Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 155900 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 780(@200wpm)___ 624(@250wpm)___ 520(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 155900 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 780(@200wpm)___ 624(@250wpm)___ 520(@300wpm)
Remorse shook his head. “So many years passed like that, and I don’t know if we all came up on a T in the road at the same time or what. If there was something that popped up inside us that told us we all had to make a change.”
Kane hesitated, sweeping his tongue over his bottom lip before he forced himself to continue. “This one night…”
Pain oozed out of him on a torrent. “This one night, I ran straight into a T, Emery. A dead end.” He swallowed hard, barely able to speak. “These bastards that we’d gotten messed up in were asking me to do something I absolutely could not do. I don’t think I realized I still had a conscience until that moment.”
I couldn’t get the air into my aching lungs while I waited, my eyes trapped by the torment that thrashed in Kane’s penetrating gaze.
“What…what was it?” I finally managed to ask.
Grimness shook his head, and he brushed a trembling thumb over the apple of my cheek. “I’ll spare you that, Little Warrier. The only thing you need to know is I couldn’t go along with what they had planned. So, that night, I betrayed these guys who were supposed to be my brothers.”
He inhaled a shattered breath. “Not one of my crew knew what I’d done. None of them knew I was basically a dead man walking. I hid out for a couple of weeks, trying to lay low, though I kept an eye on Theo and the rest of the guys to make sure they were safe. I couldn’t let what I’d done blow back on them.”
My heart was hooked on every word that he confessed.
Kane let go of a disbelieving chuckle. “Thing was, those monsters we’d gotten involved with? About a week later, that whole group imploded, and they scattered like the fucking rats they were. So, I went back home—to the house I shared with all the guys and Raven.”
He pushed out a heavy sigh before he continued. “Two nights later, River showed up with this woman…”
Kane blinked a bunch of times, as if he were taken back to that time. His voice ground like gravel. “River had overheard an altercation between her and her boyfriend. Had heard this guy beating on her. Her pleas and cries.”
He paused, staring at me, worried that he was revealing too much.
My entire being rattled. Sure of the direction he was going, but needing to hear him say it, anyway.
“Tell me,” I rushed on a whisper.
Kane gave a soft nod as if it would lessen the verbal blow he was about to deliver.
“He killed him, Emery. He killed that bastard to protect this woman who couldn’t protect herself.”
Even though I’d almost anticipated it, a gasp raked up my throat. I’d known there was something about them, hadn’t I? A dusky, quiet menace that echoed around their spirits?
Grief curled Kane’s brow, and his hand tremored where he settled it on my neck. “Are you still with me?”
It was a plea, his question begging me to understand.
I nodded as a tear slipped free.
Kane gathered the moisture with his thumb, and he tipped his head to the side, his expression turning to awe. “He brought her to us. Wanted us to help him give her a new life.”
A shiver ran through me when he shifted to expose the tattoo on the back of his hand. The two stacked Ss with the blade running from top to bottom with an eye in the middle.
The same one they all had.
He squeezed that hand into a fist. “Sovereign Sanctum. That was the day it was born.”
“Sovereign Sanctum?” It cracked with uncertainty.
Kane gave a tight nod. “It’s what we really do, Emery. It’s who we really are. We left the type of sin and corruption we’d been involved in and turned our brutality to this.”
His voice was a tolling of low thunder. “We get women and children out of whatever dire situations they’re in. Setting them up with new identities and lives…by any means necessary.”
Dark emphasis rode on the last.
I blinked, trying to process what he was saying. “You mean…you’re like…some special undercover cops?”
The second I asked it, I knew it was all wrong.
“No, Emery. There isn’t much of anything we do that’s legal.” He shook his head with the admission.
I tried to swallow around the stone that sat heavily at the base of my throat, my mind spinning through the things that he said.
What he admitted.
Raven’s statement from earlier traipsed through my mind. “But I will tell you that anything he does, he does it because he’s a good man.”
“You…kill people to get them away from their abusers?” God, it felt ridiculous coming off my tongue. Impossible. And yet it so profoundly rang with the truth.
“Only if we have to. Only if there’s not another way.”