Page 170 of Loyalty

“I don’t have to do fucking anything!”

Lucian stepped forward at John’s rage, but all he saw was a threat coming at him. One that was meant to hold him back, and stop him from finishing what had started decades and decades before.

They would lock him in.

They would hold him back.

He needed to do this.

They wouldn’t understand.

The second Lucian grabbed ahold of John, he snapped. What control he had over himself was gone. It had already been holding on by a thin thread as it was. He shoved his father hard, and didn’t even feel the slightest flicker of guilt when Lucian slammed into the kitchen island.

He heard his mother’s gasp, and his father’s curse.

Still, he knew what he had to do.

The clock was still ticking.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Counting down …

John grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair before he darted past his mother in the entryway. Her shout echoed from behind him. His father’s footsteps reverberated down the hall.

Lucian wasn’t fast enough. He had never been able to catch John once his son made the choice to run.

John snatched the keys from the glass bowl on the table near the front door. Keys for a black Mercedes SUV belonging to his father. It wouldn’t be the first time John had stolen one of his father’s cars.

“John!”

The front door slammed behind him. He didn’t even feel the cold wind as it wrapped around him. Inside, he was a fire burning out of control.

A raging devastation ready to ruin.

John was already pulling out of the driveway by the time his father had come out of the house. In the rearview mirror, he saw Lucian toss his hands up high. Exhaustion and wariness stared back in his father’s eyes.

He knew that look well.

This could be a tiring state.

John was tiring.

The lights of the highway bled together. Like a scene from a fast-moving movie, it felt just as surreal.

John pulled the phone from his pocket, and turned the device on for the first time in he didn’t know how long.

Too long.

He dialed a number. One he would have never called otherwise.

The man answered cheerfully. Like he had everything to be happy about.

“You said I could talk,” John said into the phone. “Whenever, right?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

SIENA’S GAZE drifted between the screen in front of her, and Kev sitting across the desk. Something on her brother’s phone had become extremely interesting to him, but she didn’t know what exactly it was.