Page 1 of Killian's Vengeance

Chapter 1

Killian

Iblindly stared down at Mac’s grave, unable to believe he was actually gone.

I cut a look over to Cullen Hathaway and saw the same expression of disbelief and agony on his face. The three of us had been friends since high school, Hathaway and I were classic jock types, while Mac—James MacPherson, officially—he’d been a typical nerd.

None of that mattered, though. We were bonded by something far stronger than high school cliques.

We were all from the same shitty neighborhood, struggling to cope with broken homes filled with broken people. Some of us had it worse than others. Mac’s parents didn’t understand him at all, his intelligence, his bookishness, his drive to understand how everything worked. His father was a strong, athletic man who lived for his glory years in high school and washed out as an underachieving adult. He chronically complained about his son’s small stature and lack of the hypermasculine traits he considered important. He yelled and screamed about what a loser he was. What a waste of time all his hobbies were when he should be out lifting weights and fucking girls, while his mom drowned herself in booze and denial. Basically, his dad was a verbally abusive cocksucker.

Cullen and I had more physically abusive childhoods, with Cullen getting the worst of it. His body was littered with evidence of his father’s sadistic temper. His dad didn’t hit to let off steam, he hit because he liked beating on people. It left Cullen with a burning anger and as he got older, he used his growing body to express that anger as often as he could. By the time we were in high school, everyone knew Cullen had a short fuse and to steer clear of him.

My father was an alcoholic who would knock me around after a few beers and it didn’t take much to get the old man reaching for the bottle. He was an angry fuck who took everything personally—the Bears losing a game, a bad day at the machine shop he worked at, my mother overcooking a steak. Anything could send him to the bottle, then get his fists flying. By the time I was ten, I knew to get the fuck out when I had the chance and found myself couch surfing and even sleeping on the streets in order to avoid him.

That’s how we found each other.

The three of us often huddled together in the local park, killing time and avoiding going home. Mac always had some gadget with him, excited to share with us what it did and how he made it, though we rarely understood half of what he was saying.

By the time we got to high school, Cullen and I got into athletics, using contact sports as a way to channel our anger, while Mac buried himself in academics. We were an unlikely trio, but fiercely loyal to each other. Normally a guy like Mac would be an easy target for bullies, but nobody fucked with him because they knew Cullen and I would kick their ass.

We were bonded by our history, our childhoods, our trauma. By the time we graduated high school, it didn’t make sense that we’d all be friends, but we were.

Best friends.

Brothers.

Cullen and I had enlisted in the Army after high school, having no money for college and eager to utilize our surging testosterone, barely contained rage, and aggressively competitive personalities for something more constructive than starting fights with the assholes from our neighborhood.

We did our four-year enlistment, but both of us felt so disillusioned about our experience that we went into mercenary work where we’d have some control over which power-hungry entity to work for. While it took a toll on our bodies, and our nerves, we made a hell of a lot of money.

Mac went to college and applied his mechanical brilliance to a computer science degree and started working for some tech company right out of college. When we started our mercenary work, we’d have him help us out with tech stuff, using his computer hacking skills to help us on mission after mission and kicking him back a portion of the money. After about five years of that, the three of us decided to open a security firm, combining what Hathaway and I learned in the field with Mac’s technology skills. With Mac’s connections in the industry, we were immediately successful, booking client after client and earning us more money than we’d ever seen in our lives.

That money had made Mac a target, had made him vulnerable, and that vulnerability got him killed.

There was a reason Mac had leaned into computers and the internet instead of sports, like me and Hathaway. He’d been small all of his life, under five and a half feet. Though we never allowed him to be bullied, it didn’t change the fact that his rail thin body, short stature, and pale-skin didn’t give him a lot of success with women. It wasn’t even as much to do with his appearance as it was his attitude about it.

He never overcame his own insecurities about his looks, and that translated into how he engaged with women—nervous, overly self-deprecating, and neurotic. Hathaway and I tried to bolster him, tried to shake him out of it, even offered to train him, but I think that ended up offending him more. His dad planted this seed in his brain and out of it grew an oak tree that couldn’t be fucking eradicated no matter what we said to him.

It was these fears and perceived inadequacies that made him susceptible to Lily Jensen.

Lily Jensen was the fucking bitch who walked into Mac’s life, put stars in his eyes, and ended up taking as much money from Mac as she could get. When he figured out her grift, he started tracking her and hacking her, and discovered she had another boyfriend. She was the bait in a honey trap. We asked him constantly to tell us what he had found about their scheme, but he was so embarrassed at getting duped, he refused to let us help.

In the end, whatever he’d found got him shot in the head and left to bleed out alone.

Now, here we stood. At Mac’s fucking grave. My brain was unable to compute what the fuck had happened. Why hadn’t we pushed? Why hadn’t we demanded that he let us help? I could list regrets for days but none of them were going to change shit. Mac would still be dead. I clenched my fists as rage, bitterness, and grief once again poured through me.

Hathaway walked up, his hands tapping the pack of cigarettes in his pocket he was trying not to pull out. Though we’d been out of the army for years, we still looked like we were military with our closely cut hair, hard, unsmiling expressions, and cagey hypervigilance. Sometimes, we acted so similarly people thought we were brothers, though we didn’t look much alike. My hair was far darker than Hathaway’s, like the difference between black coffee and one with a few hits of cream. Hathaway also had some scars on his left jaw by his ear where some shrapnel caught him when we were stationed in the Middle East. His eyes were typically an icy blue, reflecting the color and his attitude, but right now they looked anything but cold. There was a hurricane of emotions rioting in those blue orbs as he approached me.

“When are we going to move on this?” He gestured to Mac’s coffin, now lowering into his grave. I looked over and found Mac’s father staring blindly at it, his formerly large frame appearing shrunken as he watched his only son being covered with dirt, while his mother wailed and carried on next him.

Served the bastards right. They never appreciated Mac.

“Soon. Ian just emailed me a couple of minutes ago with information about an apartment he just discovered.”

Losing Mac had an ironic consequence of removing the one person we depended on to gather all of our intel. Mac had been training Ian Novak for the last couple of years. He had been a punk kid with a shitty attitude when Mac met him volunteering at some high school tech thing. Ian was as distraught as we were about Mac’s murder and hadn’t stopped working to try and find Lily. He had put in a brief appearance at the funeral, but had already left, mumbling something about leads. I just think he couldn’t stand being next to Mac’s grave. I could hardly blame him when I felt the same way.

Since Mac was killed, Cullen and I had worked around the clock to track down Lily, but so far we hadn’t found shit.

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