24. Rebel
Once Rage and Thanatos finally leave, I enlist Ruin’s help in cleaning up the broken glass in the entryway. Neither of us talk about where the vase came from or who brought it inside Celia’s house. But if I know my younger brother like I think I do, he’s thinking about it just as much as I am.
There was very little that survived the house fire that tore our family apart. My brothers and I made it, obviously, but not only did our mom perish in the flames, so did all of our belongings. Not that we had much to lose to begin with, but that stupid fucking vase—the one Dad filled with flowers any time he sobered up enough to suck up to our mom—somehow emerged unscathed.
It’s a sick fucking joke that it’s still covered in ash like the fire happened only yesterday, but what’s even more fucked up is that it reappeared at all.
Dad brought Mom flowers the day she died, and the sick fuck decided to do the same to Celia the day he tried to abduct her.
I can’t wait to gut the bastard.
Glancing over my shoulder at Celia, I find her perched on the couch watching me and Ruin clean up. She’s sipping on one of those sparkling waters bougie girls love and idly wiggling her toes on the coffee table. “You good, baby?” I ask, handing Ruin the dust pan. She hasn’t said a word since Rage and Thanatos left, stuck in her head with whatever’s on her mind. Ruin, similarly, is quiet as a mouse, focusing on the task at hand.
Man, fuck this.
I toss the broom to the floor and hop over the last pile of glass shards to get to Celia. She looks up only when I’m standing directly in front of her. “C’mon, let’s get out of here. Rage doesn’t have to know.”
Celia purses her lips. “He put a tracker in my phone, Rebel.”
“So leave it here.” I pluck the cell phone from her lap and toss it onto the couch beside her. “He’ll never know you’re gone. It’ll be just like last time.” Then, I snap the heart-shaped collar from her neck and drop it onto the coffee table.
Let’s see Rage find us now.
Celia’s eyebrows knit together. “But the last time he followed us, he showed up right when we were—” Her pupils dilate as the tiniest, little breath catches in her throat.
I can’t help but grin at my horny girl. “That’s right, baby, you gave him quite a show.” Licking my lips, I rub my palms up her thighs. She has the softest skin. Warm and pliant and so fucking sexy?—
An ear-shattering ringtone, some kind of popular pop song, pierces the air as Celia’s cell phone comes to life. She jumps a solid inch off the couch, but I clamp down on her knees to keep her still. “Go out with me. On a real date this time.”
The little wrinkle on her forehead drives me crazy. She’s overthinking things again. “But Rage told me not to leave the house. He says it isn’t safe.”
I click my tongue against my teeth. Such a goody-two-shoes. It’s fucking adorable. I gesture for Ruin to come over and join the convo, hoping that he’ll say something to convince her to go out with me.
With us. Whatever. He can come, too, as long as he stays in the car.
“Pleaaase,” I beg, giving her my best pout. It’s been years since I’ve had to literally beg for a girl’s attention, but thankfully, I’m cute as fuck, and Celia loves me.
My heart kicks into overdrive, revving up every part of my body like an engine. Damn, damn, damn, do I like the sound of that.
Celia loves me.
I repeat the phrase in my head, going over how nice it will be to hear her say those words out loud, while she checks her phone.
I love you, Rebel.
Stay with me, baby.
Please fuck me.
Okay, so there are a lot of things I’d love to hear her say, but the most important one is the evergreen I-L-Y.
Ruin finishes sweeping the broken glass into the trash and comes up beside Celia to peer over her head at her phone screen. She’s gone pale while checking her messages. “Who is it?” Ruin asks, sliding onto the couch beside her. Together, they read whatever’s on her screen, Celia’s lips moving as she pieces through the words.
Must be a long fucking message.
Suddenly, she jumps up and loses her grip on the phone. It crashes into my chest, and I have to scramble to catch it before it hits the floor. “Whoa, hey, what’s wrong?—”
“We have to leave now !” She squeezes around my body and rushes to the car keys hanging up in the kitchen. Once they’re in hand, she fumbles for her purse and slings it over her body so that it rests against her hip. “Come on, let’s go!”
Ruin is already jumping into motion, but it takes me longer to gather my wits. I don’t even have shoes on. “Celia, hold up.” I know that I was the one to suggest we get out of the house, but goddamn. Growling in frustration, I grab one of my shoes from under the kitchen table—where the hell is the other one?—and follow them into the garage. She’s already got the car running with Ruin riding shotgun.
Great, looks like I’ll be the third wheel.
I snag my missing Converse from the doorway and jump into the backseat. “When am I gonna ride up front?” Slipping on my shoes, I don’t bother hiding my annoyance. I bought her the car—I should get to sit up front one of these days!
“Read the text,” Ruin instructs, unmoved by my plight, “and buckle seatbelt.”
“You buckle your seatbelt,” I grumble under my breath. Flipping the phone over, I squint to read the latest voicemail while Celia backs out of the driveway. It’s from Sara, the chick Celia pays to mind the shop. The message doesn’t make sense, though, the speech-to-text system only picking up pieces of Sara’s voice rather than the whole thing. Another message comes through, this time as a text.
It’s a blurry picture of a woman tied to a chair, a raging inferno blazing behind her back. I read the previous messages as fast as I can, my stomach dropping. Sara isn’t the one sending these messages.
The killer tearing through our city is.
Another text comes through.
HURRY UP IF YOU WANT TO SEE HER ALIVE
Pinpricks of fear skitter down my arms as I lift the phone to my ear. There’s only one way to be sure that it’s our dad sending these messages, and that’s by playing the voicemail.
But… it might not be him. It could be anyone—a prank!—or a butt dial!—seriously, anyone could have stolen Sara’s phone. I bet it’s a bunch of college kids smoking pot in the science building, having a real laugh about scaring some stranger they’ve never met?—
A gruff, male voice crackles in my ear. He laughs, fucking laughs , as a girl in the background screams. “We miss you, Celia,” the man taunts, breathing heavily into the receiver. “I keep asking Sara when you’re coming back from your vacation, but she won’t stop screaming to answer me. I think she might be broken.” He chuckles again, making my skin crawl. “You shouldn’t have taken so long to come see us.”
“For fuck’s sake.” I pause the voicemail and go back to reading the automated text translation. I can’t stomach another second of that man’s voice crawling in my head.
I’ve been dying to see you again. I have a big surprise… don’t wait…tell my sons…
With a hiss, I slam my fist into the back of the Ruin’s headrest. “Goddammit!” Our bastard father did break into Celia’s house. He set up the red roses in the crystal vase—the twin taper candles on the dining room table—the broken glass pane in the back door.
He assaulted our woman and tried to kidnap her. “I’ll never forgive him,” I snarl, slamming Celia’s phone against Ruin’s shoulder. He takes the device from me and reads the message again, remaining silent. If anyone has a reason to hate our father, it’s Ruin.
But if anyone should be scared of him, that’s Ruin, too. The evil bastard has tried to kill him at least a half dozen times—some of which Ruin doesn’t even know about, because Rage and I got in the way. Some of the scars on Rage’s body aren’t from street brawls or collecting bratva debts—they’re from our fucking father going into a drunken rage and attempting to beat his kids to death.
“We should have emptied a clip in his gut the day he showed back up.” My anger flares bright, burning me up from the inside.
“We did not know where he was hiding.”
I grab my head in my hands. “Fuck! We still don’t know where he’s hiding!”
Celia slams on the breaks and narrowly avoids getting into a wreck. “I knew I should have gone to check on her. This is all my fault.” Her voice is strong but unstable, warbling on her vowels. “Now she’s been taken, and he’s going to—” Her voice cracks this time, and the sound is a dagger straight to my heart.
It won’t be long before she goes into a full-blown panic at this rate.
“Breathe, baby, just breathe.”
“I am breathing!”
Ooookay, wrong choice of words.
“Pull over. Let Ruin drive.”
“We don’t even know where to go!” She isn’t wrong—we’ve been driving aimlessly through the streets, having jumped before we checked where to land. At least Celia is coherent enough to pull over and switch seats for to Ruin take the wheel. As she buckles up and Ruin adjusts the mirrors for his height, I think back to what I know about my father.
Aside from being an emotionless sack of shit, he’s smart. It’s how he avoided capture after he set the fire that killed our mother and the pakhan tried to panel him for it. Thanatos has been tracking him outside the city for years, traveling the country to stay on his trail.
I pad my pockets, but I don’t have my phone on me. “Call Than.” When Celia continues tapping her fingers on the dash, I realize she hasn’t heard me. “ Celia , call Thanatos!”
“I don’t have his number!”
“Bullshit.” The man is almost as anal as Rage. He’ll have saved his number in her cell. I take the phone from Celia and flick through her contacts, surprised to see that he’s saved himself under the name Thanatos (Riot) . Since when did he take on an R-name like the rest of us?
Dialing his number, I read the street names as we pass by. “Where are we going?”
“To the store,” Ruin replies, turning onto a street without using his blinker. “There will be camera footage.”
Celia sits up straighter. “It’s her shift right now. She should be there.”
Thanatos picks up on the third ring, sounding as confused as I feel about how he answers. “Princess?”
“What did you just call me?”
His tone shifts in annoyance. “Rebel? What are you doing with Celia’s phone?”
“What are you doing, calling her Princess?”
“ Rebel! ” Celia snaps, turning around to glare at me. “Not now! Send him the fucking voicemail!”
With a sigh of frustration, I follow orders and send everyone a group message with not only our father’s creepy-as-fuck voicemail, but the subsequent text and picture. The image is potato-quality, so it’s hard to see the woman’s face, but she’s definitely tied up and there’s definitely a fire blazing behind her back.
Thanatos curses in heavy Russian. “Don’t move. Stay at the house. We’re coming.”
I snort. “Fuck that, we’re already on the road.”
Rage’s voice booms in the background like canon fire. “You’re what? ” Their phone changes hands, and Rage is suddenly yelling into my ear. “Get her back to the fucking apartment . Lock her in the goddamn cage and don’t let her out of your sight.”
My pulse pounds in my ears as I put my brother on speaker. “No fucking way, we’re not going home. We’re going to find the bastard and kill him.” My brothers have taken ages to catch him and still haven’t found him, so it’s obvious that they need more men on the job.
“We’re saving Sara!” Celia shouts, grabbing the phone from my hand. “We can kill him after she’s safe”
Fuck , she’s hot when she’s pissed. I’d nearly forgotten how drop-dead-gorgeous that fire inside her heart is.
“I won’t let him get near you,” Rage hisses. A car door slams, and I hear their car engine turn over across the line. “Go home, Celia. You’ll be safe there until we figure out where he’s keeping Sara.”
“Listen to the voicemail! She’s screaming, Rage! He’s torturing her!” Celia’s voice pitches with her anger. “Don’t you dare tell me to go home when it’s my fault she’s been dragged into this.”
Thanatos speaks next, the only calm one aside from Ruin. “Take a deep breath, Celia. Where would Sara be right now?” He walks her through a few questions to try and pinpoint Sara’s location, and it helps calm Celia’s emotions. She’s razor-sharp by the third question, recalling details about Sara’s life that I never realized she would know. Thanatos doesn’t seem surprised by this—or by the information itself—as he walks us all through multiple possible scenarios.
The voicemail could be a recording of someone else screaming.
Our dad could have pickpocketed Sara’s phone.
Sara could be on a date with her boyfriend, none the wiser to any of this.
The list goes on, each possibility seeming more far-fetched than the last. Finally, we pull up to Celia’s boutique and jump out of the car. The lights are on inside, but we can’t see anyone unless you count the mannequins in the windows.
Ruin grabs Celia from around the waist before she can run inside the building and pulls out a Glock from a holster strapped to his hip, then pushes her back toward the car. I trade places with him as he steps into the building, carefully wrapping my arms around Celia’s torso to keep her from doing something reckless.
Like walking into an ambush.
“He can’t go in alone! Please , Rebel!”
My brother is a professional. He can handle himself. But when Celia says please…
There’s only so much I can do to resist.
With a hiss, I run a hand through my hair and tug on the ends. Her presence in my life makes these kind of situations much more complicated than they used to be. “Baby, listen to me. I’ll go inside with Ruin, but you have to promise to stick by my side the entire time. We are silent. We are quick. And for the love of God, don’t fucking scream, no matter what happens.”
But Celia is determined. Her jaw is set and her eyes are steely, reminding me of why Rage fell in love with her at first sight. Once she’s in the zone, she’s fucking unshakeable.
I reach inside the car and grab the gun I planted inside of her glovebox. She’s checking our surroundings while she waits for us to follow Ruin inside the boutique, but fuck.
I love this woman too goddamn much to let her go in there unarmed, and I only have one gun.
Before she can react, I grab the handcuffs I stashed beneath the passenger seat and clip them around one of her wrists, cinching the cuff while I drag the other one to the passenger side door. I hook it onto the inside handle of the door and lift her up, setting her down on the seat as carefully and quickly as I can. Then, I place the gun in her free hand and wrap her fingers around the grip, making sure she’s holding on before I let go.
Her eyes are blown so wide with disbelief that I can’t bear look at her.
“Rebel, wait—” She tries to grab me, but her arm snags on the cuffs. “Don’t do this without me.”
Slamming the door shut, I yell, “fuck! Lock the doors!”
“What’s going on?” Rage’s voice roars from inside the car. Celia must have dropped the phone in the floorboard. “Talk to me, dammit!”
Instead of answering, she stares directly at me, her stone cold gaze piercing my heart. It bleeds all over the pavement with each step I take away from her. “Hurry up, Rage,” I growl, “because if I die without seeing our kid, I’m haunting your ass for eternity!”
Celia doesn’t speak to me again, but it’s for the best. If she had said please and begged me to stay with her, there’s no way I’d ever have walked away.
But I’ll never forgive myself if my little brother dies and misses out on his happy ending. That’s what Celia is for us—the happy ending we never thought we’d find. He’s the one who deserves it the most.
Over my dead fucking body is he losing it on my watch.
As I walk to the shop’s front door, I catch a whiff of gasoline. My body reacts on instinct, recoiling from the smell. “What the hell?” I spot a shimmering liquid trailing through the shop, splattered across the walls and all over the floor. Shit. Ruin’s sense of smell isn’t what it used to be. He might not have noticed before he went inside.
I yank open the front door and call out my brother’s name. “Ruin! Get the fuck out of here! Something’s not right!” I watch through Celia’s office window as my brother enters the room, and something over his head sparks bright orange.
“Oh, fu?—”
A flash of light and searing heat kicks me back, glass shattering all around me. I land on my back on the sidewalk, the air punching from my lungs. When I breathe in, all I taste are chemical fumes.
I jump up to my feet and the first thing I see is Celia’s face obscured in flame. They dance across the windshield, reflecting the damage behind my back. Embers cascade all around us, turning to ash as they sweep the ground. I swivel back around to face the burning building and lunge forward to find my brother, knowing that he’s trapped inside, knowing that I can still get to him, knowing that there’s no possible way our dad finally succeeded in taking him out.
I won’t fucking let him.
Book three, Bound by Ruin, arrives May 2025.
Thank you so much for reading Tempted to Rebel! If you enjoyed your time with Rebel and his brothers, please leave a rating or review.