Page 24 of Ruthless Reign

“He knows your weakness…”

He’d said it so quietly, I wasn’t sure if I heard him.

“The fuck did he say?” Dad asked, but I already had the Son by the throat, squeezing tight, forcing him to look at me.

I looked between his eyes, seeing the light in them fading. “What does that m-m-mean?” I stuttered, heat ripping down my back as I felt Dean and Mikey share a look over my head. It didn’t matter.

It didn’t fucking matter because I had this feeling. This fucking slimy, slithering feeling in my gut that whatever this fucker knew—whatever Séamas knew—would be the end of us all.

I shook him. “Talk!”

His lips pulled up in a crooked, dopey smile.

I shook him harder, seeing red. Seeing Becca with her neck in a noose. Becca covered in blood. Becca with her eyes open and unseeing. Becca, a casualty of a war she wasn’t even a soldier in. Becca, dead because I couldn’t protect her.

I hit him. Hit him again. Again.

“Hardin.” Distantly, I heard my dad calling my name, but all sound turned dulled. Muffled as if it came from another room. A room where people talked and people had reason, but here, in this room, reason had no place.

There was only the sting in my knuckles. The crunch of bone. The spray of hot red on my face. And Becca’s face in the void of my mind.

When I came back, I was on my ass against the wall and Dad had a fifth of whiskey in a short glass held out to me. I blinked, seeing the mess of my hand slung over one knee, feeling the air enter and exit my lungs in heavy, hard breaths. I clenched my jaw and breathed through my nose, curling my hand into a fist until the split skin there stung and fresh blood dripped down onto my jeans.

“Take it.”

I took the drink, throwing it back in one swallow, letting the burn wake me back to the moment.

Dean was untying the brutalized pulp of the captured Son from the chair to get him into the open tarp on the floor.”

“He wasn’t going to tell us anything, anyway,” Dad said, sliding to sit next to me against the wall, his own whiskey glass dangling over one knee as he swirled it.

“How long?” I asked.

He knew what I wanted to know. How long was I gone? How long was I not me? How long was I the other thing. The fucking monster I’d become so goddamned good at keeping on a leash these last few years. The monster who snapped and killed my biological father. The one who almost murdered a sixteen-year-old kid for daring to hit my little brother when he was in the ninth grade.

It’d been a while since I blinked to find myself covered in blood without the ability to fully recall how it got there or whose it was.

“Only about five minutes,” Dad replied. “You said they couldn’t have her.”

I turned to look at him, surprised I’d spoken at all while in black out rage.

“You’re right,” he continued as the Son’s corpse was tipped unceremoniously onto the tarp and our men set to wrapping him up. “Rebecca’s mother was already taken because of this bullshit. I love your mother, more than…” He trailed off, knocking the back of his head against the wall to look up at the ceiling. “You know I do, but I owe it to Becca’s mom not to let her daughter have the same fate. She deserves a life. And if after this she decides to live it far away from here—away from us—then that’s what she’ll have. But she will have that choice.”

I dropped my own head. She said she wouldn’t leave. She wouldn’t run away. I knew it would be better if she did. Safer. But Dad didn’t understand. I…I wouldn’t let her go.

I couldn’t.

Not if it was the better thing. Not even if it was what she wanted.

Dad threw back his whiskey. “They don’t know who she is,” he said. “If we’re lucky, the Son who got away didn’t even see her there at the Kents’ pub. For all they know, she’s just some chick you and Kaleb are friendly with. They may not even know that. Or care.”

That was way too many fucking maybes.

What if they did know?

Maybe not that she’s Damien St. Vincent’s daughter. But even just that she’s…important. Important to the sons of a Saint. That could be enough to take her. To use her.

I clenched my fist again. “Get cleaned up,” Dad ordered, rising as the others dragged the corpse out of the room. “And get ready. They could make a move any time now and we need to be?—”

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