Page 58 of King of Cruelty

I wouldn’t give up Mackenzie, Laurel, or Sienna because nothing was going to happen to them. I would protect them. I’d keep them. I’d give them a home, and family, and everything they could ever ask for, and a bunch of things they didn’t ask for, and as for love...

“I’m so sorry, baby,” Kenzie whispered. “I can’t imagine how stressed you are right now. Don’t worry. We’re on our way back right now, and I promise, as soon as I get you alone, I’ll do something about that tension.”

My chest thumped as hard as my dick. Who the fuck was I kidding? If me keeping Mackenzie isn’t her choice, then me loving her isn’t mine. She blew down the barbed wire fence around my heart, and took what she wanted.

“I believe I’ll take you up on that,” I said simply. A man could only engage in so much phone sex when his parents were literally on the other side of the wall. “How did your talk with Frost go? Did you kill him?”

“Killing him was never on the itinerary.” Her voice was flat.

“It should’ve been.”

“Something tells me if I had come at him with a knife in front of his wife and infant son, he wouldn’t have been so forthcoming,” she said. “Bane, I got it all wrong—again. Vance Hollywell is with the Brotherhood.Deepwith the Brotherhood.

“Damien definitely stole from Caddell House, but Vance was in it with him. Vance dummied up the documents knowing he could use them to pin it all on Damien if it ever came out. And it worked.”

I hummed. “Didn’t work that well,” I mused, heading for the door out of Genny’s apartment. “I’m going to go kill him now.”

“Considering he’s the reason Sunny was thrown off the overpass, and Tricky almost got into a car with a bomb underneath it, I’m really not all that interested in Vance living through the night, but you have to know,” she said. “This guy is... slippery.

“He takes manipulative, gaslighting sociopath to a new level. He was willing to throw his friend to the wolves without a second thought, and he gave the performance of his life when we confronted him. Sunny went in there to beat the shit out of him, and instead we walked out feelingsorryforhim.

“He’s been a step ahead of us this entire time,” she said, once again thrilling me with her use ofus. “We’ve got to assume he’s ready for our next move.”

“I’m sure he is.” I made it out to the hall and headed for the stairs. “That’s why I’ll shoot first and ask questions later.”

“Damien had more to say,” she continued. “He told me that his aunt was recruited by the Brotherhood when he was a teenager. She turned them down—big-time—but they were persistent.”

“Wait? A teenager?” I said, stopping in my tracks. “But the man is in his thirties.”

“Exactly. Bane, the Brotherhood has been around for a long time. A very long time.”

I frowned, unease drilling into my bones. “I don’t understand. How can they have been around all this time and we’re only hearing about them now? How did they stay out of our radar?”

“I don’t think they did. They’ve likely been on your parents’ radar for a while, they just weren’t calling themselves the Brotherhood back then,” she said. “Damien told me that hisaunt suspected the Brotherhood was behind the fire that burned down Sacred Heart Charities.”

And then I truly froze—standing there in front of the elevator with my finger hovering over the button. “The Brotherhood did that?” I hissed. A rage I’d never felt burned a hole in my chest. “That was my grandfather’s church. It was my father’s home after his mother was forced to give him up. My parents spent a fortune rebuilding it after miserable fuckers went and burned it down the first time, and now you’re telling me after all of that, it was the Brotherhood that went and burned it down again?”

“I’m sorry, baby, but if everything Damien and his aunt suspected is true, then... yes,” she said softly. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

I spun around, heading back the way I came. “I’ve got to tell my folks. There’s no doubt they hunted down whoever set the fires, but I was a kid when it happened. They didn’t give me any details.”

“Then, you should also tell them that Aunt Della got as far as Leonard Stevens and a police interrogation video where he bangs on about setting the fires in the name of hisfamily. They leaned on him for names, but he claimed that he’d never betrayMomandDad. His parents died when he was a toddler, so Damien and Della figured Mom and Dad were leaders of the Brotherhood, and that was just another way they were ripping off the Merchant family,” she said. “By pretending they are a family.”

“They might be right. There are plenty of criminal organizations that keep it in the family, but they don’t make their members call them Mom or Dad unless they’re their actual mom and dad. Going by those titles could be the leaders making some kind of creepy point, because everything with them has to be.”

I could sense her nodding on the other end.

“There’s one more thing,” I went on, letting myself back into Genny’s apartment. “You’re on your way back but you need to know the compound is onguestprotocol.”

“Guest protocol? What does that mean?”

I cursed. “Sunny was supposed to explain all this to you. Real quick, there are different levels of security depending on who is home. When it’s just the family and staff, then we can move from floor to floor with just the elevator and stair codes. When we have unvetted guests in the building, the elevator and stair doors need both the correct code, height, and weight to open or move.”

“Height and weight? What do you mean?”

“As in, if someone got their hands on Sunny’s floor code, when they got into the elevator and put it in, they wouldn’t go anywhere. The floor and wall sensors would note that no one of that person’s height or weight has been put into the system as having access to Sunny’s floor.”

“Wow. No wonder people say the Fairfield has better security than the NSA.”

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