Page 73 of The King of Hearts (The Raven Group #1)

I scowl. “You can barely sit up in that fucking chair. You’ll be dead before we get there, and then Savina will be lost to me for good.”

“And you’d be okay with that. Me dying, that is?” he asks.

“I don’t give a fuck either way,” I growl. “Now give me the fucking directions.”

I’m two seconds away from snapping his fucking neck. The only thing that stops me is his knowledge of Savina’s location.

“It’ll be faster if I show you, Matteo.”

“Don’t call me that.” No one has called me that name in years, and hearing it now grates on my nerves. “My name is Ryker.”

“Ryker,” he murmurs.

“Jesus, fuck,” I grunt. “Let’s go,” I order.

If taking him with me gets me to Savina faster, then so be it. But I’ll mutilate his body if he dies before I get there.

He’s slow in getting up from his chair, and I’m disinclined to help him.

“With me,” I tell Marcelo as I pass by him.

The group follows me out the front door.

Cassio, probably the nicest of the bunch, stays by my father’s side as he walks down the steps.

My patience is hanging by a thin thread as I wait for them to approach the car.

Marcelo gets in the front passenger seat, with my father taking the back seat with Emo.

Alexander, Bishop, and Cassio go to Bishop’s car that’s parked behind mine.

The doors are barely closed before I’m hauling ass out of the driveway and through the opened gate. I turn left out of the driveway, heading toward the center of the island.

I’m so strung tight that my hands grip the steering wheel with a death grip, my joints aching.

“How is your mother?” I hear my father ask from the back seat.

“Not doing this right now,” I bark in response. “Just give me the directions as I need them, otherwise keep your fucking mouth shut.”

“Ryker.”

“There’s nothing else I want to hear from you right now.”

The car goes silent after that, except for my father’s gravelly voice when he issues where I need to turn. The island isn’t too large, but when you get to the inner part where there are less houses and no storefronts, the roads aren’t paved and they’re uneven as shit.

As I drive, I’m conscious of my father in the back seat. I want to know where he’s been for the past twenty years and why he looks half dead, but I can’t let my head take me down that road. I don’t have the mental capacity to take on those thoughts right now. My sole focus is getting to Savina.

“There’s a stake sticking out of the ground ahead on the right with red paint on the top. Right after that, there should be a turn. It’ll be overgrown, so it’s hard to see,” my father says.

I come up to the red-painted stake a moment later and take a right like he indicated. The foliage is overgrown, but there’s a small path about the width of a car that’s been matted down, indicating someone has been this way recently.

My heart slams against my chest the closer we get to our destination.

“How much farther?”

“It’ll be up ahead. There’s a big oak tree. It’s about fifty feet beyond that.”

When I see the oak tree in the distance, I press harder on the gas. The car bounces and lands hard on the frame when I hit a deep hole.

“What am I walking into here?” I ask my father. “Keep it short. I don’t need all of the family dramas between you and your brother. I just need to know what I’m dealing with.”

He’s silent for a moment, and when he does speak, his voice is hard, mimicking the tone I remember as a child.

My memories of my father are faint, but I remember him always being soft when he spoke to my mother or me.

It was only when he was around others when he lost that softness, and the sterner side came out.

“My best advice, and I’m sorry to say you won’t like it, is go in thinking the worst,” he says. “Because I guarantee, whatever you can conjure in your head, he’s thought of worse.”

I grind my molars. There’s no way for him to know the shit that’s going through my head. My definition of “worse” and his, I’m sure, are different. I have a very active imagination when it comes to torture.

“How do you know this is where she was taken? You said you and Mother were the only people who knew of this place.”

“It was something Theo said the last time he came to visit me. He mentioned the Vault, which is what Miles Ellington called it.”

“Is Aiden part of this?”

I look in the rearview mirror and notice my father’s jaw twitching at the mention of my brother’s name.

“Yes,” he answers in a hard voice. “Although he now goes by the name Grant. Theo must have had it changed after he took him.”

“Did you know before you disappeared that he was alive?”

His eyes meet mine in the mirror. “No, I didn’t find out until later. It must have been a few months after I was taken.”

I break my stare with him and focus back on the road.

I can’t think of a plausible reason why he would lie, so I take him at his word.

This whole thing is a fucked-up mess. My fucking brother is alive.

My father is alive, and he has a brother whom I knew nothing about.

A brother who apparently, along with my brother, kidnapped my wife and is doing fuck-knows-what to her.

A few minutes later, I pull to a stop beside the oak tree and get out of the car.

As I wait for my father to exit, I check the clips in my guns, although nothing has changed since this afternoon when I first loaded them.

I have another two full clips in my pocket.

Across the top of the car, I hear the snick of Marcelo checking his own weapon.

“Give my father the one in the glove box,” I tell my guard. He bends in the car and a moment later, holds out the gun to Antonio.

“The safety?—”

“I know how it works,” my father interrupts.

Car doors open and close behind us, and Alexander, Bishop, and Cassio come up to my side. Bishop already has his gun out, gripped in his right hand down by his side. Alexander and Cassio are empty-handed, but I know they have their own pieces.

“Where’s the entrance?” I ask my father.

“Follow me.”

I don’t know where he gets the strength from, but he stalks off past the oak tree with sure steps. There’s a slight limp, and his shoulders are still slumped, but his gait is stronger than it was earlier.

We come up to a set of thick bushes. They’re a bit greener than the surrounding shrubbery.

If a random person came along, they wouldn’t notice the difference, but if you look closely enough, you can tell they’re fake.

He reaches down inside one of the bushes, and there’s a soft snick.

When he reaches further down and grunts as he tries to lift a door, I move beside him and take over the task.

I don’t even know why he bothered. The door is heavy as fuck.

There’s no way he could have lifted it on his own in his condition.

“How big is it down there?” Alexander asks, peering down into the black hole I just uncovered. There’s a set of metal rungs that lead down into a pit of blackness.

“It’s the size of a small three-bedroom house,” Antonio answers. “At the bottom, take a left. That’ll lead to the main part. The right only houses a bank of generators and the electrical room.”

“Are there cameras? Alarms that’ll alert them of our presence?”

“Does it fucking matter?” Bishop growls.

I glower at him. “No, but it takes away the element of surprise.”

“Yes to both.”

“Fucking great,” Bishop mutters.

I slip both guns into the waistband in the back of my pants and take the first rung. I glare at the others. “Savina’s safety is the most important thing. She gets out no matter what. But if possible, I want Aiden alive. I’ll deal with him.”

“Ryker—” Antonio starts, but I cut him off.

“Do not fucking ask me to spare him. I don’t give a fuck who he is. It only matters what he’s done. He took something precious that belongs to me. For that, he’ll suffer in the most horrific way possible.”

I’m two seconds away from pulling my gun and shooting him between the eyes. Now that I have Savina’s location, I don’t need the bastard anymore. Only my mother is what stops me.

“Son, I wasn’t going to ask you to spare him.

” I grit my teeth at hearing him call me son.

He hasn’t been my father for many years.

“He and my brother kept me locked up, barely alive, and have stolen years of my life away from you and your mother. That man is not the son who was taken from us years ago. He’s pure evil, and it’s my brother’s fault.

I was only asking to be present when you decide what you’re going to do with him. ”

I give him a tight nod and make my way down the tunnel.

The height is only about ten feet but it’s dark as shit once I touch the concrete floor.

Alexander is directly behind me. I look to the right, but don’t see much.

I look left, and about another ten feet, there are soft yellow lights lining a hall.

The lights are dim enough that I still can’t make out what’s down there.

My father comes up beside me and talks loud enough for everyone to hear.

“About thirty feet down, there’s a door on the left that leads into the kitchen.

The bedrooms are all situated on the same side of the house, which, going by the picture you showed me, they have her in the master bedroom.

Through the kitchen and dining room, then take a right. The left leads to the living room.”

I don’t bother muting my steps as I walk down the dark hall.

The cameras and alarms have already alerted my brother and uncle that we’re here, so there’s no sense in trying to hide it.

When they sent me that picture, they knew I’d eventually find their hidey hole, so they wanted me here.

I just don’t know why. I could have asked my father if he knew what this is about, and maybe I should have, but the reasons don’t matter.

What’s important is getting back what belongs to me.