[PREVIOUSLY TITLED CHASING BACK ALLEYS] ❝Once a King, always a King.❞

[PREVIOUSLY TITLED ESCAPING BACK ALLEYS] ❝A King is never on his knees, Soren.❞ ❝He is for his Queen.❞

When Neva Álvarez moves to Queens, she's merely biding her time between bartending and dodging her brother's phone calls before her final year at NYU, and with the summer dwindling to an end, it's difficult not to find herself drawn to her new next-door neighbors and their wild lifestyle. Before she can stop it, Neva is plunging headfirst into a tumultuous affair with drugs, left desperately trying to navigate too many bad decisions that threaten to bring an intimate cocaine kingdom down into ice-cold chaos. || CW: Honestly, I wrote this story to process a lot of feelings and experiences. It explores addiction, immigration, and recovery through a very gritty lens. It explores distance, deportation, and family separation. It explores the concept of home. It explores a woman's right to her own bodily autonomy in a society that shames us for owning or loving our bodies. It may contain triggering elements (slut-shaming, abuse, drug use, violence, and rape). [July 2019 CampNaNo Winner]

[UPDATES ON FRIDAYS] It's been three years since Luz Melo left Portland, Maine... and Drake Medina. ☽ When her "borderline" alcoholic lifestyle in NYC falls apart, leaving her girlfriend in rehab, her grades trashed, and her scholarship revoked, the only thing left for her to do is admit defeat and head back to her hometown, to a shared apartment with her brother (and his roommates) in a sleepy port city that she swore she'd left behind forever. Enroll at MECA. Sober up. Forget Jess. Her hopes for normalcy (and recovery) sink quickly, when a body surfaces off the Maine State Pier, only a few blocks from her campus, ruled as a drug-related death. It becomes a pattern, and if Luz looks deep enough, it becomes a coded chase through cold, dark nights with a shotgun passenger: Drake Medina. Because she knows Drake knows something, but if there's anything she... really... knows, it's that Drake has been (and always will be) a liar. It doesn't take long for Luz to understand why: if they keep digging, it only gets darker and darker... and closer to home.

You were night-tripping terror on I-40.

[COMPLETED] AT MIDNIGHT, I kissed her.

For as long as you can remember, people have been drowning in Saco River.

A story of the rise of a Queen - from the eyes of a King. ♛ ♛ ❝Strong. Like a Queen.❞ Must finish Chasing Back Alleys before reading this story.

[ R E M O V E D ] AU to Chasing Back Alleys. Must read Chasing Back Alleys first.

[COMPLETED] ❝thought you was mine, but you decided to be with him though.❞