21. ~Levi~

21

~Levi~

She wanted me to reveal the twisted truth.

For six years, my brothers had believed that I'd been held alone when I'd been kidnapped that day as a fifteen-year-old clueless kid on my way home from our hoity-toity private school. The town car I'd been traveling back home to the Knight family home in had been run off the road. The ordeal had begun with the first hit of trauma when the driver's door had been thrown open and my driver had been shot through the skull, his blood and brain matter spraying all over the seats and me.

Little had I known at the time, but that had only been the beginning.

Per a deal that Roman Knight had struck with Brianna's father, Curt Walker, the fact that Brianna had been taken too that same day across our mutual home city of Tolhurst had been kept a secret. As had my kidnapping. It wasn't public knowledge. But Colt and Mason knew because they'd been in the car behind me and seen me being taken.

Both Roman and Curt hadn't wanted it to get out, because it would have been seen as a weakness by the many other enemies they'd shared at the time that somebody had actually been able to get at their children. Worse, that the particular somebody had managed to keep them in captivity for two whole weeks before those two dangerous powerhouses had found us.

There were many reasons why I'd never spoken about it—outside of to my father—in all these years. Obviously, one of the main reasons was that I hadn't wanted to relive it in vivid detail like talking about it would have caused. The nightmares were bad enough and came too close to that as it was. Another reason was that I'd wanted to keep my memories of the one bright spark that had been there through all that pitch-black—Brianna Walker. I hadn't wanted to share that—her—with anyone. And then there'd been the two-year period where I'd tried to let it all go, to bury it beneath a shit-ton of other things, which had resulted in what my dad had called a whole lot of acting out . Fortunately, that had all been put down to teenage rebellion. But the worst of it had really ended when I'd stopped trying to bury it, to put those two weeks of torment behind me and all the trauma that had gone along with. When I'd had an epiphany of sorts and realized what I'd really needed was ultimate closure. And that ultimate closure could only be found in revenge and utter decimation of the bastard responsible for what had been done to me, Brianna, and the one other person who'd been there that she'd yet to talk about—her mom.

That last part was a tale for another day, though. When my Wildflower was ready.

The fact she hadn't brought that part up once since we'd been reunited had made it abundantly clear to me that she either really wasn't ready at all, or that she was still stuck in some major denial when it came to that aspect of what had happened. Maybe both.

Even with all of that in play, there was an even greater reason why I didn't want to go the route of full disclosure to Mason.

Since I was seventeen, for the last four years, I'd been building on my skills—what laymen called hacking, as well as my tactical know-how, and combat experience—all in the name of tracking down that motherfucker, Malcolm Lynch, and ending his sick and twisted life in the most painful way imaginable.

The guy had been underground all this time. It was why Brianna thought he was dead, why my dad did as well, why her dad did. But a few months before I'd left for a year for a supposed internship, I'd finally received intel confirming he was alive. For the last year, my internship had all been a manufactured fa?ade that I'd used my skills to maintain, when really I'd been out there traveling and tracking every single whisper concerning Lynch. I'd managed to lay eyes on him once, which was a feat in itself, considering he'd gone to great lengths to maintain his ghost status. But he'd been surrounded by two dozen of his soldiers-for-hire at the time. I couldn't take him and bolting into the fray would have exposed me with nothing to show for it. So I'd had to walk away. When I'd gone back with a force at my back, thanks to Sammy, the fucker and his people had already moved on. They were always on the move. Whenever I'd moved on chatter after that, they'd been gone each time I'd arrived.

It was why I'd come back here. I'd been aware that Brianna had come to Stonewell, but I'd wanted to see to Lynch before approaching her, so I'd made myself hold off.

But with the walls I'd kept slamming up against, I'd decided to come back to work with her to find him and the new organization he was building.

Unfortunately, all I'd found in her had been more walls. Denial. Reinvention. Her running from the past and not being willing to face it.

I'd managed to crack that now and she was with me, she wanted us to heal together.

She even believed that healing would partly require the kind of closure I'd been hell-bent on for years.

"They're still with us because we never had closure."

"They were punished."

"It's not enough, though, is it?"

"I don't know."

"We didn't get the opportunity to deal with them."

"Even if I do acknowledge that disturbing claim to have some truth to it on my end too, the fact is that the… ringleader… he's dead."

The problem was, she was hesitant about it. And she'd only just come around enough to admit to what had happened, to the experience that we shared, and being able to be around me.

We'd only just connected and I didn't want to risk that. It meant fucking everything to me.

So, yeah, I was stuck when it came to revealing the truth to Mason and Colt, as well as the last part of it to Brianna too.

I didn't want her to run from me.

And I didn't want Mason to get in my way, which he would absolutely do once he found out my true endgame here. He'd even bring in my dad and that powerhouse coming down on me would either end up forcing my hand away from my vengeance crusade, or it would lead to a war between the king and his heir.

So, there was only one thing to do right now.

Make a dent in Mason's rapidly hardening armor before it became impossible to penetrate. He'd already grown Hex's numbers beyond what both me and Colt had expected in such a short time. I'd seen Mason getting into it that day in the locker room, but the power had gone to his head all too quickly. His desperation for control had fueled it in a completely dictatorial way that had touched me, Brianna, would soon touch Colt too, and had already infected the campus. If it continued unchecked, it wouldn't be long before it spread through the town of Stonewell too and hit Sammy and my connections. The fuck I would allow that to happen. It would fuck up everything.

Mason fucking Hall needed bringing down a peg—or several—for the good of us all, including him. Most especially him. He wouldn't be able to stop on his own, we'd seen this from him a couple of times before. Nah, it required interference.

And in this specific case, a show of force.

Fortunately, that was one of my many talents.

Using a prototype that I'd borrowed from my dad's company just before I'd left for my fake internship, I'd managed to use its highly-advanced thermal imaging capabilities to determine the precise location of the ten frat boys within the farmhouse in the distance.

After Brianna's infestation strike against three of the houses, a bunch of the residents had been staying with the other frats until the houses were sanitized, but Mason had put his soldiers up here in an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of Stonewell. Actually, I'd initially thought it had been abandoned, but as I'd tracked down where Mason had put some of his Hex members, I'd discovered that he'd actually bought this place while I'd been away. Why, I had no clue. It wasn't as though he'd planned to revive Hex in this way before I'd come back and insisted upon it.

Or, had he?

The guy certainly played things close to the vest. I'd wanted him to restart Hex to keep him busy and off my back with what I had in the works, and also as a way to draw on more resources should I need them down the road. Instead, though, he'd gone a completely different way with it since he'd taken power.

As for the football players he'd taken on as his Hex soldiers, some were still in the hospital being treated for the burns they'd sustained from Brianna's hit, and the others were in special on- campus housing—too difficult to get at when they were home. I had to wait for an opportunity there.

There were also another dozen on the list I'd copied from Mason of his recruits, but they were students scattered all over—some living in campus housing, some off-campus and in the town, and a few even commuting the fifty miles from here to the City of Tolhurst. Again, more complicated to get at. That would require some manipulation on my part to have them convene in a single area. If I'd known about that meeting Mason had called last night, that would've been the perfect time and circumstance to strike. As it was, I hadn't, and now I had to wait, or create another opportunity.

If I absolutely had to.

I was hoping what I was about to do here would be enough of a blow to Mason to function as an unavoidable wakeup call. For him to see fucking sense.

I made my way through the brush, the blanket of night making it easy for me to blend into the shadows. Spinning my collapsible bo-staff around, I headed toward my first set of targets. The four frat boys I'd been able to see with my imaging device through the empty barn. They were twenty feet from it sitting around a fire pit in lawn chairs and drinking the cheap beer they were so fond of.

Two others were to the right in the main farmhouse building in the kitchen sitting around an island and having an apparent midnight snack. The remaining four were upstairs asleep, two to a room in bunk beds.

As I reached my first targets, the four of them were laughing and joking around and talking about how lucrative being members of Hex was, the cache it afforded them.

Not tonight, boys.

The fools were so relaxed, thinking they were untouchable now that they didn't even notice me when I was right upon them.

I twisted my bo-staff and it extended to double its length.

And then I jabbed it into the lower back of one of the guys sitting around the fire.

The force of it had him crying out and hurtling off the chair, landing on the grass just inches from the flames.

As he scrambled to get back to his feet, stumbling from the mild damage I'd done to his back, the other three shot from their chairs and spun to face me.

"Knight, what the hell?" one of them cried, taking in me wielding a weapon and the dark, unforgiving look in my eyes.

"You came at what's mine."

"We had orders!"

"Stand down now and walk away then."

"We can't do that. Hex members don't balk."

Heading down here tonight to inflict damage had ramped up my bloodlust, so that sick and depraved part of me was really fucking happy to hear that they were gonna go the fight route.

I stepped forward and readied my staff. "Then it's time for a reckoning, fuckers."

As they hesitated, trying to process what was happening, the brutal reality cutting into their reverie, I took advantage of their slow reactions and processing abilities, and swept my staff at the back of the closest one's legs, ripping him off his feet.

As he hit the ground on his ass, the other three launched themselves at me.

Adrenaline tore through me in the most glorious way, fueling everything and firing me up to deliver punishment and spill their goddamn blood.

I spun my staff, clocking one across the side of the head, and knocking him back as he struggled from the disorientation of the injury. Not breaking my spinning momentum, I jabbed another in the ribs, hearing a distinct crack and a corresponding wheeze from the fucker confirming I'd hit my target. With an upswing, I smashed the end of the staff into the underside of the other guy's chin. His head snapped back and he stumbled back several feet.

I finished off one of the fallen guys with a blow to the side of the head, knocking him out cold. Then, I thrust my boot into the ribs of the guy I'd already done damage there to and he stayed down incapacitated, clutching himself and wheezing.

One of the two remaining, snatched my staff, while the other tried to come at me from behind in another sneak attack. Not much of a sneak attack when the guy had no stealth to speak of, but whatever.

I yanked on the staff, sliding it under my arm and taking the guy who had hold of it with the jerky movement. He slammed into me and I held fast at the impact, then yanked him around and snagged him in a chokehold with the staff to his throat.

As he flailed and struggled, the final guy came at me. I dodged a kick to the ass—literally—then threw his buddy's weight in my hold around, smashing into him. As he staggered from it, I swept my boot at the back of his knee and wrenched it out from under him. The moment he hit the grass, I delivered a kick to the side of his head and knocked him out like the other guy.

It didn't take long before the guy being choked out by my bo-staff lost consciousness, and I released him and let him sink to the ground among the rest of them.

Four down, six to go.

It had been a whirlwind of violence, pain, screams, and a whole lot of bloodletting since I'd stepped into the farmhouse and made my presence known.

My staff was slick with blood as I strode out of the bedroom, where I'd put down two of the last four targets. One was unconscious in there, another was screaming because he'd taken my weapon to the balls after putting up a fight, instead of succumbing to my wrath like he should have. Fucking fool . After witnessing the damage I'd already done so far.

There was broken furniture throughout the house, holes in the walls from me slamming my targets into a few during the battle, frat bros downed and a whole lot of shattered glass all over the kitchen from me driving an opponent's head into a window to knock him out.

I spun, hearing the hurried footsteps of another guy coming at me, the dumbass thinking he'd be the hero who took me down. I spun into a roundhouse kick and sent him careening down the stairs, watching as he passed out from hitting step after step when he hit the landing.

And then I saw the final target trying to slip away, dodging past me.

I bolted forward, then swept my staff at the most opportune time, ripping his legs out from under him.

He crashed onto the landing, just a foot from making it to the top of the stairs.

I lunged at him and hauled him around onto his back, about to do some nasty damage with my prized weapon.

"Wait!" he called out as I brought the bo-staff down.

I stilled just an inch from driving it into his ribs. He was damn lucky for my quick reflexes.

Through the haze of violence, I took in the identity of a target for the first time.

It was Chase Arlington, the football captain, one of the first recruits to Mason's resurrected version of Hex.

He wasn't supposed to be here. He wasn't a member of the frat.

There were no accidents when it came to the moves Mason made, so he must have separated Chase from the rest of the team and relocated him out here for a reason.

"Rob!" he cried, before I could even begin to determine a reason for it.

"What?" I spat.

"Rob Brown. Your boy reached out to him," he told me frantically. "Made me put him in contact with that dangerous freak."

"And? Why does that concern me?" I had my suspicions, obviously, but I needed them confirmed.

"The girl, the one you're into… Mason has him investigating her."

Jesus.

Rob Brown was the intel man of this shithead's father, Atticus Arlington. Rob was ex-military, a fucking shadow nowadays. And because he was, he was able to venture places that very few others could and obtain extremely hard to acquire information. Just like the very thing I was trying to keep Mason away from.

"How long?"

"A couple of weeks."

Christ. That was an age for a man like him.

It meant Mason knew something.

Just how much remained to be seen.

He would've likely discovered that she was Curt Walker's daughter, perhaps what the guy used to do before his small business empire had gotten up and running six years ago.

But even if he knew that, there was a barrier in place thanks to my dad between all of that and the kidnapping. Rob Brown was good, but I had faith in my dad's abilities too.

Even then, though, I didn't like Mason knowing anything about Brianna, beyond her being a student here and her field of study. To Mason, information was most definitely power and he always found the most opportune—and when he was on a tear, the most destructive—way to use what he discovered on those he'd targeted—or marked , in this case.

Goddammit!

With a roar, I whipped my bo-staff at the side of Chase's head, knocking him out cold.

Then I stormed down the stairs and made my way out of the farmhouse, stepping over the bloodied and beaten unconscious fools as I went, reveling in the power I'd unleashed and the punishment I'd dealt out, the eerie, stone-cold silence and the scent of blood rolling through me like the sweetest drug.

Still, it wasn't enough to quell the rage and anxiousness all of this had elicited.

Mason's moves were complicating everything and throwing up barriers all over the fucking place.

All this tonight, it was just a temporary fix. A Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound kind of deal.

But that was all I needed—to pause things, to create an interim reprieve so I could put certain things in place.

He thought he could throw up barriers at me and I'd just take it lying down because it was him, or because he had an army at his back?

Big fucking mistake.

He was about to get one fuck of a wakeup call.

Tonight would look like nothing.

Shouldn't have come at her, brother.