Page 8 of Malicious Pacts

“And I’m sorry for yours. Get some rest. You’re going to need it. I think they’re coming in here to make you walk soon.” She scrunched her face for a moment and then gave a small smile before turning and walking out with her partner.

“Oh, one more thing,” Detective Hauer said at the door. I raised my brows in response, and he continued. “Pastor Montgomery. He mentioned something about you being in danger. The doc said he could have been hallucinating from blood loss. Maybe he thought you were still in the church, but I wanted to make sure. Do you know anyone who would have a personal reason to hurt you?”

I looked at him with all the shock and confusion I could manage. “Me? Definitely not. I’m no one. I don’t have enemies or friends in high places. I just…exist. I can’t think of a single person who would care enough about me to even play a prank on me, let alone murder a church full of people with guns and explosives just to get to me.”

He nodded. “Okay. I kinda figured that but… had to ask.”

“I understand,” I replied, even though I didn’t.

I didn’t understand at all.

Why would Pastor Montgomery say something like that?

Who the hell would I have to be in danger from? Hopefully the good doctor was right. Hopefully it was just the blood loss talking and nothing else.

CHAPTER FOUR

DAMIAN

Vacationing alone wasn’t the worst, but after years of it, it got a little old. My friends, while loud and obnoxious, proved to be the cure for the monotony. They flew out to stay with me in my family’s Hawaiian vacation home for the last couple of weeks. After spending the previous four weeks drinking and fucking my way through the locals, I gotextremelybored, and I never fared well when bored.

Same thing day in and day out made Damian a very angry boy.

It was one of the reasons I hated summer. Dad and his wife were off doing whatever-the-fuck they do. My friends were off doing whatever-the-fuck they do with their own asshole parents, who were admittedly far less assholish than mine. Yeah, it was a real party.

Summer was almost half over, and it was time to head back. Every year we followed the same routine. First four weeks of summer was spent fucking off, last half working our asses off. Football season started at the beginning of the school year. First practice was even before the first day of classes, so we wanted to be ready.

Once we were boarded on the private jet, I sat in the back of the cabin, poured myself a glass of champagne, buckled in, and put my headphones on to drown out the walking bullhorns I called friends. And not a moment too soon, I realized, because all five of them piled onto the plane laughing and shoving each other.

The biggest of them, Everett, shoved my best friend Asher, which sent him stumbling into Trent. As expected, they all howled in laughter as they fell to the floor and predictably began beating the hell out of one another.

They managed to rock an entire fucking plane while acting like idiots, but I didn’t care. I had Five Finger Death Punch and probably the most expensive bottle of champagne available on the plane—compliments of Daddy Dearest.

Laughing and breathless, the trio scrambled to their feet as everyone parted and found their seats.

Asher smiled ear to ear, his long dark hair a mess as he looked at me. He said something, but the volume was too high for me to make it out. I pulled one of the large earpieces back and looked at him expectantly.

“You good, man?” he asked. Judging from the mouth movements, I assumed that was what he’d asked before.

I nodded. “As good as I can be with you noisy asses around.”

He laughed and shook his head. “Relax man. You’re the only asshole I know who needs a vacation from vacation.”

He wasn’t wrong. I shrugged. “As long as I’m predictable, then you all should know hownotto piss me off by now.”

I gave him a sarcastic smile and righted my noise-canceling headphones, signaling my departure from the conversation. His body shook a bit with a chuckle as he took his spot next to me across the aisle on the white leather sofa that spanned the length of the entire wall on the left side of the cabin. He’d only been seated for a second before he stood again and snatched my bottle of champagne.

Eying him with annoyance, I watched as he over-poured himself a glass before returning the bottle and reclaiming his seat. I grumbled under my breath and leaned my head back against the headrest, closing my eyes.

Asher was my best friend. We’d known one another since the fifth grade. We came from wildly different backgrounds, but that didn’t bother me at all. Despite what people thought, I wasn’t completely elitist. I was an asshole, but notthatbad of an asshole.

He’d grown up poor, but that changed when his father got an inheritance. That was how he ended up in California and in the same school I went to.

His grandparents came over from South Korea and had started a restaurant which eventually became an incredibly successful chain. After twenty years, his grandfather, Jong-woo, had completed business degrees and began thinking of moving toward a much larger opportunity: the medical industry.

He sold everything in his forties and invested in medical technology. When that exploded and he made an obscene amount of money, he used that to build a business that manufactured bottles for pharmaceutical companies as well as medical equipment. That was how my father knew their family.

Sebastian Wolfe, my father, owned Wolfe Pharmaceutical, so he worked with Jong-woo for years.

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