Page 116 of Hide and Seek

I start the feed at the moment they burst into the room, and we watch it intently, searching for anything that might help us.

“There,” I say when a loud scream rings out of my speaker and one of the guys falls to his knees after Myles blinded him with his phone flashlight.

I rewind the video to the moment he rips his night vision goggles off and pause it.

“Son of a bitch,” Jace mutters and uses his fingers to enlarge the video until my screen is almost completely taken up by the exposed strip of his wrist from where his sleeve has ridden up and the edge of his leather glove has slipped. On his wrist is the top half of a black crown tattoo.

The crown isn’t just any crown, it’s the one from the Kings’ coat of arms, and every King has to get it tattooed on them as part of their initiation. There are no rules about where or how big the tattoo has to be, but they can’t be members without being branded somewhere on their body.

“Do you think they’d be stupid enough to take him to their House?” Jace asks.

“Who knows?” I exit out of the feed. I don’t need to rewatch my boyfriend being dragged away by a group of soon-to-be dead men.

What I need is to find them so I can tear them apart, piece by tiny piece, until there’s nothing left of them for their families to identify.

Jace’s phone vibrates with a text. “Killer’s about two minutes out, and Xave needs about ten to meet up with us. Are we moving, or staying?”

“Moving.”

Jace goes to his wardrobe and yanks the doors open. “Steel or silver?”

“Both.”

“Good answer.” He pulls a few items out from the box at the bottom of his wardrobe, where he keeps some of our weapons.

He hands me a gun, a gravity knife, and an old-school switchblade. I tuck them away as he does the same with his gun. Jace doesn’t go anywhere without at least one blade on him, and I wait as he adds a few more to the ones he’s already carrying. “Time to end a few royal lineages,” he says as we head for the door together.

“Do you think they orchestrated the blackout?” I ask as we stride into the hall.

“I’m gonna say yes because the chances of the timing being that perfect are about zero,” Jace says. “But this is way above their skill set. There’s no way they didn’t get outside help.”

A few of the guys are out of their rooms and talking, but no one pays us any attention as we hurry to the stairs.

The main floor and lobby are relatively empty, and the few guys we see give us a wide berth as we pass and we leave through the main doors.

“Who are we killing?” Killian asks, falling into step with us when we meet up with him near the main gate.

Killian might be our cousin, but he’s more like a brother to us, and we weren’t just raised like brothers, we sort of are.

The thing about our branch of the family tree is that it’s decidedly wreath-shaped since our dads are brothers and our mothers were identical twins. That makes us genetically morethan cousins, but not full bio siblings, so we’re sort of half siblings while still having two different sets of parents.

That’s created a bond between the three of us that’s as unbreakable as the one between Jace and me, and I know I’ll always be able to count on Killian to step up when I need him to, the same as he’ll always be able to count on me to do the same for him.

And right now, I need his help destroying the assholes who dared to even think about touching Myles.

The streetlights around us flicker a few times, then flip back on as the power is restored.

“About time,” Jace pulls his phone out of his pocket. “The security cams should be back online and that means we can finally track those fuckers.”

We pause walking so Jace can do his thing and break into the security feeds. He studies his phone for what feels like an eternity, but when he eventually looks up, the gleam in his eyes tells me he found them.

“Got ’em.” He shoves his phone into his pocket. “And Myles isn’t with them.”

“What do you mean?” I ask as we take off toward King territory with Jace in the lead.

“I saw five of them coming out of the woods about halfway between Boone and their house carrying bags and looking sus as fuck. I’m guessing they panicked when the power came back on and ditched the G.I. Joe duds to try and blend in when people start venturing outside again.”

“You said Myles wasn’t with them?” I press.