Page 63 of Cruel (Brutal Academy)

"I'm not saying hunting down Chloe with a bunch of mercenaries wouldn't have been fun," Hunter said slowly. "But that's not who you are. You had to protect yourself. Those assholes could have been after you. If you'd tried to take charge of them, they could have killed you. Or worse."

That reminded me of Danica and Mary. I didn't want to think what twelve men might do to me.

I shuddered.

"You couldn't have known your father was involved," Slade said. "If you had, you would have behaved differently."

"Would I?" I asked.

"Yeah," Parker agreed. "You would have called him up and told him to call off his dogs. Then we could have gone back and finished our game of Kink or Drink."

I groaned, remembering we'd only just started when the lights went out. Zachary trying to make Chloe jealous by choking Tina seemed so ridiculously childish now. Okay, it was childish then, but it was even more so now with twenty-two people dead.

"I suppose I would have," I agreed. "But he wouldn't have listened. They would still have come after us. If we knew he was behind it, we would have assumed they had orders not to kill Chloe or me. We might have hesitated."

"If we had, we'd be dead right now," Slade said. "None of us hesitated. We did what had to be done. If your father doesn't like it, too fucking bad. What matters is that we survived."

"Except Tina, Angie and fuck knows who else," I said. "This had nothing to do with any of them. Dad would call them collateral damage." Just like Mary.

"That's exactly what Reuben would say," Hunter said. "He probably got a good laugh out of all of this."

"Reuben laughs?" I asked dryly.

Hunter grinned. "Not out loud. He smiles once in a while though. Very rarely and usually when things have gone horribly wrong for someone else."

"That sounds like Reuben." I grabbed Hunter's wrists and pushed him a few steps back to my door.

"Right now, I want a nice, hot shower and to get out of these damp clothes." I let his wrists go and pulled out my key.

Tentatively I slipped it into the lock and turned it. The door opened easily. My room looked untouched. The sprinklers hadn't come on in this part of the Academy, thank fuck. Otherwise everything I owned would be saturated.

So would everything the guys owned. We’d have to leave and find a hotel for a few days. We could do that anyway.

I won’t lie, that was a tempting thought, but I wasn't going to run. Whatever Chloe, Zachary or my father threw at me, I would deal with it.

Slade placed his hands on my shoulders and steered me into the room and towards the bathroom. We stopped at the threshold for him to pull my T-shirt over my head. He unhooked my bra and slid the wet lace down my arms.

Hunter started on my shorts while Parker turned on the shower.

A girl could get used to this. I couldn’t say they didn't take good care of me. They called me their queen and treated me like one.

I stepped under the hot spray, surrounded by three even hotter, naked guys.

Parker stood with his shoulder raised, out of the water. It looked sore, but the bullet only grazed his skin. A few centimetres to the right, and he'd be dead.

I may not have hesitated to shoot my father if Parker died because of his fucking games. Screwing with me was one thing. Killing one of my guys was unforgivable.

Besides that, the whole attack could have led to me, Chloe and Zachary all dying. What would Dad have done then? Hunt down someone like Hades Turner to take his place? Or maybe he had something else in mind. He wasn't too old to have more children. I knew he wasn't sentimental, but this…

"Put it out of your head for a while," Hunter said. "We got through it. Everything they've thrown at us, we've survived. That's the important thing." He massaged my shoulders with his fingers and scented body wash.

"What he said." Slade squirted body wash onto his hands and started washing my breasts and stomach. "Also, we wouldn't let anything happen to you."

"No way." Parker washed himself quickly, then pushed Hunter aside to wash my hair.

"You know I can do this for myself, right?" I asked.

"We like doing it for you," Parker said.

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