As I pacethe floor of my room, irritation crawls up and down my spine like there are ants under my skin. I don’t like having my space invaded, and there’s only one man in the house with the balls to actually do that.
Kane. The only god I will ever worship.
He’s pissed, exactly like I expected him to be because my job had been to put a tracker on sweet little Alice, not drug her with a poorly dosed cloth of chloroform and throw her in the back of James’ truck. But she hadn’t exactly given me much of a choice, just like the little shit who initially tried to kidnap her hadn’t given me a choice.
I put the two of them together, keeping the rag split between them so neither of them would wake up during the drive, and I listened to James bitch the whole way home since I didn’t have a voice to tell him to shut the fuck up.
Of course, I haven’t had a voice in years. Not since that evil fucking witch, Romano’s mistress, held me down while my throat was slit. It was payment for my father’s betrayal. He’d run his mouth to the wrong man, but instead of tearing his tongue out, they tore out my throat.
They’d made my father watch, too, before putting a bullet in his head. I hadn’t seen him die, but I heard the thud of his body before the loss of blood knocked me out, and I fully expected to join him in the afterlife.
Instead, I woke up a week later in a makeshift recovery room in a giant manor with a curious man watching over me. That turned out to be Kane, the prince of the Walsh empire.
I hadn’t expected to survive. I doubt anyone expected the prince himself to drag my battered, half-dead body from the building and do everything in his power to save my life.
It wasn’t out of kindness, of course. It never had been. I was privy to information thanks to growing up entrenched in the Romano family. I was the boy who saw everything, in a den of lies and torment.
From the time I could form memories, I knew only order and coldness and pain. My father wanted a weapon—a sadist who would laugh in the face of someone begging for their family’s lives—and they got one. They tore away my ability to feel anything other than rage and sick pleasure and a lust for blood. They created a soulless monster and fully intended to use me to further Romano’s reach for power in this city.
But I don’t think they anticipated that their weapon would survive, only to join the enemy, hell-bent on making them pay. But here I was—silent and desperate for revenge.
I dreamed about the moment I would finally stand in front of Romano with my knives, ready to make him scream until he was no longer capable of it.
And then I’d make him silently beg for his life.
I won’t be the one to kill him, of course. That honor belongs to Kane. But as long as I can convince Guido that he’s in hell and his torment will never end, I’m happy to play the game.
It’s why I played nice with Alice for this long. It’s why I sat back and watched her instead of just jumping in her dorm window and dragging her back to the manor by her hair. And while I can’t deny she’s gorgeous and would make an amazing toy for the bedroom—especially if I could get Phoenix or James involved—I don’t much care for what Kane wanted to do with her.
I don’t much care about anything at all.
I would die to protect the other misfits. I would die to protect Kane.
But I don’t have much of a heart left that beats for anything other than basic survival.
And that’s why my patience with Kane’s lecture is wearing thin.
“…knew the plan. You signed off on the plan. And I want to believe you didn’t do this just to be a fuckin’ brat, but I’m trying to see the logic here.”
Sometimes Kane sounds like a frustrated Dom. Sometimes he sounds like a frustrated dad. Tonight is the latter, which isn’t that sexy, even if I’d drop to my knees the second he ordered me to. It doesn’t much look like he will, though, with the frown he’s giving me.
“Explain yourself,” he demands, then lunges forward and frees my hands from the cuffs he’d slapped on me the second I got Alice into the basement.
Fucking finally. He’s been lecturing me for half an hour now, so I hadn’t been able to defend myself. ‘They found her first.’
We still don’t have a lock on who they were. Phoenix was able to track down the shitty little mall kiosk where they sold burner phones, but even the security footage led nowhere. Whoever had gone in to buy it had known exactly where to stand so he was mostly obscured.
We have a vague build, along with jeans and a hoodie, and nothing else.
Well, nothing else except they’re expertly trained, and that does narrow the field a little. The Romano family rules with numbers rather than intellect, which will eventually be their downfall. But we’ve picked up a few rival families over the years that would have liked to move in on the territory, and they noticed the same thing we did.
Honestly, I’m not even sure Kane would give a single shit about turning his empire over to someone else. He’s not a man who wants to rule. He’s a man who wants retribution. That’s why he’s holding on so tightly now.
That’s why he’s staring at me with fury in his eyes, though I know it’s not about me this time. He’d punished the three of us for not telling him about the burner right away, but in the end, he was happy we had some kind of lead.
But none of us can work miracles, and a part of me wonders if Phoenix is being deliberately slow in his search to punish Kane.
God only knows I would.