Page 36 of A Knight’s Revenge: The Complete Series

PROLOGUE

“ N oah!”

I ran faster. Jolie’s screams were desperate, and I had to find her.

Someone was hurting her.

“Jojo!” I called out, panicked.

“Noah, help me!”

Where was she? These halls all looked the same.

Offices, conference rooms, break rooms with big refrigerators and little tables.

“Noah!”

A light shone from an open door at the end of the hall. I sprinted for it, somehow knowing it was the right place.

“Jojo!”

I tripped over nothing and fell into the room. Bennett and Zach were already here, standing next to the wall and staring into the middle of the room with blank looks on their faces.

Jolie lay on the floor. Her head was bleeding, and she was crying.

“Oh my God! Bennett! Zach! We have to do something!” I cried, running for her.

They didn’t answer. I looked over at them, so confused about why they weren’t helping her, and then I looked back at the floor.

She was gone.

“No!”

I woke up, my scream painful against my hoarse throat.

“Hey,” Bennett whispered from next to me. “Noah. It was just a dream.” He grabbed my hand from where he lay beside me in our sleeping bags on the floor of my room.

“It wasn’t though,” I said, and a loud sob escaped my throat. “It wasn’t a dream. She’s really dead!”

Bennett didn’t say anything. He just held my hand while I continued to cry, letting all of the tears out that I wasn’t able to last night when our parents killed our best friend and her parents right in front of us.

For reasons we had no idea about. To test us.

“Where’s… where’s Zach?” I asked, hiccupping. The sleeping bag on my other side was empty.

“Here,” Zach said quietly.

I looked over at the window seat of my bedroom where Zach sat perched on the cushion, slouched against the foggy pane.

His eyes were tired—red rimmed and bloodshot in the faint glow that shone through the window from the City lights. His black hair was wild.

And he had a big kitchen knife clutched in his hand, his eyes glued to the door like he was watching for invaders.

He hadn’t slept, I realized.

Bennett sat up in his sleeping bag, pulling me up to sit with him.

“I…,” he began, swallowing hard. A tear leaked down his cheek, and I knew he was trying so hard to hold it together for us. “I don’t know why our parents did that. Jolie’s dad must have done something really bad to deserve that kind of… punishment .”

“ She didn’t do anything though!” I cried. “Why did they do that to her?”

“Father said those are the rules,” Bennett replied sadly. “The rules of the Four Families when one Family betrays the others.”

“Screw the rules,” Zach muttered from the window. “The rules suck. Our parents are psychos.”

I nodded. I never thought my dad was crazy. Or evil. I didn’t really see him that much, but whenever I did, he always smiled at me and tried to say nice things.

Bennett’s dad and Zach’s mom were the scary ones .

But my dad went along with this horrible murder . It turned out he was just like them after all.

“What do you think our parents are going to make us do now?” I asked. “They made it seem like that was some kind of initiation.”

“I don’t know,” Bennett replied. “But I bet our Families didn’t get where they are—become as powerful as they are in this City—without doing some bad things.”

“I can be bad,” Zach mused, staring down at the knife he still held. “If that’s what they’ll force us to do.”

I believed him, but I didn’t want that for Zach.

For any of us.

Because I’d figure out how to be bad, too, if it meant protecting Bennett or Zach. If I’d have known we needed to protect Jolie, I’d have stolen a gun and robbed ten banks just so we could have money to run far, far away and never look back.

My chest ached at the thought, and I had to take several huge breaths to stop myself from breaking down again.

“From now on,” Bennett said after a long moment. “We trust no one outside of this room. We have each other’s backs, always. We do just enough to keep our parents happy until we get access to our trust funds when we graduate from Holywell. And then we decide what we want to do after that.”

“Yeah,” Zach replied. “If our parents are capable of that, there’s no telling what else they would do. It has to be just us. No one else.”

“Right,” I chimed in. “I thought my dad was nice. But there’s no way—he’s been lying to me my whole life! It’s only us from here on out.”

“And we make sure nothing like that ever happens again. We lost Jojo, but we won’t lose each other,” Bennett said, his determination breaking through the sadness in his voice.

I’d finally stopped crying. This was important—we had to figure out how to move on and protect each other.

We fell quiet again, all of us lost in our thoughts, until Zach finally broke the silence.

“I miss her,” he rasped.

“Me too,” I said softly.

“She’ll always be a part of us,” Bennett added, sniffing slightly before rubbing his sleeve across his eyes. “In our hearts and our memories. No matter what her dad did. She was good, and we’ll remember her that way.”

I would hold onto that. Years later, I would even sometimes think it was for the best she’d avoided getting sucked into the underbelly of the Families. She was too good, too happy, too innocent for it all—and in our memories, she could remain that way forever.

But as it turned out, this City had chewed Jolie up and spit her out just as it had the three of us, and she bore the scars of the Families the same as we did.

It was our destiny.