Page 34 of A Knight’s Revenge: The Complete Series

Confused murmurs surrounded us. Scoffing and complaining could be heard from students.

“You don’t, you trashy skank,” Harper said loudly, and her mother tried to shut her up with a harsh, worried look. “What? Why are we letting her talk?”

My hands shook. The dean had known Kerstin Knight well, and the version of Joanna Miller that stood before us now looked an awful lot like Kerstin had before she died.

“Harper, sweetheart,” Joanna said, shooting her a condescending look dripping with fake sympathy. “I suggest your shut your mouth and listen to what I have to say. You’ll be interested to hear it, I promise.”

“Could she be… impersonating her?” Zach whispered. “She’s dead . They told us she was dead!”

But she hadn’t been when she left that room. I’d known it. Sometimes I thought I’d imagined it.

But they told us. They’d said they’d killed her too.

“I thought it might be interesting for you all to hear how I came to be at Holywell,” Joanna went on, projecting her voice across the now eerily silent dining hall. “As it turns out, the story involves your guest of honor.”

She finally looked his way, and the look of raw, visceral hatred she gave my father at that moment made my stomach drop to my fucking feet.

“It’s her,” I whispered.

Zach let out a completely humorless chuckle. “Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

She continued, her voice strong and sure. “When I was eleven years old, I was torn from my bed in my own home. I was hit over the head with the butt of a gun until I lost consciousness.”

Fuck.

“Oh, God,” Noah breathed.

I glanced at him. His eyes shone with unshed tears .

It was like we were back in that god-awful fucking conference room, reliving it all again.

“When I came to, I was on the floor of a strange room, bleeding profusely from the head. Unfortunately for me, I regained consciousness just in time to hear our guest of honor, James Spencer, shoot my father to death.”

Loud gasps sounded. Voices rose in the room.

My father, a head of one of the Four Families, had just been accused of murder.

A murder he’d absolutely committed.

The members of the press in the room had moved to the front of the stage and were now filming her with their phones.

“Fuck, she heard it all happen,” Zach moaned under his breath. “Fuck. Fuck .”

Her eyes found Zach’s. We knew what was next.

“And then my screaming, sobbing mother, who had just witnessed my father’s murder, threw herself in front of my limp body just in time to be shot by Andrea Ferrero. She sounded so thrilled to do it too.”

Zach swallowed audibly, but he held her stare with unwavering confidence.

And longing.

It was her .

Her eyes moved to Noah.

“And then, of course, I heard Peter Hargraves congratulate the twelve-year-old boys in the room, who they’d just forced to watch as their best friend and her family were murdered right in front of them, on a job well done.”

Noah could only stare back at her, wearing every ounce of the heartbreak we were all feeling on his face.

My chest felt like it was caving in.

“I’d played dead this entire time, you see,” she continued, tearing her eyes from Noah’s before she was back to glaring at Father.

“And I suppose I was fortunate that even our illustrious heads of the Families were too chickenshit to shoot an unconscious eleven-year-old girl. I was carried from that room alongside the bodies of my dead parents, and then I was tossed into the back seat of an Enforcer SUV. While the two lucky men charged with ensuring I ended up as dead as my parents argued over who had to do it, I jumped from the car and threw myself into the Obsidian.”

Her eyes fell on me again, burning into my fucking soul. I stood there, desperately hanging onto my emotionless mask, and just took it all, the disturbing images assaulting me from back then and from just a few days ago.

The river.

The panic attack.

She swam for her fucking life in that river after her parents had been killed in front of her.

Noah looked at me, stricken. He’d realized it too.

“Somehow, I didn’t drown out there,” she said, now looking directly at Harper, who still looked only annoyed by this spectacle.

She hadn’t figured it out yet.

“I made it to the docks in Olde Town. I was taken in by a kind family who has become my whole world.” She beamed down at Max, who smiled back at her, his chest swelling with pride.

I was with Noah now. I hated him.

“You see, I haven’t been sitting on my hands, crying over the loss of my parents and hiding all this time. I spent the last seven years on the Southside preparing for this day. I came to Holywell Academy to do one thing and one thing only—to avenge my parents by taking back what’s mine .”

Dread was creeping into every part of my body. As if the revelation wasn’t enough that the mouthy, troublemaking, unbearably hot scholarship student we’d spent the semester dealing with was actually our dead best friend—it sounded like things were about to get much worse.

“She’s been fucking with us this entire time,” Zach said, blowing out a breath.

“Why?” Noah asked, his low whisper despondent. “Why not just tell us who she was? We would have protected her!”

She looked out over the crowd again. “Before I leave tonight, I will be handing to the lovely members of the press who are in attendance a few things. I have a copy of camera footage from Peter Hargraves’ personal server that will show each head of the Families entering a conference room in Hargraves Tower on the night of August 2nd, 2015.

It will also show my family being dragged in, very much alive, and then carried out, very much not. ”

“How did she…?” Noah murmured, bewildered. “She got into my dad’s library?”

“I also have a copy of the SIM card of Andrea Ferrero’s burner phone that confirms her orders to her Enforcers to have my family kidnapped and delivered to Hargraves Tower on that night.”

“Goddamn it,” Zach cursed, shock still coloring his every word. “Mom has been bitching about someone being in her office. How the fuck did she get down there?”

I knew, just like I knew what was coming next.

“And I have a scanned copy of a document taken directly from James Spencer’s personal safe, signed by all three remaining heads of the Families, whereby they voted to eliminate my entire family for the simply stated reason of ‘disloyalty.’”

My father’s face was somehow both pale from shock and flushed with rage.

“She’s the one who stole your fob,” Zach whispered.

“Obviously,” I spat. She’d also apparently jumped off the top of Spencer Tower with a fucking parachute.

There was so much we’d missed. So much we didn’t know.

We’d been staring our dead best friend in the face for an entire semester—the girl whose absence all three of us still felt as profoundly as a phantom limb—and we’d had no goddamn idea.

And she’d been playing us like chumps.

“If you haven’t already figured it out, let me spell it out for you all,” she boomed into the microphone, her knuckles white where they were wrapped around the microphone stand.

“My name is Jolie Marie Knight. I’m the daughter of Jeffrey and Kerstin Knight, who were not killed in an unfortunate plane crash in the Bahamas but instead murdered by the very people they were closest to.

I am here to take back what’s mine, and then I am coming for what’s yours, Mr. Spencer.

” She held my father’s livid glare with the confidence of an equal.

“When I’m through with you, the institution of the Four Families will be in ruins, and if the rest of you don’t want to play by my rules, I will happily sit on the docks of Olde Town and watch while the City burns to fucking ashes. ”

Those aquamarine eyes met mine one last time, and they shone with so much righteous anger, so much defiance, and so much power , that I didn’t know whether to be frightened, enraged, or turned the fuck on.

Jolie.

Our Jojo.

Back from the dead.

And she was here to destroy us.

To be continued…