Page 20 of Savage Hearts

And the fucker had left behind a lot of shit that tainted the club’s name and, indirectly, the narcotics ring he had taken from our father with his bloody hands.

I was only finding out how much shit he was in now that I’d taken control.

Though the narcotics trade in and of itself was running smoothly, there was a lot of unrest over the new heads of this operation.

But all those fuckers should know that now that it was under our control, it would stay in our control for fucking good.

It was a multimillion-dollar business, and I was sure there were going to be a lot of stupid motherfuckers coming out of the woods, wanting a piece of it now that Hayes was dead.

They might even think taking power from us would be easier than taking it from Hayes.

They would be fucking wrong, and the price to pay for their stupidity would be their lives. I would ensure it.

I didn’t bother opening my eyes when the door opened.

Only two other men would come into my office without knocking.

We were in our own home, not far away from the city, and isolated enough that Mila couldn’t just walk out the door and leave.

The gate surrounding the property certainly helped, and I smiled at the memory of the look on her face when she’d seen it for the first time.

It wasn’t so different from the house we grew up in, but my brothers and I weren’t the same. The house might feel the same,but it was worlds away. Not only did that house hold a lot of bad shit for my brothers and me when we were living there, but it was tainted even more after the attack, after Hayes had taken over and turned it into the clubhouse where he raised his daughter. It operated as the club’s headquarters.

The location was perfect, and now that Hayes was dead, the deed to the house would “technically” belong to Mila. How perfect that the little princess was now under our control.

“Are you going to pretend to be asleep?” Killian asked me from the door.

I smiled a little and opened my eyes, taking in my middle brother. The scowl that had been fixed on his face ever since we brought Mila home was ever-present.

“What do you want?”

“To go over the accounting of the operation.”

“Have Peter do that,” I said. Peter was the club’s accountant, and a damn good one at that.

“I have, but I wanted to go over Hayes’s assets. I think it would be easier if we have most of it transferred to us the legal way.”

The way Hayes had taken the deed to our house wasn’t fucking legal. Some bribe money, to the officials and the polices, some forgery here and there, and it was under the fucker’s name, while we were unable to do anything about it. We could probably do the same thing Hayes did to obtain the property, but I wasn’t Hayes.

And Mila was his only living relative.

“You mean with Mila’s signature?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure Silas couldconvinceher.” He practically sneered the word.

“You know you can’t avoid her forever.”

His face darkened. “I’m not.”

“Right. And his other assets?”

“I’m still looking. I don’t know where the fucker hid them.”

“Should have kept him alive long enough to ask,” I said. I regretted not prolonging his kill. And for more than one reason.

As much as Mila wanted to put on a “don’t fuck with me” face, there was no way to disguise the haunted look in her eyes—the one abuse victims usually got after a while.

Why I cared, I didn’t know.

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