Page 13 of Wicked Revenge

She smiles and gives me a nod. She flips her visor back down before restarting her engine and continuing her journey back into town.

After I’ve got Nightshade covered, I take off down the driveway. This forest has always relaxed me. After spilling everything last night, I need time to shove everything back down in its personal lock-box.

Reigning in the trauma after opening up for the first time in years is hard. I’ve kept them buried for so long, I don’t even know how to function with the gaping wounds I’m left with.

But I don’t have a choice.

I have to shove this shit down until nothing but The Hunter remains.

Chapter 6

“Maddox, if I wake up to your nasty ass balls stuck to my leather couch one more time, I’m going to cut them off and shove them up your ass,” Royal yells from the living room.

I slowly make my way downstairs, rubbing my hands down my face. This is already going to be a fucked up day, I just know it.

I find Royal standing over Maddox, who is smiling up at him, still half asleep with no clothes, no blanket, nothing. His morning wood stands proudly, the piercings reflecting off the sunlight streaming in from the full glass wall of our home.

“You know you like looking at my cock every morning, Royal, just admit it. You want it bad,” Maddox teases back, grabbing his dick and rolling off the couch. He takes off running up the stairs as Royal charges at him to beat his ass. Maddox cackles his psychotic laugh, slamming and locking his bedroom door.

I hear the shower turn on, and Royal walks back down. “I’m going to kill him one day, Alek.” He sighs as he makes his way to the kitchen and sets his cup under the coffee maker.

“No, you won’t. You love his crazy ass,” I say smugly. It’s been like this since we all got placed into the same group home fifteen years ago. Even though he is only a year older, Royal has always acted like the parent, and Maddox is forever the unruly child who gets into everything. Me? I’m the calm, level-headed one who gets to referee them.

Making my way to the coffee maker, I grab a cup and wait for the black life force to drip into it. Royal makes his way to the couch, looking at it in disgust before sitting on the opposite end, coffee in one hand, his phone in the other, looking at it with more irritation than Maddox can cause.

“What's wrong?” I ask, feeling dread pooling in my stomach.

“Something’s going on.” His face sets into that familiar scowl that I know means it has to do with King. “He’s called for an emergency meeting at the warehouse, nine o’clock tonight.”

“Fuck, that’s the last thing I want to do tonight,” I sigh, sitting on the other end of the couch. I place my coffee on the end table and pull my own phone from the pocket of my sweats, checking to see if an update miraculously showed up this morning.

Royal sighs heavily, mocking me, when I shake my head. Both of us know we will be at this fucked up meeting. We are stuck being his puppets until we find our sister, Emma. King is a sick bastard. We once thought he was our savior, back when he took us all out of foster care and made us officially brothers, if only in name.

He adopted us when Maddox and I were 15, Royal was 16. King took in three hot-headed, fucked up boys who were just trying to survive together, adopted us, and gave us the most powerful name in Shadow Forest. We thought he shit gold bricks and could do no wrong.

We were so wrong. It didn’t take long until we realized we were recruited for his organization. King had no heirs, and he needed someone to pass his legacy down to. I didn’t know it at the time, but when he initially approached Royal, who was getting into trouble with the Kingsmen, he only agreed to the adoption on the condition that Maddox and I were adopted too.

“What’s going on?” Maddox asks, walking back into the room and running the towel over his jet-black hair. He has it shaved into a short fade on the sides, with the top sitting a few inches longer. It always looks like he spends hours on end pulling on it.

Of course, since the towel in his hand is the only towel he has, he’s still butt-ass naked when he plops down between us on the couch.

“Fucking hell, Maddie! Put some goddamn clothes on!” Royal snaps at him, getting up and storming down to the basement where our training gym is set up.

“What crawled up his ass this morning?” Maddox asks me, tilting his head.

“King.”

Just that one name is enough to wipe the playful smirk right off his face. His eyes darken from his normal grey-blue to almost black in seconds. “Fuck,” he mutters, standing up and pacing the room.

“Yeah, that's what I said. Go get dressed and meet us in the basement. King called a meeting.” I slap the back of his head as I walk past him to the basement door.

Maddox is the most unhinged of us all. We have to manage his moods so he doesn’t get himself, or us, killed before we can find our sister. He is likely to go rogue if we don’t keep him in check. He’s fucked up, but we all are. There's not a person on Earth who wouldn't be messed up after living the lives we have.

Even before foster care, our lives were not rainbows and unicorns. The things we survived left us with a darkness that can only be sated by blood. We aren’t monsters though. Every kill we make is for the greater good. We only target evil, and Kingston Wolfe– is at the top of that list. Unfortunately, we have to play it smart if we want to find Emma and bring her home.

Emma showed up a few years ago. Kingston brought her home one day and introduced her to us as our sister. He said her mother was a junkie who OD’ed and she had no one else. By this time, we already knew King was an evil bastard.

The abuse we endured living in his home over the years was proof of that. We were already planning our move out of his mansion, but there was no way we were leaving her in his care. So we stayed to watch over her.

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