Page 5 of Cruel Crown

“When you are a woman, everything is a weapon. The way you sway your hips, talk, smile, and laugh. How you smell, and how you say things. Use every weapon you have, and use it to kill.” Yeah, my mother and I had one fucked-up relationship. The older I got, the more she would see me as competition.

My father said my beauty was starting to surpass hers, and she hated it—as did I.

“What are you still doing in bed? I told you last night you needed to get ready; we have a special visitor today.” She said it like I had a choice to comply with her request.

If she wasn’t my mother and if she hadn’t trained me, then I would believe she actually cared about my feelings. My eyes remained blank, with no emotions on my pale face. I looked calm and collected, but on the inside, I was raging. I wanted to beg someone to get me out of this hellhole.

My babushka was no longer here to protect me, not that she could really interfere. Besides being a founding member, she had to play politics, and some things, she wasn’t able to do on her own. Unfortunately, I was one of those things. Even if she would have helped me, there was nowhere on this green earth we could hide from the Sekt. She knew it, and so did I.

Sekten was part of my family’s legacy. Something that could have been great had it not been for men like my father. Power blinds and corrupts you. Power turns your moral compass upside down.

My father was a mercenary who fell in love with the power my mother had. He craved it, and she wanted him—the first person to probably show her affection. She latched onto that so-called love. When you are deprived of affection, you will do anything to hold on to it once you get a taste. I thought he cared for my family, but he fell in love with power—the power the Sekt’s founding members had. Little by little, Sekten changed. Sekten grew under my parents, but it also deviated from what it was meant to be. The change happened slowly. Rankings were shifting, alliances flipping. By the time people noticed, my father held too much power for them to turn against him.

I looked at my mother and smiled at her.

“Give me ten minutes and I’ll be downstairs.” As soon as the door closed, I did what I did every morning. I searched my room for hidden bugs; I didn’t trust my family since my grandmother’s untimely death. I became a lone wolf in my family’s pack. Once I was sure there was none, I started to get ready.

Already knowing what was expected of me, I grabbed a navy blue gown that had a deep V at the front and a long slit on my left side. The dress was far too revealing for a sixteen-year-old, but I knew this was what my mother meant when she mentioned for me to get ready.

I made my way downstairs feeling uncomfortable since I wasn’t allowed to wear undergarments to these types of meetings. The castle was cold since the only way it got heated was from lighting the chimneys. The portable heaters worked great in the rooms, but in the halls, with the stone halls, it was a bitch.

“Don’t you look ravishing!”

I stopped abruptly and looked up, my eyes meeting Damian’s, as he gave me a cruel smile. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt and had bear fur wrapped around him for warmth.

From a young age, I learned that he couldn’t be trusted. We were cut from the same cloth, yet there was something that set us apart. He had a dick and I had a pussy. He was a king and I was a pawn. Monsters weren’t born; they were made, and they made us into two different demons.

“Do you know who is accompanying us for breakfast?” I forcefully made my voice sound meek. He was so arrogant he probably thought I was afraid of him. We rounded the hall together; but his answer didn’t lessen my nerves.

“You’re finally going to get the independence you’ve always craved, my sweet a—”

I woke when a scream pierced the air. Honestly, I was expecting her to wake up sooner. We were due to arrive in about an hour. I hated long flights. The feeling of being caged made me want to crawl out of my damn skin.

Grabbing the drink I had left next to me, I finished it, ignoring how it tasted disgustingly warm. When I stood, I took off my weapons and left them on the seat. Captive people became rabid, and they gave it their all when they attacked you since they had nothing left to lose.

I had training, and she didn’t. If it came down to her or me, I would not hesitate to end her life. Before I walked inside the door, I took a deep breath, preparing myself for her hate and accusations. She would never know we had a lot in common when it came down to it. We were both heiresses to different thrones, but both stood in a graveyard of bones with rivers of blood running through them.

When I opened the door, she came at me like a fucking cat, screaming and scratching.

She was weak, and I was not. I hated myself a little when I brought my knee up and kicked her in the stomach. Then I pushed her back, and her back hit the edge of the bed and she slid down to the floor with a defeated cry.

Rebeca Estacado. She was the older of the only two females that hailed from the Estacado line. She was the easier one to kidnap. Franco Estacado was more than mafia, more than arms and drug dealers. He took his parents’ small kingdom, and along with his brothers, he grew it into an empire.

People weren’t crazy enough to try and steal from under his ruling. But the Sekt weren’t just anybody, and the Colombians and Mexicans wanted the whole pie to themselves.

That was the problem with the world—everyone wanted to be a king. It was getting fucking overcrowded at the top, or should I say at the bottom since the underground was running out of space for men who wanted a crown.

“Devi calmarti,” I told her in her native tongue. People found comfort in things that were familiar to them.

She hugged her knees to her chest, her lips trembling and her body shaking. Two weeks. She had been missing for two weeks, and the jungle had not been kind to her.

I looked down at her, and this was the part where I should have felt some remorse, yet I felt none. Damian and I planned the trip to Colombia down to every little detail. Hours of us going over every scenario that could go wrong.

“We can’t be the ones to take the girl,” I told Damian, “and neither can the cartel because that would start a war.”

He sat at a desk that had belonged to Tsar Nicholas II, a desk fit for a king. He leaned back and put his Hermès loafers on the old wooden surface. “What is it that you suggest we do?”

We might hate each other, might plot ways of bringing the other down, but when it came down to it, we were both Sekten through and through, and in moments like this, we were allies and not enemies—just for now.

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