Page 78 of A Knight’s Revenge: The Complete Series

CHAPTER THIRTY

BENNETT

I t had been blind luck that I’d exited Holywell Hall about sixty seconds after Jolie, so I’d caught her determined march toward the front gates—fucking alone and in the dark—and it had filled me with a creeping sense of dread.

I’d been on my way to the student parking garage to grab my car after Elise had informed me that my presence had once again been requested at Spencer Tower.

I knew it was fucking Harper’s doing—I’d just come from dealing with the ridiculous and unnecessary fucking mess Jolie had made by breaking Harper’s wrist and ending her crew season before it began.

The dean had threatened to expel Jolie, but it turned out that more of the women’s crew team were scared of Jolie than they were of Harper these days, and the dean received a dozen witness statements indicating Harper had started the whole thing by attacking Jolie unprovoked.

It had all given me a headache, and I’d had to endure Harper crying all over my fucking shoulder in the dean’s office before I’d managed to extricate myself, only to be summoned to a meeting with my father.

As I’d watched Jolie exit the campus alone, I’d found myself drifting after her. I followed her to the metro station and down to the platform for the train headed to the City center.

I abhorred the train, but I was already standing on the fucking platform, so I decided I’d kill two birds with one stone. I’d covertly watch Jolie’s back—because apparently her boyfriends couldn’t be bothered—while I also made my way toward Spencer Tower.

Her destination had been Knight Tower—not surprising, since she owned it now—but I still didn’t like that she was out here alone on a random fucking school night.

I didn’t think my father had an active kill order out on her, but who knew what Peter or Andrea were up to now that she’d embarrassed the shit out of both of them.

Fucking reckless, as always, Jolie.

Spencer Tower was a few blocks away, and I was going to be late, but I found myself lingering in the coffee shop in the lobby of Knight Tower. I was putting off my meeting, and I was also hoping to get a glimpse of Jolie before she headed back out.

I planned on putting her in a rideshare straight back to the Academy no matter how many times she told me to go fuck myself.

My fingers itched. I pulled out my phone and opened our group chat.

Me: Do you know where your girlfriend is right now?

Noah answered after a minute.

Noah: She’s meeting with Anders

Me: Why?

Noah: You’ll have to ask her that

Motherfucker .

Spencer hadn’t had much of a presence in Knight Tower even before Jolie took it all back, but the one thing my father had made sure of was that he could always keep tabs on Anders.

I’d thought it was ridiculous—he was a harmless leashed dog, but Spencer kept a log of his movements nevertheless.

Father had once told me, flippant and dismissive as ever, that we were the head of Knight, so we always knew what our mouthpiece was doing.

And I was pretty sure that hadn’t changed even though Knight Tower now belonged to Jolie.

I opened the portal for Spencer security through the app on my phone and quickly found what I was looking for—the log of Anders’s comings and goings. I scanned down to the last entry tonight, and a jolt of unease hit me right in the stomach.

Anders had unlocked the basement “workroom” with his fingerprint about ten minutes ago .

What the fuck was he doing down there, and where was Jolie?

I was in the elevator down to the parking garage before I could think twice.

Every Family tower had a basement workroom, though Ferrero preferred to do their dirty work at the Club. There was no reason for Anders to be down there—he didn’t do Enforcer work in any capacity.

Maybe Jolie had been attacked, and they’d dragged the offender to the basement?

My unease intensified.

I wound my way down to the third sublevel of the parking garage and let myself in the unmarked brown door next to an abandoned security hut. Inside, guarding the locked door to the workroom, was one of Anders’s personal guards.

Jones, Johnson. Something.

“Mr. Spencer?” he said, straightening against the wall and looking confused. “Did Mr. Nilsson send for you? He specifically told us not to inform Spencer yet.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Inform us of what, exactly?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Um, well, I’ll have to wait for Mr. Nilsson’s go ahead to disclose that.”

I took two steps forward, crowding into his personal space. He was a big guy, as most Enforcers were, but I was bigger. “Is that a bullet in your shoulder, Jones?”

He looked down at his right shoulder where his black uniform had been soaked through with blood and a hasty patch had been placed over the wound. “Just got clipped in a scuffle with an intruder, sir.”

“Did they also break your nose?”

“Um. Affirmative, sir. ”

My glare intensified. “You’re going to let me into the workroom. Now.”

“I, uh… I’m not authorized to do that, sir.”

“Wrong choice.” I lunged at him, jamming my thumb right into his bullet wound.

He cried out, but I slammed my other hand over his mouth. He struggled, but I could tell the blood loss he’d suffered had weakened him. He shook violently, and when he started to droop under the crushing weight of the pain, I threw my fist into his temple, knocking him out cold.

I caught his bulky body before he slid down the wall, then I made awkward work of lifting his hand to the fingerprint scanner next to the door. I slammed his thumb onto the scanner, and a soft beep and flash of a green light proceeded the thump of the lock disengaging.

I left Johnson in a heap on the floor, stripped of his weapon, and I crept inside.

The cramped, dim landing contained two additional doors—one I knew led down to the open basement floor, and the other to a narrow staircase that allowed access to the small balcony that acted as storage area tucked up high along the back wall.

As much as the urge to barrel into the basement and demand to know what the fuck was going on rode me hard, I unlatched the door to the balcony staircase and prowled silently up the stairs.

I slipped through the shadows, a particular skill of mine despite my size, and the dimly lit basement room came into view below me. There, in the middle of the bare open floor, surrounded by rectangular solid cement columns that held up the cramped ceiling, was Jolie.

She was strapped to a chair, hands bound behind her back, and her head sagged against her chest. On one side of her head, blood soaked into her white-blonde hair.

I sucked in a breath, a tremor wracking my body as I fought to remain still and silent. It was like I was back there again.

That night.

The night I’d thought I’d watched her close those beautiful eyes for the last time.

“Wake her up.”

Only then did I notice Anders, the little fucking weasel, standing off to the side next to a single Enforcer—another member of his guard.

“You’re gonna let me get the tool chest out, right?” the Enforcer asked, stalking forward toward Jolie. “She killed Martin and Alex. You should’ve dosed her with more of that shit.”

“I only dosed her to loosen her tongue,” Anders snapped. “Four of you should have been able to handle a teenage girl without a problem. Ridiculous.”

He did what? My hands clenched into fists, digging my blunt nails into the skin of my palm so hard, I was certain I’d drawn blood.

The Enforcer waved something in front of Jolie’s nose, and her head snapped back as she took a big, shuddering breath .

“What the fuck, Anders!” she barked, yanking on her bindings, and she sounded so much like normal, angry Jolie that I was able to release one one-hundredth of the tension that had wound me into a vibrating ball of rage.

“Jolie, honestly,” Anders said with his usual whine. “You didn’t have to make this so difficult. You did what you were supposed to do—you found the key to Jeff’s drive. All you need to do is hand it over, and I really think we’ll all be able to put this behind us.”

“It’s not fucking happening, Uncle ,” she spat.

He tsk ed, shaking his head in disappointment. “You don’t want to do that, Jolie. Morris over here is itching to make you hurt for what you did to his buddies. If you just tell me where the drive and the key are, I’ll let you out of here unharmed.”

I watched as Jolie smothered the boiling fury, and a blank expression settled onto her face.

Good girl.

“Why, Uncle?” she asked softly. “You knew what my dad had done, didn’t you? Did you want his discovery for yourself? Did you want to take the credit from him? Or did James Spencer put you up to it? Were you just his pawn, even then?”

Anders scoffed, puffing up his chest. “Of course not, silly girl. I was the mastermind behind it all, and Spencer and the others would already be little specks in the oppressive shadow of your father if it wasn’t for me!”

Jolie pasted a confused look on her face. “Why would my father’s success be a bad thing for you ? I’m sure you’d have been rewarded if you worked on the team that made the discovery.”

“Not enough!” he shouted. “Spencer and the others could offer me what my sister and her brilliant, clueless husband would never—the head of Knight itself. A seat at the table of the fabled Four Families of Saint Gabriel City. Power beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.”

What the fuck?

“So, instead of sharing in the greatest technological discovery of the century with my Family, you sold us out to the other three? And they just decided to murder us all to steal my dad’s work?”

He scoffed, his thin arms gesturing wildly as he rambled.

“It wasn’t a hard sell. Jeff had already become such a thorn in the side of the Families.

Knight was already outstripping the others—tech is such a lucrative field, as you know.

And he’d been making all this noise for years about how the Families needed to go legit, no more criminal activity, blah blah blah.

The other three already thought he’d grown too big for his britches—too big for the institution of the Four to be sustainable.

But throw in the fact that he’d kept the miraculene breakthrough a secret for years?

That he was going to become the richest man on the planet by a long shot without even a whisper of it to the others?

Without offering them an equal cut, at the very least?

” He paused, shaking his head like a disappointed parent. “Well, they took that personally.”

The pieces were clicking together in my brain faster than I could make sense of them. I felt a numbness wash over me, my body deploying its usual defense mechanism as I fought to remain still and in control.

I focused everything on Jolie.

My angel. So brave. So fierce.

She was struggling to keep her cool. I’d committed her every expression and mannerism to memory by now, and while she kept an emotionless mask, I knew she wasn’t going to be able to stall much longer.

“So, your plan was to turn all of my dad’s work over to the Families, and they promised you the true head of Knight and, what, an equal cut of the spoils?” Jolie gritted her teeth, her nostrils flaring. “You had your sister and your niece murdered for that ?”

“Obviously my niece was not, in fact, murdered,” he said, waving a dismissive hand at her.

“And I’m not inclined to try again—it really is nasty business—but you’ll need to turn over the miraculene files and step down as head of Knight.

You’re already rich enough, and I know you don’t actually want to be part of the Families anyway. You hate them.”

“So, what went wrong then?” she spat, now taunting him. “Clearly you were not made head of Knight, and my dad’s work just sat in Spencer’s safe all these years. Did you forget you needed the fucking key before you had my Family executed ?”

“It was supposed to be on his private drive on the Knight server,” he snapped.

“I’d watched him unlock the miraculene files before.

But he switched it last minute or something.

Of course he did! Your dad’s laughing at me from beyond the grave, giving me just another patronizing, ‘Good try, buddy.’ Well, guess what, Jeff?

I’m getting the key tonight , and then all my hard work will pay off.

I’ll finally be out of this fucking prison, and I’ll be more of a king of the world than you ever were. ”

Jolie gaped at him like he was the dumbest human on the planet, and I agreed with her. “And that’s it? You’re sure James Spencer will keep his word to you?”

“Elise promised me!” he barked. “She saw the potential in me and what we could do with miraculene if it was ours . And as soon as I’m the true head of Knight and one of the four richest people in the world, she’ll come back to me, and we’ll be getting married. I’ll continue the Knight line myself.”

Jolie continued to stare at him, her dubious look clearly genuine. “Elise Proctor?”

“Of course.”

That was it.

I’d had enough.

Gripping the railing, I vaulted over the side and swung down, dropping the eight feet to the unforgiving cement floor behind Jolie with a loud thud.

I stood up from my crouch, and I dusted my suit jacket off before I set my sights on Anders.

He’d jumped back, startled by my falling from the ceiling, and his wide eyes took me in before his shoulders slumped in relief.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Spencer. I told them not to send word until I had the drive, but I suppose it’s good you’re here. You can help me convince my niece to make the right decision.”