Page 1 of Savage Secrets (Vigilante Kings)

CHAPTERONE

Madelyn

You could say it was a midnight snack that led to my broken heart.

Normally I wasn’t even the late-night-snacker type. I liked sleep too much. But I’d been working for hours getting the last of my end-of-term essays written—the last essay I’deverwrite before my final high school exams—and I still had at least another page to go. That called for some fortification.

Both Mom and my stepdad, Holand, slept like the dead, but I slipped down the stairs quietly just in case. As I opened the fridge and let the eerie artificial glow spill over me, for just a moment I flashed back to a time more than ten years ago, when I’d woken up ravenous after a bout with the flu and Dad had snuck me downstairs to make me a PB&J sandwich.

He’d probably be making me one now to get me through this essay… if he’d still been alive to do it.

I swallowed down the pang of loss that’d faded but never disappeared and reached for the fruit drawer. I’d just started to open it when the back door rattled.

With a hitch of my pulse, I straightened up and shut the fridge. The room fell into darkness. Only a thin haze of light seeped in from the streetlamps glowing beyond the kitchen window.From where I was standing, I couldn’t see into the mudroom at the back of the house at all.

The deadbolt in the door clicked over. Whoever was there had a key. My mind scrambled for an explanation, knowing both my mom and Holand were upstairs. Unless one of them had ducked out without me noticing while I’d been grinding away at my essay? But why would they come in through thebackdoor?

The fact that whoever it was seemed to have a legitimate means of entry was the only thing that kept me from jabbing 9-1-1 into my phone. I stood here stiffly, my hand creeping across the counter to the knife block. As careful footsteps padded inside, I curled my fingers around the handle of the chef’s knife.

The cleaver was bigger, but I wasn’t confident I could stab someone with that rectangular hunk of metal. Pointy seemed like a safer bet.

The basement stairs creaked faintly. I frowned. Who would sneak into our house just to go down there? The basement only held the laundry room, a storage room stacked with bins of nothing more valuable than dusty Christmas decorations, and the second bathroom.

After a moment, the hiss of running water reached my ears. Bathroom, then. My stance relaxed a little.

It couldn’t be a homicidal psycho, right? A murderous lunatic wouldn’t break into people’s houses just to use the facilities.

And whoever it was hadn’t actually broken in.

Still clutching the knife but lowering it to my side, I slunk across the kitchen, through the mudroom, and down the steps to the basement. The cooler underground air raised goosebumps on my arms, and I wished I hadn’t already changed into the tank top and lounge pants I’d be sleeping in.

The sound of the water was loud enough to cover my approach. The possible intruder gave no sign that they’d realized they’d been noticed. The bathroom door stood an inch ajar, bright light spilling through the gap. Just as I walked up to it to peek inside, the person on the other side stepped right in front of that space.

He appeared so abruptly that a squeak of shock burst out of me even though I’d recognized the figure on the other side and knew he wasn’t any threat. At least, not in the criminal sort of way.

The tap running water couldn’t cover my yelp. Before I could retreat—if I’d wanted to retreat, which I hadn’t had time to decide—the door flew open.

Logan Brooks, Holand’s son and my stepbrother of three years, stood on the other side. He blinked at me, his forehead furrowing.

It was a nice forehead, broad and topped with tufts of dusky brown hair. Even nicer were those startled eyes, a lighter brown so bright they were almost gold. And that was without getting into the body beneath his chiseled face, tall and filled out with generous brawn across the chest and shoulders, tapering to a toned waist.

Okay, so Logan looked a hell of a lot more than justnice. He’d probably featured in the steamy daydreams of at least half the female student body at our high school. Seeing him sent a flush through all kinds of places on my own body.

“I—I’m sorry,” I said, even as I realized that it was ridiculous to be apologizing for sneaking up on someone who’d just finished sneaking into a house where I lived and he no longer did. “I didn’t know it was you.”

Logan had moved out last summer, a month before he’d started college. He’d said he’d needed time to get settled into his new digs before classes started. But even though the college was only a two-hour drive away, this was the first time he’d come home—to what had used to be his home, for a couple of years anyway—since then. I hadn’t seen him at all except for a brief appearance he’d made during the Christmas get-together with Holand’s side of the family at his grandparents’ house. One second he’d been grabbing a turkey leg, the next he’d vanished again.

It bothered his dad. I knew it did. Holand tried not to talk about parenting stuff with Mom around me, but I’d noticed the dejected slant of his shoulders when one relative or another would ask what Logan was up to these days. And now the prodigal son was finally stopping by for a visit… in the middle of the night… so he could do a little washing up?

The thought of why he was here had just started to penetrate my initial surprise when Logan tipped his head toward the chef’s knife at my side with a ragged chuckle. “And whoever you figured it was, you were planning on slicing and dicing them?”

I would have shot some snarky remark back, except my brain had finally caught up enough to notice the parts of him thatweren’tall that nice at all. He’d been angling himself to the side, but his head had swiveled just enough for me to notice the bruise forming at the corner of his jaw and a small splotch of red on his light blue T-shirt.

My heart lurched, and I pushed forward, dropping the knife on the little table in the hall. Logan grabbed the door to block my way, but I caught it, already having seen as he swiveled more fully toward me that there was a heck of a lot more carnage than what I’d initially spotted.

He had a scrape running across his cheekbone. A thinner cut veered from the crook of his neck down toward the back of his shoulder with blood still beading along it. And his shirt didn’t just have a small splotch of what was obviously more blood. There were several larger smears and splatters across the right side, the side he’d been trying to hide from me.

He looked like someone had already been slicing and dicing him.

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