Page 15 of From the Ashes

My mouth drops open as a deep blush covers my cheeks, just in time for the door to swing open. A smiling Leighton is standing in the doorway, her dark hair pulled up in a neat knot on the top of her head, and her dark eyes gleaming when they lock onto each of us.

“Come in, Elias has his medical kit open in the kitchen.” She waves us through and doesn’t seem intimidated in the least by the criminals that file past her.

Her brows tug together when she sees me bleeding in Kovu’s arms, her eyes flicking between us and then to my shoulder. “Twice in as many weeks?”

“It was a knife this time,” I tell her, and she half laughs at my attempt at a joke, but I think it’s more of a pity laugh than anything else.

Kovu carries me through the house, and I take it in as we move toward the kitchen. The whole house is warm, not just the temperature, but the vibe itself. The mix of wood and stone, paired with the warm tones of the furnishings, are a far cry from the cold mansion I grew up in.

Elias is sitting at the table, his dark eyes immediately moving to Leighton when she walks into the room, his shoulders visibly relaxing once she’s back in his line of sight.

There’s another man at the other end of the table, his eyes moving over the laptop screen in front of him. His blue eyes flick up to make sure Leighton is back in the room before returning to the screen. Are they in a relationship like ours? Unconventional to the outside world, but that feels so right for the people in it?

He runs a hand through his dirty blond hair and taps the keys a few times before he finally turns his attention to us.

“That’s Wyatt,” Leighton tells me. “When he’s not at the club, he normally has his head in his laptop doing some kind of work for these guys.”

“We really need to get a full-time IT guy on the payroll.” Bishop rubs his hand down his face.

“You really do,” Elias adds, looking up from the medical bag he has open on the dining table.

“I wonder if we could persuade the Saint James family to give us one of theirs,” Crew muses, and I raise a brow at him. Does he mean Saint James as in the Chicago Mafia family? Do they know each other? And if they do, how?

“It’s a long story,” Kaos tells me as Kovu sets me down on the chair opposite Elias. “Did you get anything off the security tapes?”

Wyatt shakes his head. “No, they’ve been wiped. But what I can tell you is that it was Caleb who accessed the compound.”

“You can’t know that if the tapes have been wiped,” Kaos snaps.

Wyatt looks up at him, his brows raised, before his eyes flicker to Crew and back again. “Unless someone else has his fingerprints, I can assure you it was your father who broke into the compound and left the gift for Camilla.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

KOVU

Ican’t take my eyes off Camilla as Elias patches her up for the second time in a little over a week. Because of Caleb.

This can’t be allowed to stand. I won’t let it.

The others see me as the unhinged muscle. It’s how it’s been since Crew found me behind a dumpster covered in the blood of my parents, but Camilla has made me more. She doesn’t look at me and see a psychopath. She looks at me and sees the broken boy who just wanted to be loved, and even if she hasn’t said the words yet, she gives me that love. She gives me everything. Which is why I’m willing to kill a man I once considered a father figure to keep her safe.

He’s meant to be dead anyway, so what difference does it make?

Everyone has already grieved for him, meaning it shouldn’t come as a surprise when he winds up dead…again.

Bishop catches my eye and nods toward the hallway where Kaos and Crew are already standing.

With one last glance at Camilla, who is chatting with Leighton like they’ve known one another their whole lives, I follow after them until we’re out of earshot. I hate her being out of my line of sight at the best of times, but right now, it feels infinitely worse.

Kaos leans against the wall, his head hanging with his hands fisted in his pockets, while Crew and Bishop lean against the wall opposite him. There’s a rift in the group for the first time in years, hell, maybe ever. We’ve had arguments, of course, but this feels different. This feels like we’re tearing apart from the inside out.

“It might not be him,” Kaos says. “Maybe someone got his fingerprints off something and used them to frame him.” It’s a weak attempt at explaining something that already makes perfect sense, but I don’t bother pointing that out to him.

“K, what more evidence do you need?” Bishop asks, his voice gentle despite the tension in his shoulders. “He met Camilla on three separate occasions, one of which was inside Davenport’s penthouse, and on another he admitted to trying to kill her. He shows up out of the blue at the same time the fight club goes up in smoke, and then someone with his fingerprints breaks into the compound, which a total of about ten people know the location of, leaving a knife and bullet with Camilla’s name on it in her bed.”

I blow out a breath. It seems even more damning when he lays out all the facts like that.

“All I’m saying is that I don’t think we should do anything rash just yet. We haven’t even had the chance to talk to him yet. We should hear him out before we run off half-cocked.” Kaos tries to reason, but the rest of us made our minds up as soon as Camilla told us that he’d admitted to trying to kill her. We don’t need any more information.

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