Page 34 of King of Cruelty

Tears filled my eyes.

“I keep bringing up your mother, Kenzie, because she’s looking out for you again, by drilling sense into my thick damn head. The whole world believes she did wrong, but I know she didn’t. She so very much didn’t because what she truly did was fulfill the promise she made to you and Sienna on the days that you were both born—to protect you with all her strength and might from anyone who dared to hurt you.”

I bit my lip hard, penning in sobs.

“Her love was punished. Her love was illegal,” he said, voice thick, “but it was still right because you and Sienna had to come first—you just had to. If she can love two people so much that doing a terrible thing is still the right thing, then I can stop being such a fucking hypocrite. If your mom was right to protect you, and my mom was right to protect me, and I was right to protect her, then...” He gave me a lopsided, but resigned grin. “Maybe my sister can be right too, in protecting her dad—our dad. And I can understand that and I can let it the fuck go, because there’s no one to protect anymore. There’s just us, and I’m tired of fighting someone who never wanted to hurt me.”

Clearing my throat, I rubbed my eyes hard. “That’s very wise, River Redgrave. Incredibly, wonderfully wise.”

He kissed me slow, then pulled back, drawing us both back into his seat and me on his lap. “I’m not saying me, Sunny, Bane, and Liam are going to be best buddies overnight, but I’m in this fight with them for real. They’re my family and I’m going to protect them because they’ve done one thing right in their lives and protected you, Laurel, and Sienna.”

I dropped my head on his shoulder, so happy I could burst. “Do you think this is a fight we can win? What if Damien is another dead end? I thought we had Vance, but he’s clueless. I thought we had Madison but...” My sentence died thinking of the body the cops carried out of the gas station. The last thing I saw on the news before Sienna and I left for the hangar. “TheBrotherhood is like water. We keep trying to grab them with our bare hands, but they slip right through.”

“They’re just people, Kenzie. Flesh and blood like you and me, and they make mistakes. They’vemademistakes. Mistakes that are revealing them whether they like it or not,” he said. “For all their self-righteousness, they aligned themselves with Luca Adams instead of putting him in the ground and freeing the women he abducted, so right off the bat, we know we’re looking for a bunch of dead-inside monsters.”

“I still don’t understand that,” I whispered, dropping my voice when I saw Laurel had drifted off to sleep as predicted. “Is hating the Merchants really the only criteria for membership? They don’t care who they are or what they do as long as they throw their weapons, money, and vengeance in the pot?”

I flicked to Sienna. She had taken a seat further back to give us some privacy. “What do you think, Si? Do you think the answer really is as simple as Sunny said? The Brotherhood doesn’t care about the women Luca tortured for the same reason Madison didn’t? They—we—were too low class to live in the imaginary utopia the Brotherhood has planned for Cinco?”

“I can’t say for sure.” Sienna got up and crossed to join us. “All I know is that I’ve been feeling for a while that this enemy is someone connected to the Merchants. Someone who had crossed their path and has every reason to hate them. But it’s an old grudge. A patient one. A grudge that’s been festering and growing in hate and malice, and even though mistakes have definitely been made, whoever’s behind this has been planning this long enough to have considered every angle, and they’ll make sure that the only one standing at the end of this war... is them.”

I was glad that River shuddered beneath me, because I did too.

GENNY

I stumbled on the steps, half tripping, half falling down. With a cloth sack over my head, it was amazing I was upright at all.

Clambering off the final step, a wrenching grip on my arm frog-marched me through a parade of shouts, arguments, and barked orders. The Brotherhood was clearing out as fast as they could, getting ready to take off behind the car that boasted me blind and gagged in the trunk.

“No, leave that! We won’t have room for a TV.”

“What are we supposed to do all day without a TV?” a weedy voice snapped back. “All we do is sit around waiting for orders.”

“The TV stays. Take a fucking book if you’re so bored.”

From the grumbling, groaning, and bitching, no one liked that decision.

Wherever they were going, it obviously wasn’t another Luca Hellhouse with plenty of rooms for his vile business, so maybe—hopefully—this was the last of Luca’s boltholes, and all the women he kidnapped were finally found and could get back to the lives stolen from them.

“Whoa, look,” someone cried. “It’s that Merchant bitch. The stupid shit actually thought she could take us all on her own.”

Raucous laughter ripped through the fussing and fighting.

“Poor girl’s been sipping on her legend for too long. She actually thought she was some unbeatable badass.” He raised his voice. “How’d that work out for you, sweetie?”

I was dragged out the door as a million cutting snapbacks sprung to my lips.

“They’ve been parking their cars all over the woods so that no one who stumbles on the house will think it’s weird that thirty cars are parked on the lawn,” Bee hissed.

I couldn’t see her, but she was obviously big-time pulling off the ruse. As gross as it was, I had to strip that worthless sack’s corpse and choose Bee to take his place. She was the only one tall enough, thin enough, and with hair short enough that a quick glance from the side wouldn’t alert the brothers to the switch. With them so busy packing up and clearing out, and the sun beginning to set, I trusted they were too busy trying to clear out while they still had light to worry about what the guy lurking around next to them was doing. So far I was right.

So far...

“Brothers could be lurking anywhere in the trees,” Bee said. “The car for this key could be anywhere. I’m supposed to know where it is and take you there. What now?”

“Calm, Bee. Just confidently march me off to the big blue van parked out in the open. That’s the car I was brought in.”

“They’re loading their weapons into that van.”

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