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I smile against his lips, shaking my head before I start to kiss him again. When I pull away, a second question hangs on my lips.
“What is it?” Dante murmurs, clearly seeing through my silence.
“How doyouknow them?” I run my lip over my teeth. “The men with the lion rings.”
He’s silent for a few seconds that drag on too long as he turns to look away with a sad, faraway expression.
“They took my sister Claudia from me.”
My face falls. “Jesus, Dante?—”
“Theauthorities,” he spits acidly, “said she was just a statistic—wrong place, wrong dress, wrong guy.” He grits his teeth. “But I dug deeper, because that’s what I do. And that’s how I found them.”
“You called them Apex, before?”
He nods. “Yeah. Apex Club. As in ‘apex predators’.”
My stomach twists and knots, sour bile creeping up my throat.
“They’re a bunch of sadistic rich douchebags who were in the same frat together and went to the same business school. And they…” His gaze stabs violently into the wall. “That’s how they get their kicks. They hurt women.”
Part of me wants to throw up. There’s a fuckingclubof them?
“From what I can tell,” Dante spits, “there were seven of them.” He turns his head and lets his gaze hold mine. “I killed five.”
My heart clenches.Holy shit.
“Well, six, now,” Dante grunts. “But there’s one I’ve never been able to track down. A man named Brett?—”
“Sinclair.” I spit the name like a curse. “Brett Sinclair.”
What happened to me never made the news, mostly due to a court gag order Brett’s lawyers rammed through. But my brothers agreed to it, not because they gave a fuck about “sullying” the Sinclair name. But because they were worried about it ripping me apart if the media got wind of the story.
I nod numbly. ““Yeah, he’s dead. He…” My eyes squeeze shut, and I turn away.
“You don’t need to tell me, Tempest,” Dante murmurs.
“No, I want to.” I swallow, tasting bile. “They never knew I was awake. I think they thought I was totally out, like Nina was. So afterward…” I shudder. “Afterward, they justleft meon the side of the street in Chelsea.”
Dante lets out a deep, lethal growl and whirls, and I gasp when he grabs the bedside table lamp, yanks it out of the plug, and viciously hurls it at the wall.
Everything goes silent except for the thud of my pulse in my ears.
“I’m sorry, Tempest,” he finally says quietly.
“Don’t be,” I whisper, kissing his chest again. “I still couldn’t really move when they dropped me off. But I was able to scrape my nails down his forearm before they dumped me on the side ofthe road. So when the paramedics took me to the hospital, they were able to get a DNA sample.”
I can still remember the disbelief on the faces of my brothers and Taylor when the word came back that the man who’d done the to me was Brett Sinclair, oftheSinclair family.
“He posted bail, obviously,” I spit. “But then he was caught trying to leave the country and got thrown in lockup.” I grimace. “He hanged himself in his cell using the string from his hoodie.”
“Good,” Dante grunts through tightly clenched teeth, his rage palpable as his body clenches against me.
“His family covered it up, but…” I shake my head. “There’s your seventh guy you’ve been looking for.”
We’re both silent a minute before I slowly lift my head from his chest, my brows lined with worry.
“What if there are more?” I murmur.
