Page 72 of Wicked Revenge

“Stop, Maddie. Just breathe,” I tell him, making a show of taking a deep breath, and he mimics me. His hot breath slowly fanning across my face as he exhales. “That’s it. Again.”

“He is going to kill her, Alek. If we don’t give him Raena, he is going to kill her just to spite us. You know he doesn’t love her. He just uses her as a pawn to control us like puppets,” Maddox whispers, his eyes shut.

“I don’t think he will. Think about it. There has got to be a reason he took her in. She is important to him. We just need to figure out why,” I tell him.

It’s been nagging at me for a while. What connection could this little girl possibly hold to a bastard like King? She has to be important enough to him to go through all this trouble. Important enough to take her in to start with.

King is not a kind man. He only took Maddox and me in because he wanted Royal to be his heir. He thought he could mold out the perfect little soldier to follow in his footsteps. He wouldn’t have taken in this helpless little girl unless it benefited him in some way.

“I think you’re right,” Royal says, standing to his full height. “Did you catch what he said about her mother on the phone? Something about slitting her throat like he should have done to her mother’s. He told us her mother was just some junkie who overdosed. Why would he have wanted to slit her throat? Who was she to King?”

“I caught that, too. Something isn’t adding up. I think if we can figure it out, we might get a step ahead of him for once,” I tell them. The tension in the room decreases slightly as we contemplate what to do next.

The sound of our phones pinging with a security alert pulls us from our thoughts. I dig out both mine and Royals phones from my pocket, but before I can see the alert, Maddox has his out.

“It's the front gate. Someone opened it,” he says, going over to his computer with me hot on his heels to pull up the surveillance footage. It takes him a minute to log in, and while he is scanning the footage, I spin around in a circle.

“Um, where is Raena?” I ask, panic lacing my voice.

“She should have already been back down here. She was just grabbing her bag from your room,” Royal calls over his shoulder as he jogs to the basement stairwell to go look for her. Before he even makes it to the doorway, Maddox's voice brings him to a dead stop.

“Found her. She left.”

“What do you mean ‘she left’?” Royal growls, jogging back over to see the footage for himself. Maddox backs the feed up, showing the front gate closed and hits play. The gate opens fully a moment before Raena’s black bike flies through it, her long red curls hanging out of her helmet, blowing in the wind behind her.

“What the fuck are you doing, Baby Girl?” I mutter to myself. I realize I still have Royal’s phone in my hand when he snatches it, shoving it in his pocket, and turning back towards the door.

“Are you two assholes coming?” he yells over his shoulder at us.

Maddox jumps up, both of us pocketing our phones before jogging after him. My mind is reeling a mile a minute, running through all the possible scenarios that would have caused her to leave. She was smiling when she walked out of the basement. She wasn’t upset. She knows she isn’t safe from King out– King.

What if he got to her somehow? No. There is no way he could have contacted her while he was on the phone with us. Something else happened.

“Why would she run?” Maddox asks what we all want to know as we race up the stairs to throw some clothes on.

“She was fine when she walked out of the basement. It doesn’t make sense,” Royal responds, his face set in a mixture of concern and anger. “I’m going to turn her ass as red as her hair when we find her,” he growls as he heads into his room.

Maddox slips into his clothes and I keep going down the hall into mine, flipping the light before going into my closet and grabbing my black hoodie, pants, and boots before going back out to the bedroom.

I quickly slip my sweats off and change before jogging back into the hallway. My brothers are both coming out of their rooms when I make it to their doors.

“Let’s go find her before she does something stupid, and King finds her first,” Royal says as we set off down the stairs.

We’re in the garage in no time, piling into the blacked-out SUV. Royal gets in the driver seat, I take the passenger, and Maddox jumps into the back. We are backing out of the open garage door in a matter of minutes.

“Where would she have gone?” I ask as Royal flies through the gate, pressing the button on his sun visor to close it once we are through. Gravel kicks up behind us as he takes the turn out of the driveway, heading into town.

“She wouldn’t have gone home. She knows that’s the first place we’d look. She only has one other person in this town that knows she is back. We start there,” Royal says, his speed getting dangerously high.

He’s right, Ella is the smartest choice. Unless she decided to flee back to White Harbor, but I just don’t see her taking off without saying goodbye to her only friend.

The trip into town takes less than half the normal time with Royal driving like a madman. He's clenching his jaw tightly, and he’s white-knuckling the steering wheel. He is close to snapping, too. I’m going to have to monitor how he handles her when we find her. I won’t allow him to take it too far.

I know she wouldn’t run without a real reason behind it. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what that reason could be, but I know she has to have one. We’ve given her no reason to fear us.

He drives down the back alley that runs behind Twisted and the other businesses in the town square. He slows to an almost stop, and I see Ella’s truck parked in the side alley. “Her bike isn’t here,” I state the obvious.

“She’s smart, she probably hid it somewhere,” Royal says, turning down the alley and parking behind her friend’s truck.

---