Page 145 of They Break Beauty

I nodded. “There wasn’t a lot of freedom back then. As club princess, it was all about being secured and protected, pushed off to the sidelines and kept away from everything. I was basically a porcelain doll to them all.”

“And your biker boyfriend? You weren’t free with him?”

“Not really. It wasn’t like that. He was my assigned protection and also the first person I saw when my dad and Levi’s dad raided that hellhole we were being held in. So, the relationship started from a messed-up place. I was in a messed-up place, and I was desperate to erase what had happened to me there. Tommy became the vehicle through which I did that—or tried to.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out and cupping my cheek in a tender way I never would have imagined from him a few days ago. But, as he’d shown me recently, and last night, Mason Hall was capable of a lot more than he let on.

I smiled up at him. “Your situation isn’t permanent either. Things changed for me because I fought like crazy to be able to leave all that behind, to come here and do what I wanted to do with my life, instead of working under my dad as an assistant or something in one of his small businesses.”

“I appreciate you saying that, but the time was right for you when you made those moves. For me, it’s a lot more complicated. My father sees to that.”

Realization hit me. “He has something on you, doesn’t he?”

He tensed, then eased his hand away, and slumped against one of the bookcases. “Something that I couldn’t just walk away from. Something that impacts Colt and Lev too.”

“What is it?”

“Revealing that would require a mass amount of trust.”

“I already know about Hex, how it works and even exactly who your members are.”

“My members? How?”

“When an enemy comes at you, it’s pertinent to gather all that you can on them.”

“Fuck me, why didn’t you say anything when Lev and I were having our peace talk and discussing Hex downstairs?”

“It could’ve been read as a threat. I didn’t want to destabilize our new truce. Now you’re talking about trust, though, I needed it to use as an example of what I’m already being trustworthy with. If I’d wanted to, I could have easily finished what Levi started and taken every single member out. The shower attack I only knew those members. And the frat infestations, I wasn’t sure who exactly among them were members, so it had a lot of collateral damage, displacing many, instead of the few I now know were members.”

“Jesus, that’s something else.”

I fixed my pink robe around me that was coming loose and winked at him. “I know.”

It took him a moment, but then he settled in against the bookcase and told me, “Five years ago, I was on track to becoming what I really wanted to be—a tattoo artist. And then something happened. Well, Levi Knight happened. He was sixteen at the time and it was one year after the kidnapping. He’d hid it well and we’d all thought that he’d moved past it and dealt with the trauma, but he hadn’t. Colt and I found it out the hard way. Lev had been sublimating by training hardcore in various forms of combat in secret.”

“So he could street fight?”

“No, this training… it was to kill.”

“Jeez.”

“Yeah. So, one night, Lev headed out to an abandoned mansion on the outskirts of the city. Colt followed him, unbeknownst to either of us at first, because he thought Lev was headed to a secret house party. Back then he used to get invited to everything, his whole mysterious vibe really making him popular, along with his father thrusting him into the public eye as his heir a lot—overcompensation for the kidnapping, we believed, with him wanting to reinforce the stability of the Knight empire.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “But it wasn’t a party. Lev had got a lock on an up-and-coming gang of drug dealers and rapists and he was using his rage and pain of his trauma and dialing it to violence, intending to beat the five of them down and dispense some frontier justice, and run them out of the city. Anyway, it didn’t exactly go to plan. Lev hesitated when he found Colt there. But it was too late to back out when the guys came at them. I’d been tracking Colt’s strange movements with our friend GPS app he and I had. I arrived to a bloodbath. The enemy’s. Lev was tearing into them like a madman, roaring and growling like an animal. One of them had ripped off Lev’s balaclava, so it was too late, they’d seen his face. So the bloodbath escalated to a whole lot more. Between us, Lev and I murdered the five of them, while Colt went into shock on the sidelines. In the middle of it, I got shot.” He gestured to the scar in his right shoulder. “That scar over Lev’s abs was him taking a bullet that night too.”

“Oh my God,” I breathed.

“After that, Roman and my father worked together to cover it up. My father has used it to control me ever since. I had to give up my tattoo artist career and go into Law as he’d wanted. He kept evidence of that night as a threat that constantly hangs over my head if I fall out of line. Lev has tried to get to it before, but it’s not kept on any of the Honor Hall Law servers. It’s a physical tape of that night from the security system the guys had installed at the house.”

I frowned. “So, what would he do if you did fall out of line? Release it? How would that help him if his son is taken down?”

“He’d disown me. As long as I do what I’m told and I’m useful to him, I’m his son, and his heir apparent. I don’t and he’ll have no use for me… he’ll burn me.”

“Fuck,” I choked. “That’s demented.”

“No arguments here. But it’s also my reality.”

That explained the full extent of why things were so antagonistic between him and Levi.

Wow.

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