47. Kane
FORTY-SEVEN
KANE
I sat in the driver’s seat of the white Suburban that we had hidden behind a hedge at the far end of the lot. Near the sidewalk where Sophia Damascus walked her son to and from school each day.
It was the only time we thought she might not be being watched, though undoubtedly, there would be a tracker on her phone.
We’d made a pass in front of their house right before dawn when we’d made it to Eugene, Oregon, verifying her piece of shit husband’s truck was there. That it was the same as the intel Cash had gotten that he drove a brand-new gray Tundra.
He typically left for work at seven thirty in the morning and arrived back at just after five, though based on the information Sophia’s best friend had given, it wasn’t atypical for him to drop in at random hours throughout the day to make sure she remained bent to his twisted, tyrannical will.
We needed to nab them before they got onto school property. Back where we’d remain invisible, and they’d simply disappear into the morning.
It was the only way we were going to get them out of this without a showdown. Without anyone else realizing what was happening. We needed them to become little more than a missing person’s report.
And we needed Sophia’s cooperation to do it.
For her not to freak out when we grabbed them. For her to remember the hints that her best friend had given her that someone was coming. That there was going to be a way out of the torment that plagued their lives.
That purpose pounded inside me. The one I’d made for my mother on that fateful night when I realized the path I’d been traveling had to come to an end. When I stood there realizing who I was meant to be.
To fight for those who couldn’t fight for themselves.
In every way.
“This feel off to you?” Theo asked. He itched in the passenger seat, dude antsy as fuck, continually peering through the window at the slip of street we could see from our vantage point.
She wasn’t due to walk down that street with her six-year-old son for seven more minutes.
I blew out through the tension that thickened the air. “We knew this extraction might be messy.”
It was the whole reason he and I were there. The reason we’d taken over for River when this was normally his gig. To protect him from the added dangers when he had his family he needed to be present for.
Now he was standing guard over mine while I was here.
The tattoo on the back of my hand throbbed. The stacked Ss and the wilting rose on top. I’d never been so sure that there was no turning back.
“There’s just…something in the air. Don’t like it.” In agitation, Theo ran a tattooed hand through his crop of black hair.
“Nothing but the fact that bastard is breathing the same air as us from a mile down the street.”
Where he worked as the manager at an autobody shop.
Theo scratched at his jaw. “Think we should just take him out and rid the world of his stain rather than putting Sophia and her son through the bullshit of starting new lives. ”
Something unsettled rumbled in my stomach, and I clutched both hands on the steering wheel. “Not the way of Sovereign Sanctum.”
We did our best to keep it clean unless circumstances required otherwise.
It was the safest for everyone involved. At least, that’s what we’d decided when we’d established it.
Droll laughter rolled out of Theo, and he swung his attention toward me, staring me down. “That’s not the way you do it, though, is it?”
My chest tightened. “What are you talking about?” I defended.
Disbelief filled his features. “Don’t play dumb, Kane. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Fuck. He knew. How the fuck did he know?
“Not Sanctum business.” I tried to assert it casually, though it cracked through the clench of my teeth.
Air puffed from his nose. “Sanctum is family, and you know it, so it most definitely makes it our business.” He paused for a strained beat before he continued. “Know why you do it. Know what you did and what you continue to do.”
What the fuck?
Adrenaline pumped through my system. “Theo…”
I struggled to find a way to explain my actions. Why I’d gone behind Sanctum’s back for all these years.
His head barely shook. “You did the right fucking thing. Those bastards deserved to die, just like they still do.” He shrugged a nonchalant shoulder. “Just so you and I are on the same page. And now that you have Maci and Emery in your life, figured you might need backup.”
“Won’t get you involved in that.”
“Look around us, Kane. We’re all neck-fucking-deep. It’s our destiny. Ridding the world of the scum, because sometimes what it takes are monsters to wipe it clean.”
He glanced down the street, his voice dropping low. “Because there are innocents who need us…just like them.”
I shifted so I could see where his focus had gone.
To a dark-haired woman who was coming up the sidewalk with a little boy’s hand in hers. She wore a willowy floral dress that swished around her ankles. She appeared so downtrodden it made my insides ache.
Another stark reminder of why we did what we did.
It grew thicker.
A dense severity that blazed in the space.
Theo stirred, and I could almost hear the screaming of his spirit. The way aggression and rage slipped beneath the surface of his skin at the sight of her.
“Look at them.” Theo’s words barely broke the air.
“It’s why we’re here, brother.”
That strain climbed and climbed, becoming suffocating as they approached, the woman completely unaware that we’d come for her where we were concealed behind the hedge.
Thinking she would go on living the life that she was living.
No more.
This was it.
“Go,” Theo ordered the second they were close enough, and we both clicked open our doors and flew out.
The second we rounded the hedge, she whirled in our direction, a gasp of shock and crippling fear tearing out of her before it turned into determination. Into the same kind of fight I’d seen out of my Little Warrior.
The determination to survive even when the light had been dimmed.
“No.”
Before we could explain ourselves, she grabbed her son and swept him off his feet, guarding his head as she turned to run.
Theo’s voice curled like a dart behind them.
Deep.
Quiet.
Piercing.
“We aren’t here to hurt you. Morgan sent us.”
Sophia stalled with her back to us, her shoulders heaving up and down with her harsh breaths. She didn’t turn to look, ready to bolt back into action at the first indication that she needed to .
Theo took one step forward, and his words curled on the breeze. “She asked you that if you had the chance to get out, if you would take it. This is that chance.”
Silence hovered thick. She continued to face forward with her son pinned to her chest, the child not making a sound, though I could feel the terror wafting from him.
A type of terror so distinct.
So familiar.
The same kind I’d been in for my entire childhood.
Finally, she turned a fraction, her son’s face buried in her neck, chaos bounding around her.
The pounding of a violent storm.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“Help.” Theo stated it simply.
Her chin lifted. “What do I have to do?”
Theo gestured with his chin at the outline of the Suburban barely visible through the foliage. Only noticeable when attention was brought to it. “You get in the SUV, and you never look back.”
Incredulity flared through her features, and she tightened her hold on the child.
“And I’m just supposed to trust you? What if he sent you?” Her tone went raspy at that.
Rage flared between me and Theo. No question, we both were thinking the same thing as we saw the sheer panic the idea evoked in her.
The traumas she’d been inflicted.
The agony that she’d sustained.
Theo was right. We should just end him. Wipe out that possibility.
“Morgan said…” She blinked as she processed through the memory. “I…I thought she meant it hypothetically.”
“The question is, did you mean it when you said yes?” My question hovered in the dense air.
She shifted, fear darting her attention left and right before she turned her fierce gaze back to us. “Yes.”
“Then we need to go, and we go now,” I told her .
She hesitated for one more beat, glancing back and forth again, before she came running our way.
We hurried her to the SUV and ushered her into the back seat, the blacked-out windows obscuring that she was there.
We already had a car seat ready, and she fumbled to get her son buckled while I jumped into the driver’s seat and turned over the ignition.
It roared, and Theo jumped into the back with them, sitting guard as I slowly pulled from our hiding place. I took it cool and casual as we bounced along the side road as if we were just another person going about their day.
While two fragile lives were getting ready to change.
Gravity pulled in the cab of the Suburban. Confusion and hope. Dread and fear.
“Is this really happening?” Sophia whispered into the disorder.
“It’s real,” Theo rumbled, and I could hear the frenzy he was holding back. The violence that pulsed through his veins as he watched for things to go south.
“What happens now?” she asked, disbelief in her voice.
“We take you to a safehouse where you’ll stay for a few months until you’re ready to move on to your new lives,” I explained.
“Out in the open? He’ll hunt for us. He won’t stop until he finds us.”
“He won’t be able to. You’ll have a completely new identity.”
“How? Are you…part of the witness protection program or something?”
Theo sent me a knowing glance through the rearview mirror, and I mumbled, “Something like that.”
Not at all except for the fact that we would do everything it took to conceal them. To keep them safe.
The longest time passed as I took a few turns through Eugene, covering our tracks in a maze of turns that led us farther out of the city. Then I took to a desolate two-lane road that would lead us to where we’d left the actual truck we’d be driving back to Moonlit Ridge.
The thick forest grew up close to the edge of the road as we traveled farther and farther from the nightmares that they’d lived .
“How do you make sure he can never find us?” she finally asked.
I didn’t have time to answer before we were suddenly rammed in the back.
A scream tore through at the impact, Sophia’s fear blistering like a shockwave through the cab.
“Shit,” I grunted. The Suburban lurched forward, and my hands jerked at the wheel as I struggled to keep from skidding out of control.
Theo’s attention flew behind him out the back window.
“Tundra.” He gritted it as he pulled the gun from the holster hidden under his shirt.
Fuck.
“He’ll kill us,” she wheezed, gripping onto Theo’s leg where he sat beside her in the back.
“He won’t have the chance,” Theo promised.
He cocked his gun.
We should have known it had been too easy. Getting them into the SUV and out of town without a hitch.
The roar of the Tundra’s engine blazed up behind us again. I prepared myself for impact. This time, he clipped me on the left rear bumper.
It threw us into a skid, the tires squealing as we fishtailed down the winding road.
I fought it.
The way our Suburban wanted to fly into a spin.
There was no stopping it when he hit me again.
Our SUV hooked hard to the right, sending the tail end whipping around to the front. Tires squealed as I slammed on the brakes.
We landed facing the fiend who’d come to a stop, me staring down the beast through the windshield.
Two beats of stilled eternity passed.
Then we fast-forwarded into action.
He threw open his door, and Theo shouted, “Get down!” a second before gunshots rang out.
They pinged against the metal, and Theo and I were out, our guns in hand as we returned fire. We ducked low behind our doors as we exchanged shots.
The asshole began to come out from behind his door.
Brazen motherfucker who continued to take shot after shot.
“Take that bastard down,” Theo gritted as he ducked back into the Suburban to reload, and I straightened, coming out from around the door, too, trying to draw him away from the SUV.
I couldn’t let him get to them. Couldn’t let him get near them. No way would I allow him to continue to inflict the kind of torture that had been inflicted on my mother.
I saw it in his eyes.
That disgusting rage that made him think he had the right.
That he deserved the foul, obscene control.
“I knew it. I knew it. Knew that bitch was up to no good,” he spat.
A thousand memories from my childhood came battering into me.
“You piece of shit,” I gritted. I fought to keep my trembling hand steady as I aimed, ready for when he came out far enough in front of his hood that his chest and arms were exposed.
I took the shot.
He roared when it pierced him in the shoulder, and he fumbled backward two steps. Only he rebounded in a flash, fury and adrenaline flooding him as he ran around the front in a barrage of bullets.
I dove for cover, gasping as a shock of pain ripped up my side just as I slammed against the ground.
He kept moving, coming my way, a nonstop barrage of bullets pinging and flying.
Dread sank to the pit of my stomach when the man was suddenly standing right in front of me, and my limbs quivered as I tried to wrap my hand back around the handle of my gun.
My skin was clammy with dread. Sweat slicking my flesh in a searing cold.
The man hell-bent on bringing me to my end.
A single shot rang from out of nowhere, and the man dropped to his knees before he slumped facedown onto the dirt .
And the mayhem that surrounded us slipped into a tacky silence.
The bright sky suddenly burned too bright against my eyes. Spinning in a way that it shouldn’t.
A moan tore out of me, and Theo was suddenly there, rasping, “Oh, fuck. Kane.” He dropped to his knees and pressed his hands low on my side. “It’s okay, brother. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
And the only thing I could see behind my eyes were two faces.
Two sweet fucking smiles.
My Little Warrior and my Angel Face.
And I remembered the promise I had made that I would always make it back to them, just as Theo was on his cell, words raking in low desperation, “Dr. Reynolds…fuck…Kane was shot, and we’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. Tell me what the hell to do.”