by Devney Perry
“You okay?” King asked, kneeling down beside me and grabbing me by the hand. “I can’t trust you for a second, can I?” His smirk was cute, his dimples deeper than ever.
I shoved him playfully just as something flashed on the ground. I bent down and picked it up. “Huh. A lighter!”
“Zippo!” King corrects, taking it from between my fingers.
I shrugged. “Zippo then!” He pockets it and takes my hand. “Hurry up before it gets dark.”
I step up beside King. Slowly turning my head, the body on the floor catches my eyes straight away. There’s a pool of blood spilling out from his body, his face turned toward me. “Jack?” I rush toward him, dropping to my knees. His eyes are rolling to the back of his head, blood leaking out from between his lips.
“King!” I scream, turning to face him. “What did you do?”
King blinks, his eyes coming to mine. “Revenge, only this time, he’s not walking away alive.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I whisper-yell, taking Jack’s hand in mine and squeezing it.
King steps forward and I quickly stand to my feet, putting distance between him and Jack. “Why would you do this? The door opens to the side, the light breaking through. Delila steps inside, assesses the current situation and shakes her head. “I hope you deal with that, King.”
King continues to look at me, his eyes searching mine. “You won’t believe a fucking thing I say anymore, will you?”
“You lied to me! And then you were going to fucking kill me, King!”
“Yeah?” He grabs me by the front of my throat, blocking my airways and forcing my lips against his. “I’ve killed for less, P.” He shoves me backward and I fall onto Jack, my hands slipping in the warm goo. “Good luck with your bullshit, P. I’m fucking done.” He turns and walks out, slamming the door in his retreat.
“Jesus Christ.” I turn quickly, my hands coming to Jack’s chest. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll get you some help.” I pick him up, but he coughs, clutching his ribs. His shirt is torn and blood is spilled all over it. I swing his arm over my shoulder and wrap my arm around his waist, pulling him up to stand straight. “I’ll get you to a hospital and say someone jumped you.” I help him to the door, yanking it open. Thankfully, there are not as many people hanging around because most of them have disappeared for the holiday. I yank him forward, pushing him against the side of the RV. “Wait here. I’m going to get King’s keys.” I rush back inside and shove papers, keys, and other random crap out of the way to find his keys. Running up the stairs, I head straight for his bedroom, shoving away the memories of the last time I was up here.
Finding the keys on his dresser, I pick them up and quickly rush out, heading back to Jack. Scooping him back in my arms, I direct him to the parking lot. I find King’s Rolls Royce as soon as I get there, pushing the alarm on the key to unlock it. Swinging open the door, I put him in the passenger seat and run to the driver’s side.
“Drive and I’ll show you where to go,” he huffs, blood coating his lips.
“To a hospital is where you need to go!” I yell, pushing the engine button to start the car. It roars to life and I skid down the gravel as if I’m being chased by the five-oh.
“No!” Jake coughs, blood spilling out of his mouth. “Please. This isn’t the first time King has hit me. Just follow forward and I’ll tell you where to go. There’s only one person who can help me.” I hesitate with myself, but when he pleads again, I agree and begin following his directions.
Twenty minutes later, we’re pulling up into a long driveway that’s lined with shrub bushes. Jack groans beside me, so I quickly floor it forward, pulling up right outside the front door.
A woman comes rushing out, shoving her hair out of her face and panic struck in her eyes. She must be mid-forties.
“Jack?” She hurries down the marble stairs and straight for the door without giving me a second glance. It’s not until Jack is out and under her arms when her eyes connect with mine.
She freezes. Something I can’t quite piece together flashes over her eyes. “Hello.” She looks up to a window that overlooks the driveway before coming back to me. As soon as I look up to what had caught her attention, the curtain has already moved and whoever was standing there is gone.
“This is Persephone, Mom. She helped me.”
The woman eyes me skeptically before nodding. “Come inside.” I follow behind them, closing the doors to King’s car. I pat the back of my pocket for my phone before realizing I left it at the compound.
We hit the inside of the foyer and the door slams shut behind me. Chills break out over my skin, like a warning that maybe I shouldn’t have come to this house.
“Perse, can you help me?” Jack says, reaching for my hand. My eyes fly from his awaiting hand to his mother, who is beside him. “Perse?”
I step backward, but crash into someone behind me. Before I can scream, a hand is over my mouth and I’m being lifted off the ground.
“What are we doing with her?” the man says from behind me as I kick and shove away from him.
“We don’t have much time,” Jack says, massaging his head with his bloody hands. “King will come here first.”
“The Brothers of Kiznitch don’t know this house,” his mom says. “We can tie her up in the shed outside.”
“In the shed for now. Then I’ll gather everything I need to deliver her. This bitch. They’re crazy about her.”
His mom eyes me up and down. “She’s the ugly twin obviously.”
I scream again and bite down on the palm that’s covering my mouth. I want to rip out her hair and chew on her eyeballs, but not because she called me the ugly twin, because she is obviously hiding something I don’t know.
I’m being lifted off the ground before I can process anything.
King
The grip that P has around me is as tight as a fucking vise, but her acting up and throwing her tiara across the room because I beat up Jack tugged on my final string. When she was a kid, she always had this idea that she could fix people. Not just hurt people but really fix them. She’d always ask if you’re okay and what you were thinking. That’s P, always a healer.
The door to P’s room swings open and I raise my head from between my shoulders as Killian glares at me from across the room. The room is shit. There’s too much pink. “You’re both fucking exhausting. You know that, right?”
I chuckle, sitting up straight. “I do.”
“And in other news.” Killian strolls in, falling onto my bed and leaning against the headboard. “Have you seen the new girl?”
I roll my eyes. “There are two of them, so I’m going to need you to cut it down.”
A pillow hits the back of my head. “You know I’m a brunette man.”
I snort. “I know you’re a Maya man.”
“Man, fuck that. She knows the deal. We don’t touch, kiss, or anything. She’s like the little sister that I wanted to fuck for a very brief period of time.” He pauses, blows out a breath of air, and then taps me with his foot. “What’s up with you? Moodier than usual.”
I rub my hands over my face. “Don’t know.” I know. “Ever since finding out that Dove is P, it’s fucking with my head.”
Silence stretches out. “And what did you do?”
“I almost killed Jack.” Images flash over my head.
“Good.” Killian stands and rounds the bed, dropping down on the floor opposite me. “He should be dead.”
“Oh, he would be.” I laugh, shaking my head. “Only I wanted to give her the power to do it, instead of taking it all for myself. Man, do you know how hard it was for me to rein in all of my rage and hand it to her on a fuckin’ silver platter?” I bring my eyes to Killian below my hoodie. “I tormented this chick for the better part of her life, Kill. I hid in the corners of her bedroom and heard her screams in her nightmares. I’d watch her toss and turn in her sleep. Sweat would pour off her body every night and I watched.”
“You actually added to her nightmares.” he adds.
I glare at him. “Yeah, so I know she doesn’t want me, and that was never the end game. All the shit we were fed as kids, the meal which we fed each other, it’s gone stale. We both know that.”
“I feel like there’s a point to this.”
“So I handed Jack to her. Had him in our RV bleeding out. All she needed to do was say the word and I would have snapped his neck.”
Killian grins, running his finger over his upper lip. “That’s cute. Where is she now?”
I wave him off, leaning back on one elbow. “I left her there with him. He didn’t have much life left in him.”
Killian doesn’t say anything, and then he flies up from the floor. “Our RV?”
My eyes snap to his. “Yeah. Why?”
I watch as his face pales. “Pretty sure the door was open when I passed it.” I shoot up off the bed and we both run down the stairs, out the front door, and straight for our RV.
Empty. The blood puddle where Jack was is empty. I punch the door until it swings open. “Fuck!”
“Yo, we need to go get her. He’ll deliver her to Patience if we don’t.” I can’t even fucking think of Patience right now.
“What is going on?” Delila comes rushing toward us, dressed in her costume.
I dash back inside as Killian explains what’s happening. Searching around the room, I try to find my keys, knowing I left them on the counter when I dumped his sorry ass on the ground. She’s taken my SUV.
I run back out to see that all of The Brothers are here now. “We need to go. She has my ride so I can use GPS to find where she is.”
Three carloads is all it takes.
P
I shiver in the corner, my fingers flexing around my arms. He hasn’t touched me, but now I know who he is. He was the one who wore the mask in the cell. Who came for me. It was Jack. Was that why King had brought him to me? Whose blood it was on his finger when we were in the forest? Jack had disappeared after that.
Banging snatches my attention from above, and I stop breathing. Who is Patience, and what does it mean?
The door swings open and Jack steps forward. He still looks battered, but you can see he has attempted to tidy the wounds that are fresh on his face.
“Persephone fucking Hendry. The perfect little princess. How much money you are worth?” He tsks, shaking his head. “They’ll be very happy.”
“Who are they?” I ask, and when he reaches out to touch me, I rear backward and sneer. “Don’t fucking touch me!” He swings backward as the back of his hand swipes across my face. My face numbs and thuds with pain, blood filling my mouth.
I spit it out onto the ground. “Fuck you.”
He hits me again.
And again. Until I am sure that I’m going to pass out.
I’m curled on the ground, cradling my head. Jack finally pulls me up to my feet. “You’re going in the shed. You’re going to give me my own show.”
I yank my arm out of his grip. “Fuck—” A sharp needle stabs my arm, and I fall backward as fluid pulses through my blood. The ceiling spins as Jack’s face fuzzes in front of me. He triples. “Get used to this, Perse. This is how Patience does things.” The room spins.
I see grass.
Heavy boots.
Jeans.
His voice sounds deeper, funny, like a broken record or a flat battery. Swirls morph in my vision, everything doubling in effect. My head is slammed against the ground, my body frozen, and my head fuzzy. I don’t know. Where am I? What’s happening?
I’m yanked up to my feet, the smell of sweet marijuana filling the air.
“Dance,” Jack says, but his voice is distorted.
I can hear the distinct tune of Tool’s “Schism” with smoke clouding my vision. Or maybe that’s my brain. Everything hurts as my body sways from side to side. My arm throbs where the sting hit it and I slowly gather what has happened. Motherfucker drugged me.
He grips below my shirt and tears it off, and then works on my pants. Tears roll down my face as I fail to stop him.
Fail to fight. Being robbed of my control. I’m going to die here, or, at the very least, wish I did. Jack comes in again, and I watch as he brings the needle to his arm and blows out a cloud of smoke, injecting himself. He pulls my body into him and dances around the barn with me, lost in a drugged haze, before shoving me down onto the hay. The particles fly up around me, my eyes crossing together as I focus on one stick that’s floating down over his shoulder, slowly dropping and dropping. My eyelids flutter, my vision being cut black every two seconds as I fight sleep.
Jack bites at my breasts, and just as he swipes my underwear aside, King’s face appears over his shoulder, and I know I must be dead. There’s a lot of yelling, but I don’t know.
In a perfect world, King would save me, not want to kill me.
In a perfect world, I wouldn’t be lying here, drugged and vulnerable, all for what? For the mistakes of my parents?
In a perfect world, I wouldn’t be a broken girl trying to find her own way.
But this isn’t a perfect world. King isn’t here to save me, but I go with it. My blinking slows as I lean up on my elbows and watch as King’s figure moves fluently in triples. All I see are King and Jack, and then an explosion of blood. My tongue sneaks out, just as Killian and Delila drop down on either side of me. Metal slips over the tip of my tongue. “Revenge?” I whisper to myself, only to myself, because this is a dream. This is not real.
“Yeah, Little Bird,” Killian whispers, only it echoes into my head. “Fucking revenge.” But then Killian is being torn away and so is Delila.
I inhale, recognizing the smell of fresh burnt ash, leather, and honey. King picks me up in his arms and cradles me into his chest. My head tilts back as I finally lose myself in a deep slumber.
I wasn’t saved by Prince Charming. I was saved by a villain, and fuck being on his warpath.
P
My mouth feels like cotton, my limbs cemented into the mattress. I groan, raising my body off the bed. The smell hits me first, and then I scrub my eyes and open them. The large glass window to the left. The black leather bed, leather dresser, and large TV. The black walls and large white triangle of Kiznitch painted into the wall above the bed.
“Shit.”
The door opens, and King walks through, pausing when he sees I’m awake.
“What happened?” I ask, running my hand through my hair. It feels like straw and I smell. Badly.
“You don’t remember?” he says, attentively stepping inside the room.
“Not really.” I reach for the glass of OJ and take a sip slowly, rejoicing in the cool pulp juice. “God, I smell.”
King shakes his head, and when our eyes connect, we do that thing we always do. When our eyes say the words that our mouths cannot, I see the strain on his face. His pupils dilate, and his jaw sets to stone.
“You can go for a shower, P,” he whispers, stepping forward. “But I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
I squeeze the sheets. “That bad, huh?”
King chuckles. “Yeah, baby. That bad. Come on.” He reaches for me, my hand connecting to his. It’s a small gesture with so much meaning. That’s the thing with King and me. We write our story in invisible ink, so no one else can read it. He tries to carry me to the small steps near his bathroom, but I push him away.
“Stubborn,” he murmurs, and for a brief second, I see the old Kingston I knew all those years ago. Once we’re in the bathroom, he turns the faucet on and waits for it to heat up, closing the glass door. “I wiped your face down when you were asleep. I mean,” he kicks down the toilet cover and takes a seat, “Delila wanted to give you a full-on bath, but I almost killed her, so she didn’t try again.”
“King,” I whisper-scold, my heart clenching in my chest. He looks so…tormented.
He shakes his head and gestures to the shower.
I smile, taking a small step inside and undressing whil
e I’m in here. It’s stupid because King has seen me naked before, but I’m not feeling very anything right now, and I need to sit in here alone. I close the glass door, knowing he hasn’t moved from his spot.
“Music,” I murmur, knowing he would hear me.
The door opens, and then closes, before opening and closing again. The sound of the sound dock picking up his phone dings through the air as I reach for the soap. Seconds pass before “Evil Angel” by Breaking Benjamin starts playing. My eyes close and I inhale, exhale through the waves of music surrounding me. Music has always and will always be the main part of me and how I express myself and vent my energy. I think that’s the same with everyone in Midnight Mayhem. I work on the shampoo and conditioner, rubbing it through my hair. Squeezing soap onto my palm, I scrub my face and then wince when I feel how bruised my cheek is. After I rinse off, I slowly slip to the ground, pulling my knees up to my chest. The door cracks open and King looks down at me. I draw my knees in closer. His eyes don’t drop. He doesn’t eat me alive with lust. He’s tortured and guarded and…broken.
Breaking Benjamin continues to fill the silence between us as he kneels down and reaches for my chin. The water cascades over my face, hiding the tears that are free-falling. “I guess that wasn’t going to be the last time you kneeled for me.” I try to joke about the words he used when I first formally met him on the boat, but hiccup and choke on my words when tears tremble out of me. “I remember everything.” I swipe across my cheeks even though I don’t need to.
King pauses, his eyes darkening. “I promise you, P. No one will ever come near you again. He wasn’t even supposed to be on that fucking yacht. We’ve got some digging to do, but from where we’re standing right now, we think he’s been sleeping with the enemy and he killed a guard to get on the yacht.” There’s so much promise in his words. Can I trust him again? What happened now seems like an ant in an army of soldiers. Jack killing the guard obviously explains why his knife had blood on it.