Page 102 of Cruel Legacy

She doesn’t answer. She just winks at Finn and walks away. His hand clamps down on my shoulder, preventing me from going after her.

I look over at my friend, wondering why he’s okay with her walking away with this secret. “We need to bag it up and find out what she did. It could be poisoned.”

He shakes his head, dismissing my concern. “Only the best kind of poison.”

“You recognize the smell?” I reach out and check his pulse with one hand, pulling my phone out with the other to call 9-1-1.

“Oh yeah. It’s called Fragrance Du Pussy.”

My head whips around. “Huh?”

He’s got the biggest grin on his face when he says, “She wiped her pussy with my hat.”

Instead of shoving the damned thing in his pocket, he slips it back on his head, unrolling it so it’s a full mask, and wears it down for the rest of the night.

Chapter46

Deacon

Idisconnect my call and scrub my hand through my hair. I’ve been fielding calls for two weeks about new prospects for the guardianship program at MISTIC.

The League lost two guardian trainees in the past month. One to rehab, the other to pregnancy, and they’re desperate to replace them.

MISTIC has mandatory drug testing, so I have no idea how the guy showed clean all this time. I even heard him say he was set up and that there’s no way it wasn’t a clean sample.

As for the female candidate. There’s no mandatory birth control policy. That would sort of defeat the purpose of spawning the next generation of guardians, but the timing is less than ideal. Once she has the baby, she can restart training.

My relationship with The League of the Daggered Ravens is a complicated one. My family’s been involved with the organization since its inception.

There are two branches to the society. You have the legacies who run it, taking full advantage of all it has to offer. Then there are the families whose duty it is to protect the legacies as well as their assets, monetary and physical, at all costs, The Guardians.

Some guardians work their way through the government so they’ll be in a position to protect the legacy members who are politicians. Others become leaders in national defense, and then you have the basic body guard types. At any rate, a guardian’s family and descendants are all assigned to a legacy line. They protect each generation of that family until they die off or fail to take their place within The League.

That’s what happened to my family. The line we swore our allegiance to died off when my grandfather attended CFU. The heir died in a car accident.

My grandfather wasn’t officially assigned as the heir’s guardian yet and he wasn’t there when tragedy stuck, but he carried the weight of that accident for years.

It changed the trajectory of our family. With no line to protect, my grandfather went to work with a private security firm. My father joined the intel community. Me, I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

I was great at sports, and in high school, baseball had my heart. I thought I’d go pro, until I realized that what I loved was the physicality of working out, and admitted that I didn’t want to spend my life traveling for games, getting traded, making others rich.

I did my time in school, focused on health, nutrition, and body mechanics. Then, I discovered Mixed Martial Arts. I started training, started winning, and I never looked back.

Eventually, I realized I had a good eye for talent and started training others. I figured The League would leave me alone since all my time was spent helping people become better at beating the shit out of each other.

It turns out someone thinks that’s a useful skill set and now I’m here, tangled up with them, because opening a gym wasn’t cheap and there’s really no such thing as getting out of The League. I made a deal with them. Not that I had a choice.

I got to open my gym, and they agreed for the most part to leave me alone. All it cost me was a huge chunk of my soul. I’m a small fish in their pond and I’m happy they don’t force me to participate in the marriage games or whatever else the council comes up with to amuse themselves. But fringe living doesn’t mean invisible. The council has decided training others to be in top physical condition is a useful skill set and they’ve found a way to monetize it to their benefit.

The League is connected to sponsors for some of the biggest names in the boxing world and the UFC, and they help fund lots of fights around the world.

My Physical Enhancement classes help prepare students to face the grueling conditions of MISTIC.

At first, it was simple. Train the children of the guardian lines. But when enrollment at CFU started dwindling, when there were less male heirs from guardian families to tap for protective details, they decided all MISTIC students and lower legacy families could do the job. With no real power or contribution to the council, those families are expendable.

Protecting the top of the food chain is imperative. Every student I push towards MISTIC is just one more person who’ll never get the chance to decide what they want for themselves. I guess that’s true of all league members.

I laugh to myself. The kids on campus think they’re such hot shit, pledging fraternities and sororities, going through their little challenges. They have no idea that the little tasks they’re given don’t even come close to the things they’ll be expected to do when they progress from Wren to Sparrow, which is the next level in The League.

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