Page 83 of A Knight’s Revenge: The Complete Series

CHAPTER TWO

NOAH

I stood on the dock of the Boathouse, a rowing club in Olde Town and apparently the place where our Jojo had been fished from the Obsidian River on the worst night of our lives.

Bennett and I looked on as a horde of men and women dressed in black and armed to the hilt swarmed the dock, each of them focused on their assigned task of preparing our boats to cross the river and land on the shores of Industrial City.

“Seriously, Martinez?” Bennett snapped at a familiar man who skirted by us, carrying what appeared to be a flamethrower. “Was being my personal guard so terrible?”

Martinez grinned at Bennett. “It wasn’t, actually, but you know my time with Spencer was also spent doing other things I found a lot less…

palatable. The mission of the Shadows is more in line with my values.

” He winked at us both as he sauntered away, tossing the flamethrower into one of the boats.

“Unbelievable,” Bennett muttered. “I’d thought he died .”

“Yeah,” I said lamely. I remembered how bummed fourteen-year-old Bennett had been when his favorite bodyguard disappeared, and twenty-year-old Bennett was not impressed to find him here, very much alive and apparently part of a secret resistance organization that had been lurking in the City all these years, lying in wait for the right time to move against the Families.

“Kara’s over there,” I added, motioning toward the Boathouse’s doorway.

“Remember she was my mom’s guard before Mom bailed on us? ”

Bennett just grunted as he eyed the still-very-buff woman in her forties where she was engaged in a serious conversation with Dom, our de facto leader for this little raid to extract the wayward Ferrero Heir.

Our heads snapped to the other side of the dock as Jolie emerged from around the side of the building.

She still wore the emotionless mask that had descended over her face the second Frankie had reported Zach’s disappearance.

She’d shut down immediately, becoming singularly focused on saving Zach while shoving aside all the soul-shattering shit that she’d just gone through at the hands of her uncle.

She’d pulled the trigger on something called “Phase Three,” and Bennett and I were now getting a crash course on the true extent of the power behind our girl.

“I don’t know if I’m more worried about Zach or Jojo,” I said, adjusting my weapons belt. “I know Andrea won’t have Zach hurt in any life-threatening way, but that doesn’t mean he’s not suffering. And Jojo is… not taking this well.”

“Recall she made an entire Tier One company disappear and had the CEO put in prison because I came to school with a shiner,” Bennett said as his consuming gaze followed her every move.

I hadn’t thought the way he looked at her could get more obsessive, but now that they’d had sex and apparently also swapped the L-word —because Bennett didn’t do anything half-assed, the bastard—his intensity when it came to Jolie was at an entirely new level.

“I’m surprised Ferrero Tower is still standing, honestly. ”

A gruff voice sounded behind us. “You boys all caught up yet?”

The owner of the Boathouse, an older guy named Bruce who was sporting a gray ponytail, white stubble, and track pants from the eighties, stepped up beside us.

He glanced in Jojo’s direction with a knowing grimace before turning his attention back to us.

“She’ll snap out of it eventually. I was worried, but when she looks at you two, she does soften up a bit. She’s still in there.”

“She’s been through a lot in the past twenty-four hours,” I replied. “It’s understandable. ”

“She’s a survivor,” he agreed. “I knew it the moment I pulled her from the water all those years ago.”

Bennett and I both jerked our heads in his direction. “You’re the one that found her?” Bennett asked.

“Who else? I own the place.”

“And you handed her over to this… Shadows organization, trusting they’d do right by her?” I asked. I shuddered to think of all the ways that night could have gone even more wrong.

He grunted in irritation. “I took her to Dominic, trusting he would do right by her. Her later involvement with the Shadows was her decision.”

I watched as Jolie and Max stood huddled together on one of the boats, both of them muttering into the speaker of Jolie’s phone, probably talking to Zepp. I knew I’d get my update from Silver, as she was now squarely in Zepp’s business and enjoying poking at him on a regular basis.

Bennett looked at Bruce again. “So, the Shadows are a secret army of people who have a problem with the Families? People who’ve defected or otherwise been harmed by us?” He paused, swallowing hard. “ Them . Harmed by them.”

“Yes,” Bruce replied. “It’s a network of those in the City actively opposed to the rule of the Four Families. Every member has their own personal reasons for joining. There are certainly many who have a history of working within the Families.”

Bennett pondered this for two seconds before stating what we were both thinking. “There are Shadows undercover within the Families today.”

Bruce cracked an amused smile. “Yep.”

“Damn,” I said. Our parents had no fucking clue this existed right under their noses.

Bruce went on. “Some of us have had loved ones get on the wrong side of the Families. Many have had an injustice done to them personally. We have people from all walks of life with all kinds of skills, from the hackers and the muscle you see here, right down to the kitchen worker at the Euphoria Club who left the door open for your girl one night last fall.”

We both tensed at the reminder of what Joanna Miller had been up to last semester—the danger she’d put herself in—before I dared to ask Bruce the obvious question. “What pushed you to join? ”

He was quiet for a beat. “My wife passed away ten years ago of a cancer that would have been treatable had she been allowed into the program at City Center Hospital. But we didn’t have the right last name or the funds.”

A Hargraves hospital. Shame curdled in my gut, and I vowed to fix it.

“And now that you— we have Jolie’s fortune,” Bennett said, swiftly changing the subject, “the Shadows have decided to come out into the open?”

“Yes, though we became a pretty well-funded organization about fifteen years ago when we had some… people of means join up,” Bruce replied.

“But things have moved quickly over the past few years. What happened to Jolie was a rallying cry—not even the innocent children of the Families were safe in this City, for Christ’s sake. ”

“And her mission to avenge her parents and destroy the Families aligns with the reason for the Shadows’ existence,” I finished.

“Indeed.” He motioned to the flurry of activity on the dock. “And here we are, throwing some of our best men and women into a battle with Ferrero to rescue the Ferrero Heir because Jojo loves him.”

Bennett bristled. “And because he’s a valuable asset to the organization.”

“And that, sure,” he replied, chuckling.

All three of us watched as Jolie abandoned her position in her boat and made her way toward us. She was dressed in the same black tactical gear we were all wearing, and I took a moment to appreciate how sexy my girl looked in cargo pants.

She came to a stop next to us and gave Bruce a squinty-eyed stare. “Is that a crossbow?”

Bruce nodded, motioning to the weapon he had strapped to his back. “Did you think I only knew how to bark orders at middle schoolers learning to row?”

She almost cracked a smile at that. “Pretty much, yeah.”

“Angel,” Bennett said, using his new pet name for her that made even my insides gooey. “Are you doing okay?”

“I’m fine, Bennett,” she said, and her hard expression relaxed just enough when she looked at him to appease us both. “We’re going to get Zach back, and we’re going to make anyone who’s laid a hand on him pay with their life. ”

I reached for her, and she let me pull her into my side.

I felt her sag against me, releasing a little bit of the tension she was carrying, and I pressed a kiss to her temple.

Bennett moved in front of us, and he was bold enough to grasp her chin with his big hand, forcing her to look him in the eyes.

“We will get him back,” he agreed before he took her mouth in a demanding kiss.

He was the only one around here not treating her like she was a bomb about to go off.

After a few seconds, he pulled back to stare her down again.

“Do not do anything reckless tonight, or I’ll have Noah put you over his knee. ”

She shivered, and I grinned. “Look at Spencer being a team player already,” I whispered into her ear.

She let out a breathy sigh, then she snapped out of it and shook us off. “Focus, both of you. Have you heard anything else from Frankie?”

“No,” I replied. “He’s still got eyes on the team they have blocking the bridge, but he hasn’t texted again since he reported Andrea crossing back into the City.”

“That bitch is dead,” she spat.

Maybe, but not tonight, it seemed. “Zach’s used to this, sweetheart. He’s tough and won’t let her get to him.”

“I don’t give a fuck. No one touches him and gets to live.”

Bennett and I exchanged a loaded look. Jolie in overprotective-beast-mode about one of us was such a turn on, but we had to lock it up until Zach was safe and we’d all had a nap.

The minute Frankie had informed us that Zach had gone missing, we’d thrown ourselves completely into finding him.

Jolie, Bennett, and I had taken fifteen minutes to retrieve Jolie’s belongings from the Knight penthouse— her penthouse now, truly and completely—showered, changed clothes, then spent the night camped twenty floors below in Silver’s command center, coordinating with Zepp and the Shadows to scour the City for Zach’s whereabouts.

Frankie had come through by ten o’clock this morning, having located the one Ferrero Enforcer who was in on the plans for Zach’s kidnapping and not also either hidden at the location with Zach or dead on his bedroom floor in Ferrero Tower.

Frankie had made quick work of that unfortunate soul, and an hour later, Silver and Zepp had identified a piece of property owned by a Ferrero shell in Industrial City .

The blockade of the bridge happened soon after, so we knew we’d found our target. And since there was a small army on the one car route into Industrial City, we would be going by sea.

Bennett’s phone buzzed, and he ignored yet another call from his father. I’d ignored three from my own father since last night, both of them likely growing very annoyed that we’d disappeared from the Academy and were nowhere to be found in the City.

Fuck them. I was already done with my dad and the decaying corpse that was Hargraves, but after Bennett told me what he’d learned listening to Anders wax poetic about selling his own flesh and blood to the Families for power and money, and I’d given him the final piece of the puzzle—the world-changing contents of Jolie’s dad’s flash drive—we both knew it was really and truly over for us.

Fuck our parents. Fuck the Four Families. They’d pay for what they did to our girl and then lied to our faces about for seven goddamned years. If she wanted to slit their throats, I’d help her do it and then pop the champagne afterward.

A whistle sounded. “Yo, Nathan! Spencer! Load up—we’re moving out.”

I scowled at Max while Bennett had the audacity to snicker.

“Don’t fucking encourage him,” I griped as we followed Jolie and Bruce to our assigned boat.

Jolie smirked at me over her shoulder—a welcome sight. “Don’t worry, Noah. He’ll run out of N names eventually, then he’ll have to get a new bit. I doubt he’ll ever stop hitting on Bennett.”

It was Bennett’s turn to scowl as we climbed into the speedboat. Max barked out a laugh. “Fuck no. And since everyone’s so good at sharing around here, Jojo will share Big Man with me, won’t you?”

“In your dreams, Max,” she replied, but that smile was threatening to break through her hard mask.

Max winked at us, and I decided I hated him slightly less.

“Everyone ready?” Dom called out. He and Kara had boarded one of the other four boats carrying our group of two dozen. “You all have your marching orders. In and out. Shoot to kill. Let’s bring Zach home.”

He cast a fond look over at Jolie, who returned it with a curt nod. She’d blanked again .

We fired up the boats, Bruce at the helm of ours, and we were off to save Zach before we lost him forever to the dark side of Ferrero.