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

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]

At sixteen, Sunngifu is more of a spoiled child than a dignified thane's daughter. She is destined to a life of wealth and power. Until her father fails to pay the Viking's tribute...