Page 3 of A Knight’s Revenge: The Complete Series

CHAPTER TWO

I returned my boat to Bruce with two minutes to spare, and he just gave me a knowing stare and a nod as I hustled out the front door, which I suspected was the only goodbye I was going to get from him.

As “Girl’s Not Grey” by AFI hit my ears, I made my way down to Main Street, taking in the Saturday morning hustle and bustle as shop and restaurant owners readied their storefronts for a busy day.

Main Street ran east to west and divided Olde Town, a historic suburb of the City that lay on the western border of the river, into the Northside and the Southside.

Northside was where the wealthy, Family-connected residents lived who desired Olde Town’s quaint feel and quieter pace of life.

Old colonial rowhouses had been renovated into million-dollar homes.

Fancy modern townhouses filled in the gaps.

Pristine parks, expensive restaurants, and gourmet coffee shops and grocery stores lined the streets.

The Southside was much, much larger, extending from neighborhoods of smaller but well-maintained historic homes that made up the area just south of Main into a sprawl of blocks and blocks of drab mid-century houses with rusting fences and overgrown lawns alongside aging apartment buildings and crowded public housing.

Strip malls popped up along the main roads, and the dining options were mostly fast food or the occasional shabby-but-delicious mom-and-pop restaurant.

The majority of the City’s working class lived here, many taking the train into the City daily to toil within the Family empires, while others stayed closer to home—all of them trying to make ends meet in whatever way they could before the City’s ruling class sucked them dry.

Main Street itself was where we could get a glimpse of the City’s rare middle-class citizen. There were even some small-business owners here who were, by some miracle, making a decent living with no connection to or investment from anyone Family related.

Like my uncle, Dom.

I turned south and walked the last two blocks to my family’s bookstore.

The happy turquoise brickwork greeted me, and I waved to my aunt, Laura, where she was seated in the large corner window, setting up the fall-release display.

I ducked into the back alley behind the store and let myself into our private entrance, making my way up the narrow flight of stairs that led to our small two-bedroom apartment on the store’s second floor.

“Hey, honey,” Dom said as I joined him in our small kitchen. He was wearing his black training shorts and matching T-shirt sporting the tiger logo of the MMA gym he owned, and he was bent over the stove, carefully folding an omelet. “Have a good morning workout?”

“I did,” I replied, taking a seat at one of the barstools. “Bruce gave me his worried face but didn’t hassle me too much when he said goodbye.”

Dom slid his perfect omelet onto a plate, and then he turned to look at me with his “concerned dad” face. “Bruce feels responsible for you—almost as much as Laura and I do. Cut him some slack. What you’re doing—what we’re doing—it’s very risky.”

“And very fucking important,” I added, not that he needed convincing. Dom was my biggest champion. He knew the stakes, but he also had confidence that I had what it would take.

“What’s very fucking important?” Max mumbled as he trudged into the kitchen, all sleep rumpled and lazy.

“Oh, I don’t know, Max, the little project that your sister is about to undertake that’s intended to cause the destruction of the all-powerful Families of Saint Gabriel City?” Dom snarked at his son.

Max just nodded as he grabbed a box of Cheerios. “Well, yeah. It’s gonna be fucking awesome.” He wandered into the living room, stopping on his way to drop a kiss on the top of my head, and then he threw himself onto the worn leather sofa and began eating cereal straight from the box.

Dom rolled his dark brown eyes in Max’s direction before bringing them back to me, where they softened with deep affection before he said, “Maybe I’m just not ready for you to go off to college, regardless of the circumstances.”

“You old softie,” I teased. “The Academy is, like, five miles from here. And I have a feeling I’ll be seeing you anyway.”

He chuckled. “I suspect you’re right.”

I smiled, full of the affection I felt for my uncle-slash-adoptive father, because I would miss him too. It was a real miracle that he, Laura, and Max had somehow been able to put my heart back together just enough that I could feel love again.

Whatever asshole god that had not been watching over my mom and dad that night seven years ago had apparently decided to cut eleven-year-old me a break, miraculously delivering me to Dom instead of letting me drown in the murky black depths of the Obsidian.

My memories of that night were hazy—a brutal head wound will do that to a little kid—but I did remember that I had been unlucky enough to have regained consciousness just in time to listen to the people I’d thought were my parents’ closest friends and allies murder them in cold blood.

I’d frozen in shock and terror, deciding to continue to play dead, and then I’d learned that those psychopaths had committed murder in front of three twelve-year-old boys to teach them a lesson.

And I still didn’t know why .

But I was sure the fuck going to find out.

Fortunately for me, it seemed that even the sociopathic heads of the Families didn’t have it in them to kill a kid with their own hands, because I’d made it out of that room still alive—barely.

I had vague memories of two Enforcers arguing over who was going to have to do the honors as they drove one of their armored Jeeps along the riverbank with my “unconscious” body tossed in the back seat.

Something had come over me—a moment where the will to live won out over the crushing despair of losing my parents in the worst way imaginable—and I’d bolted from the Jeep and jumped straight over the guardrail into the river.

I’d stayed submerged for as long as I could manage, and I remembered feeling disoriented and undecided about whether I shouldn’t just let myself drown. They must have assumed I did drown because when I finally floated up under a dock, there had been no sign of the Enforcers or the Jeep.

And then I swam. I was a good swimmer since my rich parents had put me in lessons with the other Heirs as soon as I could walk, but I’d had my goddamn head bashed in, so I wasn’t exactly in top form.

I didn’t know how it happened, but Bruce told me he found me clinging to a piece of driftwood on the riverbank next to his dock when he came to open the Boathouse at five in the morning.

I apparently had no sense of self-preservation left, so I’d blurted the whole horrific story to him as he wrapped me in a towel and carried my shivering little body inside.

Instead of turning me over to the Families for what would have probably been a substantial payout to keep quiet, he’d called his friend Dominic Miller—recently retired from the military’s Special Forces and who, Bruce knew, had no love lost for the Families.

It was then, and still was today, a strict policy of the Families to keep images of the Heirs out of the media except under very tightly controlled circumstances, but Dom and Bruce had no doubts that I was who I claimed to be.

My aquamarine eye color and white-blonde hair looked just like my mother’s, and she had been among the most recognizable faces in the City.

My memories were spotty after Bruce pulled me from the water, but at some point, I’d woken up snug in a twin bed in a tiny bedroom with stitches in my head and a ten-year-old boy dozing in a sleeping bag on the floor next to me.

When he woke up a short time later, he happily informed me that he was going to be my brother and that I could have his bed for as long as I needed to feel better.

We still slept in bunk beds in that tiny room, and I loved it.

“Jojoooo,” Max whined from where he was sprawled on the couch, pulling me from my trip down memory lane. “I have a headache.”

I’d finished the eggs Dom had whipped up for me, so I joined Max on the couch, settling his head on my lap and running my fingers through his silky black hair.

He usually kept it in a messy bun on the back of his head, but I suspected he’d known he was going to whine at me for a head massage when he woke up hung-the-fuck-over and had planned accordingly.

“You’re pathetic,” I told him. “You’re lucky I’m feeling mushy about how much I’m going to miss you, or else I wouldn’t be rewarding your reckless behavior.”

“I wasn’t reckless,” he grumbled. “I was high off my win last night, so the guys and I had to celebrate.”

“Maybe celebrate about half as much next time!” Dom called from the kitchen.

“Whatever! Don’t act like you’re not proud!” Max shouted back.

Dom grinned, and I rolled my eyes. Friday Fight Nights at Dom’s gym were legendary on the Southside, and Max was among the best in the under-twenty-one group.

I was no slouch, either, but I’d been busy of late and hadn’t made a Fight Night in a while.

Dom was exceedingly proud of both of us, and he bragged to anyone who would listen about his son’s and his niece’s prowess in the cage.

To the outside world, I was Dom’s niece by marriage, and Max was my cousin.

Dom and Max both favored Dom’s Korean mother with their striking dark looks, but we were fortunate that Laura was very Caucasian—a honey-blonde, blue-eyed Midwestern beauty.

It was easy to sell my arrival and their subsequent adoption of me after Laura’s “sister” perished in a car crash, leaving behind a daughter.

Dom’s connections in the Shadows—an organization that the Families would have destroyed long ago had they gotten even a whiff of its existence—whipped up a fake identity for me, and I had been Joanna Miller for seven long years. A niece on paper, but now a daughter and a sister in their hearts.

If it hadn’t been for them, I’d still be the traumatized shell of a human I’d been when Bruce found me.

I might even be dead.

Max shifted in my lap, looking up at me with the same dark eyes his father had. “Still rocking the purple, eh? Is that the color scheme we’re going with or are you going to change it up before we move you in tomorrow?”

“It’s violet , and yeah, I think I’m going to keep this look,” I replied. “ I’ve got too much other shit going on for me to fuck around, changing things. I’m fully stocked up on contact lenses and hair dye for at least the next year.”

Seven years ago, Dom had sat on the end of Max’s bed where I’d been sleeping on and off for days and gently explained to me that I was going to have to work very carefully and meticulously to keep my identity a secret because we had no idea if the Families truly believed I was dead.

The public certainly thought I was after James Spencer had held the world’s fakest sad press conference on the steps of Knight Tower, announcing my family’s death in a plane crash while on our summer vacation.

I’d managed to listen to James speak for about two minutes before I’d run to the bathroom to puke my guts out.

We later found out that they’d actually crashed a real plane to stage the accident, though we never were able to figure out which poor souls’ bodies they’d burned to a crisp in the wreckage.

So, in order to maintain the ruse that I’d died with my parents, I’d learned to conceal my distinctive features by wearing contacts to hide my eye color.

I’d had brown eyes for years until I got bored and started a more exciting rotation.

I also dyed my hair any color that wasn’t blonde—usually some shade of brown, though I spent a few years as a redhead before I’d decided I’d had enough “does the rug match the drapes” jokes from disgusting teenage boys and went back to brown.

It was also good luck that I’d gotten the tall gene from my dad and was now five foot nine, so I was no longer the tiny girl I was when I “died.”

According to our intel, no one suspected a thing, and there hadn’t been even a hint of an off-the-books search for Jolie Knight since that night.

Max smirked at me. “I, for one, just hope someone else decides to call you a purple-eyed freak in the cage again. You’re vicious when you’re pissed off.”

I laughed. It wouldn’t be long before the entire City found out how true that was.