Page 132 of The King of Hearts

I’m so strung tight that my hands grip the steering wheel with a death grip, my joints aching.

“How is your mother?” I hear my father ask from the back seat.

“Not doing this right now,” I bark in response. “Just give me the directions as I need them, otherwise keep your fucking mouth shut.”

“Ryker.”

“There’s nothing else I want to hear from you right now.”

The car goes silent after that, except for my father’s gravelly voice when he issues where I need to turn. The island isn’t too large, but when you get to the inner part where there are less houses and no storefronts, the roads aren’t paved and they’re uneven as shit.

As I drive, I’m conscious of my father in the back seat. I want to know where he’s been for the past twenty years and why he looks half dead, but I can’t let my head take me down that road. I don’t have the mental capacity to take on those thoughts right now. My sole focus is getting to Savina.

“There’s a stake sticking out of the ground ahead on the right with red paint on the top. Right after that, there should be a turn. It’ll be overgrown, so it’s hard to see,” my father says.

I come up to the red-painted stake a moment later and take a right like he indicated. The foliage is overgrown, but there’s a small path about the width of a car that’s been matted down, indicating someone has been this way recently.

My heart slams against my chest the closer we get to our destination.

“How much farther?”

“It’ll be up ahead. There’s a big oak tree. It’s about fifty feet beyond that.”

When I see the oak tree in the distance, I press harder on the gas. The car bounces and lands hard on the frame when I hit a deep hole.

“What am I walking into here?” I ask my father. “Keep it short. I don’t need all of the family dramas between you and your brother. I just need to know what I’m dealing with.”

He’s silent for a moment, and when he does speak, his voice is hard, mimicking the tone I remember as a child. My memories of my father are faint, but I remember him always being soft when he spoke to my mother or me. It was only when he wasaround others when he lost that softness, and the sterner side came out.

“My best advice, and I’m sorry to say you won’t like it, is go in thinking the worst,” he says. “Because I guarantee, whatever you can conjure in your head, he’s thought of worse.”

I grind my molars. There’s no way for him to know the shit that’s going through my head. My definition of “worse” and his, I’m sure, are different. I have a very active imagination when it comes to torture.

“How do you know this is where she was taken? You said you and Mother were the only people who knew of this place.”

“It was something Theo said the last time he came to visit me. He mentioned the Vault, which is what Miles Ellington called it.”

“Is Aiden part of this?”

I look in the rearview mirror and notice my father’s jaw twitching at the mention of my brother’s name.

“Yes,” he answers in a hard voice. “Although he now goes by the name Grant. Theo must have had it changed after he took him.”

“Did you know before you disappeared that he was alive?”

His eyes meet mine in the mirror. “No, I didn’t find out until later. It must have been a few months after I was taken.”

I break my stare with him and focus back on the road. I can’t think of a plausible reason why he would lie, so I take him at his word. This whole thing is a fucked-up mess. My fucking brother is alive. My father is alive, and he has a brother whom I knew nothing about. A brother who apparently, along with my brother, kidnapped my wife and is doing fuck-knows-what to her.

A few minutes later, I pull to a stop beside the oak tree and get out of the car. As I wait for my father to exit, I check the clips in my guns, although nothing has changed since this afternoon when I first loaded them. I have another two full clips in mypocket. Across the top of the car, I hear the snick of Marcelo checking his own weapon.

“Give my father the one in the glove box,” I tell my guard. He bends in the car and a moment later, holds out the gun to Antonio.

“The safety?—”

“I know how it works,” my father interrupts.

Car doors open and close behind us, and Alexander, Bishop, and Cassio come up to my side. Bishop already has his gun out, gripped in his right hand down by his side. Alexander and Cassio are empty-handed, but I know they have their own pieces.

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