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“Do we have to?” Kingston asked, leaning his head back against my knees. I had been reading a book I found in the apartment’s library in between texting with Penny. I couldn’t tell her where we were, but I could tell her we were okay. I had to warn her, too, so she and Mark would be prepared in case Maksim and Ilya send anyone to pay them a visit.
I had to do the same with mom and Nat, but Nat had flipped the hell out the moment she got my text. Reg had called them and said I was partying it up with my guys in Europe and he was concerned for me. He had lied and said I was high, and my mom and Nat had believed him. That hurt almost as much as everything he’d done to me over the years. The fact that he’d undermined my relationship with my mom and my little sister.
I didn’t know if Nat would ever know what I’d sacrificed for her. I didn’t know if I even wanted her to know. All I knew was that it felt like shit when she looked at me that way, and when I was feeling unkind, I would resent the fact that her life had been so easy. That I’d kept her from darkness so now she could parade around, untouched and arrogant, as if she’d earned it on her own.
“I say we vote on staying or going,” Archer said from his big overstuffed chair where he was reading a novel about a man who had escaped his homeland to a fantasy world. He kept telling us about it, giving us hints that he wanted to escape our current reality to somewhere even more detached than this penthouse. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t agree with him.
“I vote to leave,” Valen said, surprising me. “I don’t think we can outrun this one, princess. We have to face everyone at some point, and it’s more powerful to do it on our terms, not wait for theirs.”
“That’s exactly what we need to do,” Ryker said, sitting up at the end of the sofa. He’d been napping, or so I thought. More likely, he’d been dozing just enough to rest but still listening in. He had a tendency to do that. It was adorable, but he never liked it when I called him that word, so I kept it to myself. But he was adorable, even if he didn’t see it. “We need to come in hard and fit, hit them where it hurts.”
“But where does it hurt?” I asked. “Where can we hit them?”
“Who are we targeting, exactly?” Kingston asked. “I mean, I’d like to kill Reg, if that’s okay with everybody. I think he’s the son of a bitch who needs to be yeeted into the sun.”
“True,” Valen agreed. “But also, we don’t all have somebody we have a personal beef with like you. I say we go for the big dog and knock the entire organization off its rocker.”
“So, Ilya?” Archer asked. “We kill Ilya Kostin?”
“To start,” Valen said. “But there are more, I’m sure.”
“I want to kill Maksim,” I said with my eyes narrowed. “It’s personal. I’m not afraid to admit that. I want to see him hurt.”
“I suspect there’s a story there that we need to hear at some point,” Kingston said. “Only when you’re ready, though. But I want you to know that whatever happened to you, we still love you, and nothing can ever change that.”
Except what happened, I thought to myself, and I had an unwelcome flash of Avery and Maksim forcing me to—
I couldn’t even finish the image. I couldn’t handle it at that moment.
“He’s right, princess,” Ryker said, stretching and yawning. “I know I love you no matter what. I don’t care what happened, or anything you think might change that. I love you forever, until my last breath. Beyond my last breath, even. To eternity.”
“Now I’m gonna sound like a copycat loser, but me too,” Archer said with a grin. “I love you, Everly Hayes, no matter what.”
“Well, yeah, me too,” Valen laughed. “We all do, it’s true. Just know that in case Maksim made you do—”
He didn’t finish his sentence, but it was hanging in the air. I knew what they meant. They meant if Maksim raped me, if he forced me to have sex with him.
What they didn’t know was that he did worse. What he made Avery do to me was beyond rape. It was a tearing down of my decency. He’d stripped me of my dignity and left me with nothing. How could I ever confess that deeply traumatizing secret to my Kings? How could they ever look at me again?
“I’m just mad about being his prisoner,” I said with a laugh. “Can you imagine? He fed me shitty store-bought bread and wouldn’t let me go for a run in the mornings. I swear I’m the only kidnapping victim who put on twenty pounds.”
They erupted into protests to tell me how good I looked that I hadn’t gained, but even if I had gained, they would all still love me until the moon fell from the sky and the stars disappeared and all that. I appreciated their devotion so much right then because it deflected from the events with Avery and derailed my mind spiraling into horrifying memories of that day.
I loved my Kings. That much was true. In fact, if that’s the only truth I knew in the world, then it would be enough for me.
“Okay, so we have to think about this. Do we leave?” I asked again, and I put up my hand. “I vote yes because Ryker is right. If we stay here, they’re going to come looking for us, and we’ll never know when they pop out. We need to strategize and go to them. Hit them first and hit them hard enough that they don’t get up again.”
“I vote yes, obviously,” Ryker said and shot me a cocky little grin. “I don’t care where we are, as long as it’s with you.”
The other three fell into step, and it was official. All four of us would go the moment we came up with a plan.
Unfortunately, that was the hard part. Ilya wasn’t exactly an online presence, we searched for as much as we could to find out about him, but he was a ghost in the world. We found one old article about him opening a financial institute in Luxembourg, but even that was fuzzy on detail.
I did see a photo of Maksim’s mother, though, and there was something familiar about her. I didn’t study the image, it was in black and white and quite grainy, but I felt a twinge in my stomach that there was more to the story.
Maksim, however, was everywhere. He was a natural-born attention whore, and his search turned up hundreds of thousands of images, articles, and information about lawsuits all over the world. Everything from environmental fines in Venice for running over nesting ducks with his high-speed boat to embezzling money in the United States. Of course, when I clicked on that link for more detail, I found out that he’d been let off scot-free on the embezzlement and was even seen partying with a US senator days later.
Every photo I saw of him, and there were hundreds and hundreds, made me hate him more. His smug face with his cherubic golden blond curls were such a contrast I didn’t understand how people could fall for his bullshit.
