Page 1 of Explode
Prologue
Hendrix
“Wherethefuckishe?” I growled, pacing up and down the length ofthe warehouse, and checking my watch for the hundredth time.
“He’ll be here soon, Boss. You know Jacob is shit at timekeeping,”Alex said, blowing his last puff of cigarette smoke out and stubbing the butt on the floor. I fucking hated the stench, but it was a small price to pay to have someone as loyal as Alex by my side.
He had a point. Jacob had always been shit at timekeeping. Everytime I arranged to meet him when he worked for my former boss, Kai Wolfe, he’d turn up late. Even if it was just one or two minutes.
Drove me fucking insane.
But what he lacked in punctuality, he made up for in enthusiasm.From the day I met Jacob, I saw the potential in him, and it was only too easy to get him in my pocket instead of Kai’s.
I supposed I could forgive the inability to keep to the time in exchangefor having a faithful servant.
There was a little part of me though that worried his tardiness wasn’tjustbecause he was incapable at telling time. In the last week, bodies of my men had turned up, and I was beginning to think the tides were turning on the run of good luck Max and I had been enjoying these past six months.
Six months.
Six months since I’d shot and killed Kai Wolfe, the man who thoughthe was indestructible. Six months of showing the people of Hollows Bay thatIwas in charge, even if it wasn’t strictly true.
To the people of Hollows Bay, whether they worked for the Wolfeorganization, or were just a resident, I was now their king.
It was a tough few weeks to start with, especially as Kai had put theword out that I betrayed him. But I’d been making wavesmonthsbefore that, and I had enough people on my side to take the throne. Those who didn’t want to work for me, well, they learned the hard way, and there were more than a few who refused to cooperate.
Thanks to the shootout at the warehouse where I shot Kai, there wereonly a few survivors left on our side, meaning only a handful of trusted people knew the truth: Max Thorne was the real King of Hollows Bay.
It wasn’t always going to be this way, with me in charge. Maxintended on killing Kai and claiming the throne for himself, but after Kai almost beat him to death, he needed time to recover. He was barely clinging onto consciousness when I dragged him from the warehouse, so I made a decision. A decision Max approved of when he came to from his injuries.
The night of the shooting, I took control of the city, and I would remainin control until Max recovered. But Max and I slowly realized the benefits of him remaining hidden in the shadows. He was the Chief of Police, he had access to valuable intelligence, contacts across the country, hell, across the world if we wanted to take our control that far.
And so we decided. He would carry on playing his role as the chief,pulling strings from behind the scenes for a while longer, while the masses of Hollows Bay would believe I was in charge.
The problem was, I was enjoying being in charge a little too much.
Everything had been going well until a week ago, when over severalnights, the bodies of five of my men turned up dead. All five of them had once been Kai’s men but had since proven their loyalties to me. I didn’t know if it was a coincidence that these five men had been killed, or whether the attacks were targeted.
Either way, it wasn’t good news.
Each of them had met their fate in rather grotesque ways, and themost recent body had been dumped outside Sapphire, the club I now owned, just like I owned all of Kai’s businesses.
As the club was closing and customers were leaving, the body wastossed from a speeding van. It was the body of Vince, who once upon a time had been Kai’s bodyguard until he joined my side. He’d been gutted, his bowels hanging on the outside, and the smell was so bad I’d vomited all down myself.
I thought I had issues, but whoever was wiping out my men wasseriously deranged.
Where the fuck was Jacob?
I paced up and down the warehouse, the men I had brought with mewatched on silently, but they knew better than to speak. They thought Kai was ruthless, but he was nothing compared to how bad I was.
My mind churned with questions as to where the fuck Jacob couldbe. Yes, he was often late, but it was getting on for nearly an hour, and he fucking knew better than to keep me waiting this long. I ground my teeth in frustration, the apprehension that something had happened to him growing deeper in my gut.
Had Jacob met the same fate as my other men?
I didn’t know who was responsible for killing my men, but I had adamn good idea. Under Max’s instructions, I stopped paying the Bianchis the 5% fee the Wolfes were meant to pay them as part of the peace treaty. A treaty that had been in place since the war old Theodore Wolfe started with them years ago.
I always thought Kai should have challenged the treaty, it wasn’t hisfault his great-grandfather was an arrogant prick and started a fight he couldn’t win, but Kai was too much of a coward. He didn’t want to start an unnecessary war.
Max, on the other hand, didn’t give two fucks about the treaty. Hisview was that it wasn’t his deal to keep because he’d never grown up as a Wolfe, and as soon as we took over Hollows Bay, one of the first things Max did was order me to stop the 5% payment to them.
