Page 67 of To Curse A Knight

We didn’t speak—we didn’t seem to need to as we stood under the hot spray to get clean. The euphoria of an incredible fuck and an awakening of sorts had untethered us from our bodies and we floated up in space for a little while longer.

My two men took turns soaping me up, paying careful attention to my very sore and swollen pussy, fluttering light kisses across my shoulders and neck as they did so.

I caught the two of them staring at each other too; apparently the sparks of the heated moment weren’t a dying flame—it looked like just the beginning sizzle of what would become a blazing bonfire.

I bit my cheek before the smile could take over my face, oddly satisfied with this little development. If these two men could find love with me, who knew what they could find in each other—even if it was just a fun fling of fucking?

After drying off, Aaron and I put on fresh clothes. Kellan left for the living room to grab his pants from the floor.

“Oy, Conan,” I heard from the next room. “Nice arse. You here to fulfill my wet dreams, or Blondie’s? How about a two-for-one?”

“Too late for that,” came Kellan’s cutting reply.

“You gotta be kiddin’ me!” came Lucky’s response, and I could just picture his childish look of disappointment. “And Imissedit!?”

I snickered, then resumed a neutral mask to go greet our other roommate. This condo was becoming awfully crowded these days.

I walked out into the kitchen with Aaron in tow. I surveyed the three men I was now completely in bed with. Figuratively, and… literally.

“Good, we’re all here.”

My tone was bright, my mood considerably content after the best threesome of my life. Marco’s world was going to implode tomorrow, and things were looking up for our little groupof misfit criminals.

“I’ll order takeout. We’ve got some planning to do.”

"Ihave another update, and you're not going to like it."

Trish, to her credit, stared down her angular nose at me and didn't even blink. My updates were usually a breakdown of Antonio's latest drug shipments, or information on a new weapon supplier. She had long since been desensitized to the depths of my father's depravity.

She knew about the gang war and Alvarez's determination to take down Antonio's territory, and the retaliation efforts we’d led to wage bloody war against the crews on the ground. My brothers had taken out four more sites in the last several weeks, decimating Alvarez’s gang presence in Sequoia. We couldn’t do anything abouthis locations in other states, but Antonio didn’t care about those operations, anyway.

If Alvarez was no longer encroaching on his business, the leader of the Carlos Cartel would let him live—until he made my brothers make an example of him when the timing was right. The two rivals had maintained their separate operations for decades. This was the year Alvarez had started pissing in our backyard.

Where my father didn’t care, we’d taken up the mantle; Lauchlan and Blackbird had successfully hacked into all of Alvarez’s major systems—bank accounts, private chat links with evidence of his underground behavior—the whole gambit. That information would be leaking to the world in the next hour. Alvarez was about to have one hell of a lawsuit on his hands, with his fortune dismantled in minutes.

The worm or spoof or rootkit—fuck, hell if I knew, I wasn’t a hacker—would siphon most of his accessible holdings to private accounts worldwide, before being rerouted as anonymous donations to over a thousand women and children's organizations internationally; Killer’s directions, and now that I knew the history behind her hurt, I didn’t blame her. Blackbird had already parsed through some of the incriminating encrypted text messages and would upload them to national news channels at the same time.

Today, Alvarez was royally fucked. And Trish-the-Fish was going to be royally pissed I'd waited this long to tell her. The last thing I needed right now was to be the next victim on her chopping block.

"And?" she prompted when I failed to speak up.

We were back in the makeshift office again, seated on dented metal chairs around the dinged-up coffee table in the center of the room. Maverick, my number two, was following up on another lead for the international theft ring. I'd let that ball drop these past few weeks; my attention tuned into the other massive shitstorm on my docket.

Now Alvarez had been taken care of, my sights were quickly shifting to my other family obligation. We were in the last week of January. My debt to my father—the one I’d accumulated by simply being born into this fucked up family—was about to be called in.

“Marco Alvarez is about to be exposed to the world,” I said, then laid out the stakes in tidy piles for her to sift through. “You’re going to want some agents on standby in the next couple of hours.”

Slivered, severe brows rose at that statement. I summarized everything for her; leaving out names and accomplices, and spun the story to look like the Carlos Cartel had arranged the cyber hit. It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination, and I was determined to leave Hillary’s involvement entirely out of it. Blackbird would remain anonymous too—she was a useful card to play, and I planned to keep her in my back pocket.

“And you didn’t think I deserved a head’s up on any of this?” Trish barked when I finished. Her face had collapsed into a disapproving frown. She didn’t wait for me to answer, choosing instead to grab her phone and deliver orders for several of my colleagues to return to base.

“I made a judgment call.” I shrugged unapologetically as I faced her ire head on. “I need to be several steps removed from this, and the media shit storm is going to be a frenzy. It won’t matter how the information came out—he’s guilty, and the evidence shows that.”

“You know damn well it matters!” she hissed, her eyes flashing with a healthy dose of anger, tempered with a slip of fear. “They committed a hundred felonies to get that information!”

“So, what!?” My voice rose, hovering on shouting; I took a calming breath and tried again. “Antonio doesn’t give a fuck if he committed a thousand felonies. You’re telling me that our justice system is going to care more about the method than the madness? Human trafficking is one of the worst crimes on earth.That’swhat we should talk about!”

Years of polished frown lines forced her face into a heavy scowl.

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