Page 105 of They Break Beauty

For six years, my brothers had believed that I’d been held alone when I’d been kidnapped that day as a fifteen-year-old clueless kid on my way home from our hoity-toity private school. The town car I’d been traveling back home to the Knight family home in had been run off the road. The ordeal had begun with the first hit of trauma when the driver’s door had been thrown open and my driver had been shot through the skull, his blood and brain matter spraying all over the seats and me.

Little had I known at the time, but that had only been the beginning.

Per a deal that Roman Knight had struck with Brianna’s father, Curt Walker, the fact that Brianna had been taken too that same day across our mutual home city of Tolhurst had been kept a secret. As had my kidnapping. It wasn’t public knowledge. But Colt and Mason knew because they’d been in the car behind me and seen me being taken.

Both Roman and Curt hadn’t wanted it to get out, because it would have been seen as a weakness by the many other enemies they’d shared at the time that somebody had actually been able to get at their children. Worse, that the particular somebody had managed to keep them in captivity for two whole weeks before those two dangerous powerhouses had found us.

There were many reasons why I’d never spoken about it—outside of to my father—in all these years. Obviously, one of the main reasons was that I hadn’t wanted to relive it in vivid detail like talking about it would have caused. The nightmares were bad enough and came too close to that as it was. Another reason was that I’d wanted to keep my memories of the one bright spark that had been there through all that pitch-black—Brianna Walker. I hadn’t wanted to share that—her—with anyone. And then there’d been the two-year period where I’d tried to let it all go, to bury it beneath a shit-ton of other things, which had resulted in what my dad had called a whole lot of acting out. Fortunately, that had all been put down to teenage rebellion. But the worst of it had really ended when I’d stopped trying to bury it, to put those two weeks of torment behind me and all the trauma that had gone along with. When I’d had an epiphany of sorts and realized what I’d really needed was ultimate closure. And that ultimate closure could only be found in revenge and utter decimation of the bastard responsible for what had been done to me, Brianna, and the one other person who’d been there that she’d yet to talk about—her mom.

That last part was a tale for another day, though. When my Wildflower was ready.

The fact she hadn’t brought that part up once since we’d been reunited had made it abundantly clear to me that she either really wasn’t ready at all, or that she was still stuck in some major denial when it came to that aspect of what had happened. Maybe both.

Even with all of that in play, there was an even greater reason why I didn’t want to go the route of full disclosure to Mason.

Since I was seventeen, for the last four years, I’d been building on my skills—what laymen called hacking, as well as my tactical know-how, and combat experience—all in the name of tracking down that motherfucker, Malcolm Lynch, and ending his sick and twisted life in the most painful way imaginable.

The guy had been underground all this time. It was why Brianna thought he was dead, why my dad did as well, why her dad did. But a few months before I’d left for a year for a supposed internship, I’d finally received intel confirming he was alive. For the last year, my internship had all been a manufactured façade that I’d used my skills to maintain, when really I’d been out there traveling and tracking every single whisper concerning Lynch. I’d managed to lay eyes on him once, which was a feat in itself, considering he’d gone to great lengths to maintain his ghost status. But he’d been surrounded by two dozen of his soldiers-for-hire at the time. I couldn’t take him and bolting into the fray would have exposed me with nothing to show for it. So I’d had to walk away. When I’d gone back with a force at my back, thanks to Sammy, the fucker and his people had already moved on. They were always on the move. Whenever I’d moved on chatter after that, they’d been gone each time I’d arrived.

It was why I’d come back here. I’d been aware that Brianna had come to Stonewell, but I’d wanted to see to Lynch before approaching her, so I’d made myself hold off.

But with the walls I’d kept slamming up against, I’d decided to come back to work with her to find him and the new organization he was building.

Unfortunately, all I’d found in her had been more walls. Denial. Reinvention. Her running from the past and not being willing to face it.

I’d managed to crack that now and she was with me, she wanted us to heal together.

She even believed that healing would partly require the kind of closure I’d been hell-bent on for years.

“They’re still with us because we never had closure.”

“They were punished.”

“It’s not enough, though, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“We didn’t get the opportunity to deal with them.”

“Even if I do acknowledge that disturbing claim to have some truth to it on my end too, the fact is that the… ringleader… he’s dead.”

The problem was, she was hesitant about it. And she’d only just come around enough to admit to what had happened, to the experience that we shared, and being able to be around me.

We’d only just connected and I didn’t want to risk that. It meant fucking everything to me.

So, yeah, I was stuck when it came to revealing the truth to Mason and Colt, as well as the last part of it to Brianna too.

I didn’t want her to run from me.

And I didn’t want Mason to get in my way, which he would absolutely do once he found out my true endgame here. He’d even bring in my dad and that powerhouse coming down on me would either end up forcing my hand away from my vengeance crusade, or it would lead to a war between the king and his heir.

So, there was only one thing to do right now.

Make a dent in Mason’s rapidly hardening armor before it became impossible to penetrate. He’d already grown Hex’s numbers beyond what both me and Colt had expected in such a short time. I’d seen Mason getting into it that day in the locker room, but the power had gone to his head all too quickly. His desperation for control had fueled it in a completely dictatorial way that had touched me, Brianna, would soon touch Colt too, and had already infected the campus. If it continued unchecked, it wouldn’t be long before it spread through the town of Stonewell too and hit Sammy and my connections. The fuck I would allow that to happen. It would fuck up everything.

Mason fucking Hall needed bringing down a peg—or several—for the good of us all, including him. Most especially him. He wouldn’t be able to stop on his own, we’d seen this from him a couple of times before. Nah, it required interference.

And in this specific case, a show of force.

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