shit. We were just so different.

As I walked through the school halls, making my way to my next class, I found myself unwittingly looking for her. Every brunette caught my eye. I tried to shake it off, to deny the effect she had on me. Damn, why did she have to be so pretty.

Back then, in middle school, I’d had a wild crush on her. She was so cute, so adorable, so smart and so easy to be around. I wanted to be with her all the time. But I knew that my father would never approve.

“She’s not right for you,” he’d once said.

What did he know?

I shuddered. If Dad ever found out how I truly felt about Kat, he would kick me out of the school himself just to keep me away from her.

There was no way I’m leaving the school I helped my father built. There was no way I would let Axel fully run the school by himself. For as much as I love my twin, I also didn’t think he had it in him to take on all the responsibilities of the Academy, which Dad left to us twins to manage. Part of the training to run his and mom’s culinary empire. We’re running the Academy as hands-on as can be, even while being students there ourselves. Then we’ll graduate to helping Dad run his restaurants with Mom. So for now, everything at the Academy, had to go smoothly, and that meant the students all had to put away their diva ways from home, put on their aprons at the Academy, and act as professionally as though they were working for a top restaurant right from the start.

Kat and her friend Layla? They stood out too much. Acted like they were at a resort instead of being at a top school, and just something else...which Axel and I both had a feeling about but couldn’t pinpoint. Overall, we felt they didn’t quite belong.

Arriving at my class, I leaned against the doorjamb and looked into the room. The professor, a sixty-one-year-old woman who’d spent decades at one of the best restaurants in Osaka, stood looking down at her notes. How fitting that my next class was in Asian cuisine. Perfect. I liked everything about the culture, the food, the history... Katrina. I seemed destined to think about Katrina no matter what I did.

Asian cuisine: precisely the reason my father would flip if he ever found out how I felt about Kat. Her family owned the most popular and successful high-end Asian restaurants in America. Recently, they’d won the hearts and appetites of every epicurean in Singapore, and they were set to win the hearts of South Korea and Japan.

I could still hear my father’s roar when he’d simply heard the name Katrina Lee.

“Dad,” I’d argued when I’d come home from camp. “I don’t understand. What do you have against her? She’s just a kid from cooking camp.”

“Cooking camp? Kobe, it’s not simply cooking. Anyone can just cook. This is cuisine. Haute cuisine. Culinary arts. If you don’t respect the art, you’ll never be a respected chef.”

“And what does all that have to do with Kat?”

“Kobe, she’s not right for you. Just put her out of your mind.”

“But...”

“End of discussion.”

The confusion I felt as a twelve-year-old ended a year later when Axel mentioned Dad’s business partner.

“What’s with Dad’s attitude these days?” I asked Axel.

“He had a meeting yesterday with his trusty partner. From what I heard of the conversation their new restaurant, The Oyster House, is faltering a bit since the Lee’s opened their new restaurant.”

“The Lee’s? You mean Katrina’s family?”

“That’s the one. The Lee family has been competing with our restaurants for years, but now... this is really eating Dad. You know how he hates to lose.”

Everything was suddenly so clear. Dad didn’t want me to see Kat because he viewed her and her family as rivals. But it wasn’t fair to me, not by a long shot. I had to settle this with him.

“Father,” I said as I knocked on the open door to his den. “May I speak with you for a moment.”

He nodded. “Make it quick. I have a lot of work to do.”

I took a tentative step in and hesitated.