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I wished I’d spit in that drink. Or better yet, pissed in it.
I didn’t like Caspian Donahue, but right now I had a feeling Tatum was better off with him chasing her than being in this room with her own goddamn father.
Twelve hours later, we figured out that phone call my father talked about making last night had been to Kipton Donahue. And their way oftaking care of thingswas to kidnap my sister and bring her to a hundred-acre wooded area in upstate New York called The Grove. In the depth of the forest, there were no witnesses to their fucked-up ritualistic behavior. What kind of sick motherfucker helped kidnap his own daughter?The kind who forced his thirteen-year-old son to murder a stranger.
Thank fuck I’d found Tatum’s phone on the ballroom table and called Caspian this morning to check on her. Between me, him, and Chandler, we figured out where they’d brought her and manipulated our way inside. Bymanipulated, I meant Chandler called in a favor to some special-ops military guys who got us past the front entrance. I didn’t even want to know how he knew these people.
From there, we fought our way to the edge of the lake. Five boats. Five girls. All of them wearing white silk robes and drugged into unconsciousness.
Five guys wearing dark, hooded cloaks and solid black masks stood on the shore, ready to climb in the shells.
The next few hours happened in stages. First, the five boat captains were reduced to two scared shitless rich kids with the fear of death etched in their gaze. Caspian, Chandler and I took the other three boats and slowly poled across the lake, giving the girls enough time to ease back into consciousness. All around us, the trees were still full, waiting for their leaves to turn with the coming of fall. The air was just beginning to turn cool, especially now that the sun had set. The sky was dark and clear. Somewhere under this same sky, there was a couple gazing up at the stars and promising a future full of forevers. There would be no more promises from me because nothing lasted forever in my world. The moon reflected off the glass-like surface of the lake. I’d been here before—not onthislake, but one just like it—poling a boat over the water with a body in tow. Back then, the body was a man calledGreed,and I’d just severed his spinal cord with an axe. Tonight, it was my sister, and she had no idea that I was one of the masked men cloaked in a dark robe towering over her.
We dropped the girls off on the other shore where a group of men—about fifty of them, all wearing cloaks—gathered around bonfires and a massive shrine of a lion and waited. One of those men was my father. He stood there with a smug look on his face as the serpent man from the ballroom walked up behind him and grinned at Tatum. It took every ounce of my willpower not to rip them both open from asshole to elbow. Tatum slapped at one of the other guys as he tried helping her out of the boat, and for a split second my dark façade slipped. I let out a chuckle but quickly reigned it back in.Good fucking girl.
Then we moved around to the backside of the woods where another boat waited for us, this one much larger and faster. Chandler and I waited on the boat while Caspian navigated his way through the forest, beyond the darkness and the sounds of female screams I would hear in my nightmares for the rest of my life, and managed to find my sister then bring her back to our boat.
The next phase was the most rewarding. After we dropped Caspian and Tatum off at the airport, making sure my sister was out of harm’s way, Chandler and I went back to The Grove.
“You sure you can handle this?” he asked me as we docked the boat on the backside of the forest. “You can stay here and keep the boat warm.”
Yeah, I could fucking handle it.
Not that I blamed Chandler for thinking the way he did. Since that night at the lake, I’d been labeled as the loose cannon, the guy whose emotions overruled his brain. And maybe sometimes they did. But not this time. This time I was thinking clearly. I knew exactly what needed to be done. There were four more girls out there that needed saving and at least fifty grown men hellbent on destroying them.
I snickered and hopped over the side of the boat onto the dock. “It’s showtime, motherfucker.”
Chandler secured the boat to the dock with a wicked grin spread across his face. “Let the games begin.”
We pushed stray branches out of the way while others that had fallen crunched under our heavy footsteps. In the distance, an owl sent warning to the other animals lurking in the darkness that we had arrived. Karma was here to hand out the ass whippings these men deserved.
The thick grove of trees opened up to a clearing facing the other side of the lake. The bonfires from earlier still blazed high. The men had shed their cloaks. Most of them were in nothing but their underwear. Some of them were butt-ass-naked. The last thing my eyes wanted to see tonight was a bunch of old, wrinkly balls swinging between hairy legs.
In my life, I’d seen some fucked-up shit. I’d done some fucked-up shit. But this… the shit these men were doing to these girls… Fuck.
And the screams.
Those screams were what nightmares were made of.
One girl was hanging from a tree—a rope tied around her wrists, then wrapped around the thick branch while her legs dangled in the air. Blood-soaked trails etched paths down her naked body where they’d marked her with letters or words I couldn’t comprehend. Latin or some shit. Another girl was kneeling by the fire with her hands and feet bound together behind her back. One of the men held her head steady while he fucked her mouth while another one stood behind her and pissed on her ass.
They were laughing. Fuckinglaughingat the vile shit going on around them.
That could’ve been Tatum. It would have been Tatum if we hadn’t showed up.
My chest heaved with every breath I took. Rage boiled inside me, hot in my veins. I took a step forward, ready to pounce, but Chandler held a hand to my chest.
“Not yet.”
I yanked his hand off and glared at him. “So, we just stand here and watch them do this shit? The fuck is wrong with you?”
His expression remained hard. “I said, not yet.” Then he folded his arms across his chest and leaned his back against a tree.
This went on for another half hour. The fucking. The degradation. The depravity. I finally sat down, leaning against a tree, and faced the dark forest because I couldn’t take it anymore.
What happened to these girls? How did they get here? Were they all the daughters of powerful men like my father? I didn’t recognize any of them but that didn’t mean they weren’t someone’s sister, someone’s daughter, someone’s first love…
My mind spun in circles and my pulse kicked into high gear.
