25. Jax
JAX
“Well, that was fun.” Jace tosses his bag on his bed and rolls his neck in that way he does when he’s pissed.
“Yeah,” I agree and drop my bag on the floor beside my bed.
We got notice from our dad that he wanted us to come home for the weekend and help him with some business. He didn’t say what it was, just that it was a good learning opportunity for us.
We were already in the air when we got the message that he had to cancel because he and our uncles had to leave town to deal with someone, and the jet was forced to turn around and bring us back to school.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened, but it would be nice to have gotten the message before we wasted half of our day.
“You going to see what Myles is up to?” Jace asks as he stretches his arms over his head.
“In a bit. He’s talking with his friends right now. I’ll wait until he’s done.”
The lights flicker off, plunging the room into darkness.
There’s an eerie silence, then a loud hum as the generator kicks in, and a few seconds later, the emergency lights flick on.
The emergency lights are just bright enough so we can move around without bumping into things, since most of the energy from the generator is needed to keep the building’s security running.
“Seriously?” Jace asks as he walks over to his desk and digs out a flashlight. “When was the last time we had a power failure?”
“It’s been a while,” I say as my hackles rise and my instincts start screaming at me that something is wrong.
“Is it just me, or does this not feel like a simple power failure?” he asks, shining the light around our room as he looks for any signs of a threat.
“It’s not just you.” I walk over to our window. We’re high enough that I should be able to see lights from the other buildings around us and some light pollution from the rest of campus, but there’s nothing but darkness. “And it’s not just us.”
“The block is out?” Jace asks as I turn away from the window.
“Not just the block, it looks like everywhere is out.”
“A campus-wide blackout?” Jace tosses me the flashlight and strides over to my desk, presumably to get the one I keep in there. “I don’t buy it. Something is going on.”
I pull out my phone and open the app for the cameras in Myles’s room, then tap on the camera I put on his dresser.
The video feed fills my screen.
My blood instantly boils when I see a group of guys dressed like action movie rejects surrounding Myles as he lies on the floor.
“Who are we killing?” Jace asks, already striding toward me with a hard look on his face.
“Whoever the fuck these assholes are. Every. Single. One of them just signed their death warrants,” I say in an icy voice as dark anger mixes with my already brewing rage.
We both watch my screen as two of those assholes haul Myles off the floor. One of them puts a fucking bridle gag in his mouth, and another slips a sack of some sort over his face.
Jace’s hand on my shoulder is the only thing keeping me from losing my shit, and I focus on the video, looking at it objectively and not focusing on what they’re doing to Myles.
We watch them drag him out of the room as he kicks and writhes and does everything he can to be an all-around pain in the ass.
“Atta boy,” Jace says softly. “He’s keeping his cool, and he’s fighting. He’ll be okay.”
“He better be. Otherwise I’m going to burn this fucking school to the ground looking for anyone who had any hand in doing this to him.”
“You and me both, brother.” Jace’s voice is as dark and empty as mine as he unlocks his phone and types something. “Can you see anything that tells us who these fuckers are?”
“Not from that angle.” I switch to the feed in the statue that’s still on his night table, but it’s facing his bed and not his room so nothing that happened would have been caught in the feed.
I switch to the camera I put over his doorway and check the footage in the cloud.
“Killer and Xave are on their way,” he says. “See anything?”
“Not yet,” I tell Jace as I study the image of the group crowded around his door. One of them has a key, but it’s for his old lock. He tries to use it, and when it doesn’t work, he kicks the door open, and they rush inside one after the other like a dollar store SWAT.
“Do you see his phone in his room?”
I flip to the camera on his dresser and access the recorded footage. My blood starts boiling again as I watch his phone fall from his hand when he’s body-slammed into his dresser. “Yeah, it’s on the floor. Why?”
“Because I put a tracker in it.” He taps on his phone screen a few times.
“But that doesn’t help us if he doesn’t have his phone on him.
And you were right. It’s a campus-wide blackout.
Even the school security cams are out, so tracking them isn’t an option.
Is there anything on here that helps us figure out who the fuck has him or where they’re taking him? ”
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 more than 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.
“Nope, just them. It looks like the power came back after he escaped, so there’s no way to see where he went. But we know where they are, and that’s good enough for me.”
“Me too.” Killian glances at me. “You good?”
“No.”
“Fair enough.” He turns his attention back to the paths. “Are you going to lose your shit when we find them?”
“Probably.”
“Good.” His tone is as dark as mine.
“About two clicks that way.” Jace points in the general direction of King House. “We should intercept them before they make it back to the more populated part of campus.”
“Lead the way, brother,” I tell Jace and fall into step behind him as the three of us run toward where he last saw those assholes.