Page 7 of Savage Throne
I let out a long breath. “I’m sorry, TT. I didn’t want him to take her. I was going to try and stop this.”
“I know.”
Duck quickly returned with seven guys. They rushed through the passageway. I hoped they could catch up with my father, but. . .I doubted that they would.
Moni. . .you’re gone.
A cold chill ran up my spine as my bottom lip quivered.
I was supposed to keep you safe.
My eyes watered but I would not let one tear come out. I returned my attention to TT. “I will try to get her back and. . .I think at least for now. . .she will be safe.”
“I know she will be.”
I widened my eyes. “You know it?”
“She’s going to be okay. Uncle Leo said he was going to make her powerful, so powerful she wouldn’t need you or him in the East.”
I tensed. “Did my father say how he would make her powerful?”
“No, just that by tomorrow evening all would know she was dangerous.”
My heart pounded in my chest. Officially, my father was a serial killer, a complete psychopath. The very thought of whatever plans he had was unsettling in a way I couldn’t even fully process yet.
What the hell did that mean? How could he make Moni stronger? And stronger without me? That would mean. . .she would have her own reputation of violence, right?
I didn’t trust this.
Not for a second.
Whatever my father had in store for Moni, it wasn’t just about power. Not really. He didn’t empower people. He manipulated them, twisted them into brutal tools for his own twisted goals.
I can’t let her fall into that trap.
I thought back to my own initiation ceremony—the one that solidified my name in the East.
The blood.
The screams.
The stench of death so thick in the air, it still clung to me years later.
I was only fourteen when I went through it, just a boy forced into a man’s world by the most brutal of tests.
He’d put me on that stage to battle thirty-six men—hardened killers.
Thank God I had prevailed.
But had I truly?
It took a year for the nightmares full of dead men to leave me.
Another year for me to get the sound of my fists connecting with flesh and cracking bones out of my head. That sound had haunted me while I sat in class, in church, in the fucking bathtub.
Even now, after all these years. . .whenever I was alone in my bed for too long, I would feel the warm blood splattered across my face and smell it.
I earned power that day.
