Page 11 of Savage Cravings

I felt energized.

I washed my hands in the kitchen sink, the memories flashing in and out of my mind. I was sure it was from being back here after all these years.

All the bad memories—and there were a lot of those—mingled in with the good.

My thoughts drifted as I watched the water turn from red to pink, draining Hayes’ blood away from my hands.

All the men loyal to Daniel were dead—at least, those who hadn’t been lucky enough to escape our wrath. Those who’d left, or weren’t present during the massacre, hopefully received the message and would do the smart thing and stay the fuck out of our business. Those who weren’t here tonight didn’t have enough manpower to resurrect this club back to life.

If I had to personally hunt down every single one of the fuckers, I would, but I wouldn’t fucking like it. I’d live up to my good name as the Tiernan Savage.

My men were taking stock of all the bodies around, seeing if we could identify at least some of the high-ranking men of the club.

I never thought taking out these fuckers would be hard.

And it wasn’t.

The hard part was what came next.

Taking back control of my territory.

The Heartless Saints MC controlled a lot of the drug trade—mostly narcotics—spanning from the East to the West. They even owned the biggest and strongest arms deals transport in the Midwest. But I had been keeping track of Hayes for a while now. Things weren’t going well. The club was in fucking deep shit and a ton of debt.

It would be like starting fucking over.

It would have been easier to set up a base elsewhere and expand out to this territory slowly, but taking back the name was a matter of principle.

This empire was fucking mine.

“Hey, Maverick?” I turned to find Killian standing by the stairs. A shadow crossed over his eyes. “You might want to see what I found.”

“What, more dead bodies?” Silas joked as he sauntered into the kitchen. Showed where my mind had fucking been that I hadn’t heard either one of my brothers coming into the kitchen.

“If only,” Killian said. I raised an eyebrow at him. Now my curiosity was piqued.

Silas and I climbed the stairs after him.

He led us into the master bedroom.

This was the room our old man had shared with our mom, before the fucker went crazy and killed her in cold blood.

I had been the one to find her.

He had wanted me to find her.

A lesson, he had said.

What a fucking lesson that was.

At thirteen, I had been old enough to know about the kind of family I came from, no matter how hard our soft-hearted mom had tried to shield us.

But it was something else entirely to find the person who had always protected you dead in the most gruesome way imaginable.

The image of her—bloody and in bed, her eyes open and staring up at the ceiling in terror—was scorched into my memory.

I shook it away and looked around.

I didn’t think I had been back in this room since the day I found her, but of course, we were forced to leave when I was only sixteen.

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