Page 23 of Vicious Knight

He also had tattoos on his wrist. The tattoos of the Knights.

The man shot Michael in the head twice and killed him. But it didn’t end there. When Michael fell on the ground, the man pulled out a knife and stabbed Michael through the heart. Then he carved out his heart and held it up to the light with blood dripping from it.

I heard him say ‘I will kill all of you. Every last guard here’, then he uttered a chant in a language that sounded old and creepy.

“Valin mortilum dohaliues.” That’s what it sounded like.

He placed the heart in a black bag and hurried out of the room after, looking hideous with his knife in the air.

I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to find my father but I was so terrified I couldn’t even move. I’d never seen a man die before, and it was someone I knew.

Michael was always so kind to me and looked after me when my father was busy. Now he was dead.

An eternity might have passed before my father came into the room, but he was covered in blood from head to toe. I was so happy to see him that I rushed out of my hiding place.

He grabbed me and picked me up, but I made the mistake of looking at Michael’s bloodied, heartless body. His eyes were wide open, the bullet hole in his head was oozing blood, and blood gushed from the place his heart used to be like a river.

“Papa,” I screamed and Dad held me closer.

“Don’t look, moya lyubov. Don’t look,” he’d mumbled in my ear, but it was too late. I couldn’t unsee what I saw.

Dad ran out of the room with me straight into more dead bodies of people I knew. They littered the path.

The sight of death, blood and gore only ended when we reached the door to the underground tunnels.

We went down there and met Mom on the other side where she waited in hysterics.

Dad had managed to tell her about the attack and got her to meet us somewhere safe.

As he handed me over to her, we begged him to come with us but duty sent him running back into the arms of danger. My father was the senior guard, and he took that responsibility to heart.

That was the last time I saw him.

After that night I only knew what had happened to my father from what I heard by eavesdropping or Mom actually sitting me down to tell me.

Dad was found unconscious on the palace grounds. Even though he was injured there was evidence that suggested he was involved in the attack. The targets were the Russian Syndicate of Bratva leaders and senior Knights.

Dad saw the man with the scarred face too, but no one believed him.

No one could identify anyone who fit that description, and since the cameras at the palace were all down they had no footage of the incident or the man.

Eventually people thought my father was lying and when I told Mom I saw the man she thought I was lying too to save Dad. Because mom was worried for our lives she forbade me to mention him again.

She wouldn’t even allow me to talk to Levgen about the scar-faced man, so he never knew that the man was a Knight or about the mysterious words he spoke.

My mother was disgusted with Dad for putting me in danger. The thing was I wasn’t meant to be there that night. My presence there was solely because Mom had an emergency at work, but she felt my father risked my life anyway to kill the Syndicate members.

Apart from me, Dad was the only person in the palace who survived. That was suspicious enough.

We weren’t allowed to see him, but Mom knew what was coming next—our deaths.

That’s when she got Levgen’s help. The only thing he could do to save us was stage our deaths by blowing up our home. Then he arranged for us to go to L.A. under the pseudonyms of Ivy and Oksana.

He made it seem like my father’s enemies had killed us in retaliation for what had happened at the palace.

Levgen married Mom to add a further layer of protection. It was expected of him as a Knight of his caliber to take a wife. His previous wife had died years before from an illness.

We started our lives in the States with the vow to forget my father.

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