Savage Sanctuary (Crowne Point #5)

Chapter 1

ONE

GEMMA

When I was a little girl, my friends used to dream of meeting their Prince Charming. I dreamed of meeting the guy who would ruin me. As we grew up, their dreams became less about pumpkins and glass slippers, and more about Lambos and Manolo Blahniks.

Mine never changed.

I knew a love like that couldn’t exist, one not sprung from my dreams, but my nightmares.

Until I met him.

“Gemma.” My friend Blaire waved a freshly manicured hand in my face. “Earth to Gemma. You’ve been zoned out, like, all night. Did you already take something?”

“It’s rude not to share, Gemma,” my other friend Kennedy pointed out.

“Says the girl who kept the year eleven test answers to herself,” I said.

We were at the Underworld, the hottest club on the East Coast, and also the one place in Crowne Point where no paparazzi could reach us.

Our private booth was shaped like a horseshoe and the center of the table was filled with a bucket of ice, more Dom than we’d ever drink, and truffle fries.

Beyond us, the dance floor undulated with bodies.

“Yeah! I bombed that test,” Blaire said, indignant through a mouthful of fries she would later purge. “My dad had to buy a new wing so I didn’t fucking fail.”

“Did you sleep with Mr. Larsen?” Kennedy rounded on Blaire. “No? Then shut the fuck up.”

“Dude, what?” I started laughing. “He was, like, seventy.”

Kennedy chucked one of Blaire’s fries at our heads. “He was a very young-looking fifty—oh my God, shut up, shut up! They’re here.”

“No way,” Blaire said without looking up from her phone. “They’re never here.”

As she spoke, our gazes drifted up to the balcony through confetti falling like glitter. Their backs were to the club, and the magenta light from the dance floor illuminated them like shadows of hell. The four boys who owned this club, who ruled everything criminal in Crowne Point.

The Horsemen.

Blaire coughed on her fries. “Holy shit, all four of them?”

“What goes on up there?” Kennedy whispered.

“I heard they torture people, that’s why the music is so loud,” Blaire said.

My phone vibrated for the one hundredth time of the night.

“Is it seriously your mom again?” Blaire asked. “Since when does she give a shit?”

“Since our world imploded.” I rolled my eyes. My mother didn’t used to be so…involved. We had a nice deal going. As long as I was who every girl wanted to be and who every boy wanted to fuck, she left me alone.

But then, in an instant, my brother dissolved a marriage my mother had been planning since I was thirteen.

For Tansy Crowne, there was no greater achievement than marrying someone of status.

Which meant all her time—and mine—was focused on finding that someone.

For all her class and subversion, my mother had all but hired a skywriter: Gemma Crowne Desperately in Need of Dick.

“Do you really think they murder people?” Kennedy asked, drawing our attention back to the four boys lurking above us.

“They’re just a bunch of burn-out druggie losers from the townie school—no offense, Gemma.

” Blaire swiped the powder beneath her nose and grimaced at me, the girl whose grandfather made her drop out of our boarding school to go to said townie school.

“This whole town is so without culture they have to invent weird cults.”

“I’m starting to come down,” I groaned, rubbing my temples.

“I still have bars!” Blaire said. “And powder!”

“I have crystal—”

“No one wants your meth, Kennedy,” Blaire said, cutting her off. “When your fucking teeth fall out, we’re not gonna be nice about it.”

My friends littered pills and lined up powder on the sparkly black table as a server approached with a drink.

“We didn’t order anything,” I said, waving him away. There was always some guy who thought buying the Gemma Crowne a twelve-dollar drink meant I’d want to hop in his pants.

When I reached to grab a xanny, the tray was placed in my path.

The tray was exactly like the rest, except that glittering rubies cut like pomegranates were sprinkled along the circumference. My phone vibrated again, two words bright on the screen.

You’re late.

“Oh my God!” Kennedy exclaimed. “He’s looking down.”

“Who?” Blaire asked.

“The Reaper.”

My gaze shifted again to the four shadows looming over the club. One had put his elbows on the railing, leaning just a little bit forward. He took a puff of something, probably weed—he hated cigarettes—eyes narrowing on me.

A bang louder than a gunshot sounded and more glitter fell from the ceiling.

I shot out of the leather couch. “I…gotta pee.”

Glitter fell like sparkling rain while a slow, upbeat rhythm thrummed. I wove through faceless grinding bodies.

I didn’t really have a plan.

Just had to move.

Postpone the inevitable, I guess.

I settled into a shadowy corner, my back to the club, but knew I was being watched. Because even the people who frequented the upper deck didn’t know this club’s true nature. Like the cameras placed strategically, recording their every move, to later be used as blackmail if necessary.

I eyed one in the black chandelier—

“The Reaper’s girl down here without the Reaper?”

You don’t grow up in Crowne Point without hearing the smoky rumors of what happened when the Horsemen claimed their girl.

But that wasn’t me, and it never would be.

Something was different about this guy. Different from all the other guys holding whatever brand of whiskey was in vogue now, chatting up every girl who would listen, playing the numbers game.

He was older, maybe late forties, early fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair. He was smoking weed openly, and he didn’t even glance up from his phone. Like calling me out as belonging to the Underworld’s most notorious was just like saying hey.

I was also pretty sure the two men in charcoal-gray suits just off to the side were not here to party, but packing heat.

I stepped to him. “You afraid?”

He took a puff of his joint, still not looking up from his phone.

The man kept ignoring me, so I plucked the joint from his hand. He raised a hand as one of his guards took a step toward me. The guard stilled.

“I’m not here for you.”

Who are you here for?

“Oh, but you could be.” I took a deep draw of smoke into my lungs, relishing the hazy peace that soon followed.

There’s something wrong with me.

Mentally.

Emotionally.

Soul deep.

A horrible hurricane hit Crowne Point a year after my father’s death. I remember it as the only time my mother hugged me—us. She wrapped all of us together in a blanket down in the servants’ quarters as the wind slammed against the wall.

My mother said things under her breath that night. Things I’d never heard her utter before or since. About God. About her love, for us.

I remember not being afraid.

I was excited.

The chaos of the wind had fed something inside me. The morning after, I walked among the ruins. Wind had ripped off the black shingles of Crowne Hall and the facade was broken toothed. Branches lay scattered among the beach and blocked Main Street and I felt…peace.

Not just for the first time since my father’s death—for the first time in my life.

Among the desolation and devastation, I took a big breath of the brackish after-storm air. The smell of something new, rebirth that comes only after something terrible.

I remember thinking then I wasn’t normal. Everyone else had wrinkles in their brows, and I was smiling. I eventually found a facsimile of that peace…in pills. And one night, I tasted the real thing again—in him.

But it was so small, so brief, it had been like a drop of wine in the ocean.

Hot and Scary Older Guy, heretofore known as HSOG, slowly lifted his head, eyes locking with mine. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to play with fire?”

“My mother taught me not to look under the bed for monsters. I guess that made me want to look more.”

HSOG laughed, hard, and put his hands in his pockets. “Do you know who I am?”

I blew smoke in his face. “Someone scary?”

He laughed again. I got close to him, until I could taste the musky smoke on his lips—and was promptly yanked back and behind a wall of muscle.

Two out of the four Horsemen.

“This one is off limits,” the first one spoke.

“She belongs to us,” the second added.

Behind me spoke a third. “Unfortunately.”

I’d recognize that low voice anywhere.

Grim Reyes.

The king of the Underworld and leader of the Horsemen. The man who didn’t want my soul but held it hostage anyway—the Reaper.