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I didn’t look back, but I heard them dragging him across the driveway. My hand shook slightly as I found a cigarette in the console and lit it. My head fell back. Head buzzing, I pulled in the smoke and held it.
The world was quiet save for the soft pleading in the back seat, muffled by the hood.
The stars glinted in the velvety darkness overhead.
In that moment, I wished I could turn back time and pick a different path. I wished I could rage at Daphne, to beg her for answers, plead with her to tell me why she’d put me on this path.
Why had she told a young boy he was destined for greatness?
Because this…this wasn’t greatness.
This was just fucking pain.
Back at the warehouse, I stripped off my shirt as Caden and Yale hauled Osian into the basement and strapped him to a chair. Securing his hands behind his back. He was soaked in sweat, shivering. The whites of his eyes bloodshot.
I knelt on one knee before him and he dragged his gaze to mine. His lips cracked open.
“Please,” he whispered.
“Have you ever fucked any organization women?” I asked.
His chest heaved, stuck to his shirt. He nodded once.
“How many?”
“Three,” he croaked.
I reached up and tilted his chin, making him look me full in the face. “And did you put your hands on them too?”
He shuddered and his jaw gritted.
“Silence is a yes, so pick your words,” I warned.
“Not all,” he snapped. He spat at me, catching me in the jaw.
I wiped it off.
“There is one thing I can’t fucking stand,” I said evenly. “And it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
His head lolled to the side. “Like your hands are so fucking clean,” he panted. “You fucking murdered twelve people just to be Brenin, you sick fuck. Scales of justice, protector of the weak, my ass.”
“Twelve is alright,” I said. “But thirteen is my lucky number.”
I beat him to death with my bare hands. I needed to feel the life slip from him. Yale and Caden stood there in the shadows, eyes down, until it was done. My knuckles split and blood spattered over my naked torso. Pain blurred and rushed up my spine, making my skull buzz.
I swore that in the middle of it, he looked at me out of Edwin’s eyes.
But that couldn’t be.
I drove home, my split knuckles on the steering wheel leaking blood. I’d found answers in the echo of Rhys Cardiff’s scream out into the night as I pushed his son’s body onto the dirt at his feet. I found them in the blood that covered my forearms and the ravaged flesh on my knuckles.
Daphne hadn’t put me on this path to destroy me, she’d done it to contain the man I would become.
She was a kingmaker and she’d made me king to protect the world from my darkness. Because she trusted my ability to control my anger and my bloodlust, because she knew I could take on the burden of standing between the darkness and the people I loved. Because punishment was the devil’s work.
Because she knew this world was no place for weak men.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
