Page 115 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

“Eat,” I say, loading up a cracker with cheese and some sort of jam and handing it to her.

“For me?”

It’s all for you.But I don’t say that. I shove a chocolate into my mouth and continue.

“We were discovered one day, kissing in a nook in the chapel. I was punished, but Sara? She disappeared. I searched all over. Even snuck into the girls’ wing to ask the girls what they knew. I wondered if she’d been sent home, but they said that she hadn’t, that she was simply taken away. A few weeks later, one of her friends smuggled a note to me telling me that I had to come. That it was about Sara. I followed the directions the girl gave me to asmall stone room at the far end of the basement, adjacent to the cemetery. It was full of caskets.”

“Oh, Luka,” she says.

I can’t believe I’m telling her this. I haven’t spoken of it to anybody, not even Orton, though he knows what I saw.

“I started throwing open the lids, wrenching them apart with my bare hands. That’s when I found her body. She’d been beaten. Killed.”

“No.”

“Savaged, really. I couldn’t see straight, and I went wild. By then, the alarm was up. Three of the schoolmasters rushed down to subdue me and bring me back. They had stun guns they’d use on the boys, and I don’t know if they missed or if they jammed some electricity into my veins and I just had too much fury for it to even matter. I ripped those things out of their hands, and I bashed in their heads with a small boulder. I just bashed and bashed. I was so angry, so grief-stricken, and killing them? It was beyond cathartic.”

“Is that when you made the bag of rocks that you swung around by a rope?”

“Yup. I was an unstoppable killing machine making my way down through the main hall in the chapel. I grabbed keys at one point and started letting boys out of their cells in the basement, and that’s when it became a full-on bloody uprising. The schoolmasters and priests employed guards from the local area, but once these guards saw what was happening, they simply left.”

“Wow.”

“Someone thought to let the girls out, too, and they went for their teachers and nuns. They’d been amassing weapons, as it turned out, making knives out of pencils and combs. We all had a lot of pent-up rage, which was very unfortunate for the people running the place when the shit finally hit the fan. Calls were put out for help, but the local officials were slow to react. Nobody liked the church down there—not this church, anyway. I killed somany people that day. Once I started, it was hard to stop. I suppose it was in my blood.”

“They were your tormenters. It would be in anybody’s blood.”

I kiss the top of her head, just fucking loving her style.

“Orton was in there, too. He was my friend. Once we got out, we fell into the mercenary life. Twenty years we were in the field.”

“Fighting for whoever hired you?”

“We had our standards, but that didn’t mean we were good guys. We met Storm a few years in. He’s been with me since.”

“You inspired two loyal followers before you even took over the Ghost Hound Clan,” she observes.

“I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly. Orton has a dream, and Storm has a debt, at least in his mind.”

“Oh, yeah, okay. Nothing about you.”

“Everything’s a transaction,” I say. “That’s what you learn out there.”

She takes a chocolate-covered strawberry, inspecting it from all sides before deciding to take a bite off the end.

“Anyway, we weren’t planning on coming back. Orton wanted to because he always felt like our place was in the clan. But I wanted nothing to do with the Zogajes. We were in Tunisia one winter and ran into someone from one of the rival clans. That’s when I found out what really happened to Sara. It wasn’t the schoolmasters and priests who did that to her. It was two men sent by my own brother.”

She straightens up, eyes wide.

“Not that the schoolmasters and priests were blameless, but it turned out that my brother was getting reports about me. When Sara and I were discovered meeting in secret, he sent people after her.”

“He went after Sara just to... be cruel to you?”

“That was very on-brand for Alteo. Not that I’m trying to excuse myself. Ultimately, it’s my fault she died?—”

“No, nobody could fault you for having a girlfriend.”

“I asked her to meet me. I engineered all of our meetings, and I got her killed. And I didn’t even avenge her death well—if I hadn’t been so rash, so quick to unleash maximum bloody chaos, I might have taken the time to ask a few questions and get to the truth. My brother and those who helped him kill her wouldn’t have been walking free for so many years after.” I grab a cheese square. “Not that I’m sorry I killed the St. Neri people. I just would have liked to kill Alteo and his guys sooner.”