Page 72 of We Will Rise

I swallow down the cry that tries to escape. “That’s rich coming from the guy that whored his girlfriend out to distract his family,” I say calmly.

He turns on his heel and glares at me, the anger in his dark eyes palpable even from across the room. Just as I expected him to, he stalks toward me, his hands fisted at his sides, but I hold his gaze.

I’m not going to cower to a man like him.

His fist sails into my face, but the pain isn’t immediate. It’s slow as it vibrates through my cheek, and I swallow past the cry that tries to escape.

I refuse to give him the satisfaction.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

KAOS

Ipace restlessly through the apartment, my entire body screaming at me to do something, but we’ve been ordered to stay put.

I don’t remember ever appointing Wyatt guardian of the Syndicate if something happened to Crew, and yet when he barked down the phone at us, none of us went against him.

He did promise to find them, I suppose. And he did say that us running around half-cocked would only make it harder for him to do that.

“You’re making me dizzy,” Bishop groans as he leans back on the couch. He’s been on the phone for the last hour trying to follow any leads we can, but there’s nothing. It’s like Camilla and Crew disappeared into thin air.

All we know so far is that Rogers betrayed us, which I think we probably should have seen coming, if I’m honest. He knew Caleb, and out of us, Caleb probably gave him the least work to do. But more than that, money talks, and Rogers has always been an opportunist.

“I can’t just sit around doing nothing,” I growl.

He sighs and hangs his head. I can’t tell which of us is handling this the worst. Kovu did exactly as Kovu does and destroyed two rooms of the apartment with his bare hands, right down to throwing a chair into a wall so hard it’s now lodged in the drywall.

Bishop went into work mode and has been almost too calm, something that tells me he’s close to the edge.

And I can’t sit still. The dread that washes over me every time I think about Camilla at the hands of my dad, of losing Crew to the man who betrayed us, has made me sick to my stomach.

“We’re not doing nothing, K. We’re waiting for our next steps.”

“Sitting around doing nothing,” I repeat.

Bishop runs his hands down his face and lets out a frustrated huff. “I need you to hold it together, Kaos. Kovu is already losing his shit, I’m doing everything humanly possible to figure out where they are, and I can’t be chasing you across the city if you decide you’re going to take matters into your own hands. We need to stay calm. We need to wait for Wyatt to give us a lead. And we need to hold it together until we have them back.” His voice cracks as the final words leave his mouth, and it’s only now I notice the tears in his eyes.

We are not men who cry, especially not around one another. But this show of emotion is enough to tell me he needs me to be strong right now, just like I need him to run point, and Kovu needs both of us to stop him from hurting himself.

I give him a single nod and stalk from the room to find my best friend. The last I saw him, he was in the makeshift gym we had installed in the apartment in case we were stuck here for any extended amount of time. It’s nothing special. Just a punching bag, a treadmill, and some free weights, but it’s enough to tide us over while we’re here.

I find Kovu crouched in the corner, his chest heaving so hard it’s as if he’s just run a marathon. His fists are bloody and torn, and his usually wild blue eyes are more animal than they are human.

I don’t know how we’ve kept him within these four walls for the last five hours, but I have a feeling if we don’t get a lead soon, he’s going to throw the whole wait-and-see plan out the window and start killing people until he gets answers.

“Kovu?” I say as I carefully cross the room toward him. When he first lost it, I got a bedside table thrown at me for getting too close, so I’d rather now repeat that in a room full of dumbbells.

“Unless you have information, fuck off,” he growls.

I sigh and stop a handful of feet from him, carefully dropping to my knees a safe distance from my unpredictable best friend. “We’ll bring them home.”

“You don’t know that,” he snaps.

He’s right. I don’t, but I have to believe that this morning when we were woken up and forced out of our home wasn’t the last time I saw my uncle and our girl.

“Do you think Crew won’t fight like hell to get Camilla away from Caleb? Do you think our badass woman won’t go to the end of fucking earth to come home to us? Hasn’t she proven over and over how capable she is? How much she can handle?” I ask, but it’s not really a question because we both know Camilla is a survivor. From the very first day she’s shown us that, and now more than ever we need to believe it.

He glares at me but doesn’t open his mouth to argue, which means he knows I’m right.

---