Page 38 of Claimed By the Billionaires

How was it possible?

Her curiosity and fascination about the Phoenix Warriors and her need to learn more about them were harshly silenced by her father, and she was forbidden from ever talking about them again.

He called them the greatest enemies of the Pegasus dynasty and, by association, the enemies of the Creer family as well. Her father’s hatred of them stemmed from history eons old between the Pegasus dynasty and the Phoenix Warriors. To say he loathed and despised them would have been putting it mildly.

He called them villains, drunks, violent thugs, and heartless monstrous scum of the earth. They were forced to live on the outskirts because they carried sickness and terror with them wherever they went. They stole and pillaged their way through life, and their eradication was the best thing that happened in history.

With genuine revulsion in his eyes, he told her how one Phoenix Warrior stole a Pegasus daughter from her father’s house and bred her, forever tainting the Pegasus bloodline.

Were these three men who touched her heart and soul descendants of the Phoenix Warriors?

Yet, all the signs were there all along. From day one. Touching her when they were only supposed to drink the milk from her breasts, and then rimming the goblets with the wetness from between her thighs. Those were not Pegasus virgin rituals. Not the ones she’d read and studied. She’d stupidly opted for silence instead of questioning them, but then again, no one questioned men like them, whether they were the Masters of Pegasus, the Phoenix Warriors, or none of the above.

Their power came from within, not from a title.

The butt plug they’d made her wear? Based on the brief glimpse, she assumed it was embellished with a pegasus because of the wings. In hindsight, she had seen a phoenix.

Their tattoos were all symbols of the phoenix.

But who were they? Why were they pretending to be masters of the Pegasus dynasty when nothing about them alluded to the fact that they belonged to the Pegasus dynasty?

“Do you want to hear a story, Winter?”

Konnor’s deep, rough, velvety voice broke through the mayhem in her head.

“For centuries, there’d always been four secret societies. But then there was also the Phoenix Warriors. These men were soldiers, assassins, and bodyguards for those secret societies. They did all the dirty work with no compensation. But one day, not more than forty years ago, a set of scrolls came to light, and in those scrolls was apparently documented the greatest love story of all time.

“You see, beyond centuries ago, maybe as old as time, there were still only four secret societies that ruled a quarter of the world each. They were the Leoni Family, the Basilisk Empire, Swan House, and the Phoenix Monarch.”

Winter’s brows settled in the center of her forehead. She’d spent half her life learning about these secret societies, and there was never anything about the Phoenix Monarch. She did learn everything there was to know about the Pegasus dynasty, though.

"The Phoenix Monarch was considered the richest and most powerful until they had a leader who fell blindly in love with a daughter from a poor but malicious family who went by the name Pegasus.

“He was so in love that in a moment of weakness, he gave the father of the girl he loved ownership of half of his land, half of his treasure, his life, and the Phoenix epithet, all in the name of love. Except the father was a greedy bastard, and together with his allies, the Creer family began a grand plot to overthrow the Phoenix Monarch and replace it with a Pegasus dynasty. Through deceit, greed, and lies, he succeeded in turning the girl against the man she once loved.

“After the fall of the people of the Phoenix Monarchy and after they’d lost everything, their people were forced into thievery and pillaging to survive. Over the years, they became what they are known for today: Soldiers, assassins, and bodyguards.

“But then those scrolls came to light about who the four secret societies actually were. And then those scrolls magically disappeared.

Burned to ashes.

“And so began an act of revenge on a scale so vast, so insidious, so cataclysmic, forty years in the making that the Pegasus dynasty would have their enemy sitting at their table, ruling their people, taking down their enemies, and no one suspected otherwise.

“We are those men, Winter. Sitting at their table, at the helm of their boardroom, worshiped and revered while we choked the life out of our foes one at a time.

“The Pegasus dynasty is our enemy; by association, their virgin family, the Creers, are our enemies too. When you consider the sudden death of your father’s best friend, William Spike…”

Oh, god.

She never understood why they asked her father about his friend. It was the oddest question in the world, but Uncle William worked for Pegasus as well. She wanted to start hyperventilating. They killed the man she had grown up knowing. They were making themselves known. Her father was next.

She had to try to escape them. She had to warn her father to leave the country. To take her mother and disappear.

But throughout her frantic thoughts, one dark thought shadowed her mind.

She’d fallen in love with them. She willingly gave her virginity to the three men who were going to kill her father out of revenge for being associated with the Pegasus dynasty.

“Please, I’m begging you. Please don’t hurt my father—”

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