Chapter 24
HEATH
Duckling: Thank you. You didn’t need to do that.
Nate: I know, but I wanted to. You ran out of the house in such a hurry, I figured you hadn’t had any coffee.
Duckling: You were correct. Thanks again.
A shley was back at work, taking a shift at double pay because the country club was so short-staffed in the spa, and we were all on edge about it.
Carter had assured us that he’d added his own private security to the club’s staff to specifically keep Ashley safe, but it didn’t feel good having her out of our sight for so long.
Ten hours was going to feel like an absolute lifetime.
“How come Ash was in such a hurry this morning?” Nate asked, scowling at me when I emerged from the shower sometime after she’d left for her shift.
I arched a brow, quietly enjoying his jealousy now that he wasn’t trying to hide it.
“Don’t act like you don’t know. She’s hardly quiet.
” And Royce had been annoyed enough by the noise that he’d come in to join us.
Which was how she’d ended up running late for work and Royce had needed to drive her.
Nate just grunted back at me, sour as fuck .
Poor baby needed to learn what it meant to share when real feelings were involved.
Knowing that Paige had slept with Royce was totally different because he didn’t actually care any more about that girl than his favorite coffee mug.
Scratch that, he definitely liked his coffee mug a lot more.
“You got class today?” I asked, changing the subject before he could get pissy. “I need to turn in an assignment for Musical Engineering, but otherwise I’ve got the day free. We could go hit some balls at the driving range?”
That made him chuckle, looking up from whatever he was doing on his phone. “Oh yeah? At the country club? Subtle, bro. Real subtle.”
I shrugged, grinning. “Wasn’t trying to be subtle. So?”
He sighed heavily, shaking his head. “I actually have a fuck-ton of study to catch up on too. When I signed up for this program, I wasn’t anticipating quite so many distractions.”
I winced, understanding exactly what he meant. None of us could have seen this coming, that was for damn sure. “Yeah, fair. Well, let me know if you need me to bring home lunch or something.”
“Will do,” Nate murmured, already engrossed in his phone again. Whoever he was texting had his full attention, and the little smile curving his lips was…odd.
“You’re texting her, aren’t you?” I accused, reaching for his phone, but he swiftly jerked it out of my reach. “Bro, she’s supposed to be working. Leave her alone.”
He scoffed, sliding out of his seat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I rolled my eyes as he escaped back down the hallway toward his room, so I couldn’t tease him anymore about how hard he was crushing on our girl. Not that I could blame him—I was totally in love with her myself, but it was funny as fuck to see him finally step out of denial.
I set about making some breakfast, then got totally distracted cleaning out the fridge of old takeout leftovers and ended up losing track of time while I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher.
We had all been at least twenty times more diligent with household chores since Ashes moved in, for fear of her deciding a bunch of boys were too messy to live with.
“Hey.” Royce strolled back in, tossing his keys into our little tray by the door.
I arched a brow at him in question, because it did not take nearly two hours to drop Ashes to the country club. He just gave me a toothy grin back.
“What?” he asked innocently. “I needed to check up on the new security Carter hired. They seem competent enough, but you know they can’t actually be in the therapy rooms, right?”
“That makes sense,” I replied. “It’d raise a few eyebrows if there was a security guard in a massage appointment, don’t you think? Everyone there is a member of the country club, so it’s not like her clients are walk-in weirdos off the street.”
Royce huffed, flopping down on the couch. “I guess.”
Both our phones beeped at the same time, and I pulled mine out to check it. I figured it was a text in our group thread—which Ashley had graciously added Nate to a couple of days ago—but instead it was an official message from the Society.
“You get the same thing?” I asked Royce, reading the message over. “Summons to speak with elders council this evening?”
“Yeah,” Royce replied. “They want to see us at seven…Ash finishes work at eight. I guess we can get there and still be back to pick her up, so long as they don’t drone on and on for too long?”
“If they do, we just tell them we have to go?” I suggested with a shrug. “We can always leave Nate and Carter to deal with whatever the council needs, since they’re the senior DBs right now.”
“Fuck you,” Carter growled, stalking into the kitchen with a shitty look on his face. “This feels pointless. They want to review our statement from the weekend event? What’s to review? We gave literally all the details we could possibly provide.”
I put my phone down and returned to finishing the dishes. “Okay, if you want to tell the elders council that, I’ll let you take the lead.”
Carter flipped me off, then slouched over to play video games with Royce. We made a rough plan to drive over to the elders council meeting, then went about our days.
Frustratingly, the council always insisted on meeting on-site at Nevaeh University.
Convenient, usually, but when we needed to get clear to the other side of Prosper to pick up Ashes after work?
Irritating. The campus wasn’t totally empty when we arrived, but there were only a handful of students left, and they were mostly all leaving the library before it closed for the night.
We bypassed all of them, heading for the drama department and the hidden basement below, which had been the meeting place for the Devil’s Backbone Society since the school was built.
“It’s been a hot minute since we’ve had to robe up,” Royce commented as we pulled on our ceremonial outfits in the dressing room above the meeting chambers. “I feel like we haven’t even tried to scare the initiates this year.”
Nate scoffed. “Because you said we weren’t allowed to, dickhead.”
Royce grinned, totally unapologetic. “Oh yeah. Because I didn’t want Ash getting hurt again…unlike some people I know.”
“Hey, I didn’t intend—” Nate started to clap back.
“Not now,” Carter snapped, interrupting what was undoubtedly turning into an argument between the two of them.
For once, I’d have been on Royce’s side because I could still remember how terrified Ashes had been after Nate dragged her out of bed for her initiation.
“Let’s get this over with, then take Spark for dinner at the new Korean barbeque restaurant in town. ”
My stomach rumbled at that suggestion, so I quickly donned my robe and mask, then followed Nate through to the theatre, where the entrance to the basement was concealed in the orchestra pit.
From the moment we stepped into the underground chamber, my gut told me something was wrong.
The usual corridor lights were off, and the chamber ahead was dimly lit at best, yet multiple shadowy figures moved around.
The elders council was only seven members, but when we stepped into the meeting room, we realized only three seats were occupied by gold-masked elders.
But there had to be at least a dozen black-masked DBs lurking around, and as we spread out in front of the council, we found two black masks positioned behind each of us.
Something bad was about to happen, I was sure of it.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice. You may remove your masks,” the elder in the center of the three said in a flat voice. I was fairly certain that it was Martin Taylor, but I wasn’t totally sure. “We need to discuss the weekend’s events with you all.”
“More than just this weekend,” the woman to his left said in a gravelly voice. “We need to discuss the small matter of Jocelyn Reynard’s experiments within this Society.”
“And how the four of you will not be speaking on this matter to anyone outside this room again,” the third elder added, making a pool of dread fill my stomach. “Devil’s Backbone business is not for the public authorities to meddle in, nor is it military business.”
“You will do whatever it takes to rescind your statements to Colonel Michael D’Arenberg, or you will suffer the consequences,” the first speaker finished, clasping his hands together in his lap.
I glanced over at the guys, grateful that I could actually make eye contact without the masks but confused as to how we should handle this. As usual, we deferred to Nate to speak for us all, even when it was Royce’s father in question.
“With all due respect, elders, we won’t be doing that,” Nate snapped, with a hell of a lot less diplomacy than he usually offered in these situations.
One of the elders snapped their fingers, and the black-masked members stationed behind us grabbed our arms in a tight grip. “If you are unwilling to take our advice, then it seems you need a physical demonstration of what will happen to you, should you disobey this council.”
We were held firm as a light flared to life beside the elders’ chairs, illuminating my absolute worst nightmare.
The shock hit me so hard, I almost blacked out, and then it became crystal-clear why there were so many guards restraining us.
Because I almost ripped my own shoulder out of its socket in trying to get to her.
Ashes. My girl. Bound and gagged, tied to a table and seeming a whole lot like she was just waking from being unconscious. But she was alive—that had to mean something. They hadn’t killed her.
“Jocelyn mentioned that you may require a heavy hand to keep your mouths shut, and that you wouldn’t trust anything not seen with your own eyes.
So here we are.” The first elder had risen from his seat and approached our captive love.
“Take this as your one and only warning. If you disobey this council again, it will be you.”
He pulled an enormous blade from his robes and raised it above his head, clearly intending to bring it down in the middle of Ashley’s chest. He was going to kill her in front of us, to scare us into silence.
A feral scream ripped from Royce, who was positioned closest to Ashley and the elder, and all of a sudden, he ripped free of his guards. In a move faster than the eye could track, he had his pocketknife in hand and slashed it across one guard’s throat.
The jet of blood that squirted out of what must have been an arterial cut was almost surreal, but the shock of it was enough that I wrenched myself free from my own guards and turned on them to slam my fist into a masked face. I didn’t give a flying fuck who was under the masks—they were all dead.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Royce tackle the stunned elder holding the huge dagger, and the blade went skittering across the floor as my best friend savagely stabbed his pocketknife into the gold-masked man’s throat over and over and over. It was fucking beautiful.
Nate and Carter had wasted no time jumping into the action, and despite how greatly outnumbered we were, it quickly became apparent that we were the bigger threat in the room.
Really, though , I thought as I choked out one of the black-masked members with my arm around his neck in an unyielding grip.
What did they expect? They’d taken the one person, the one woman, who owned all four of our hearts.
They’d taken her, bound and gagged her, and tried to stab her in front of us?
No. No one would be leaving this chamber alive, and I knew my friends were on the same page.
As I watched, Carter scooped up the dropped dagger and threw it with terrifying accuracy, hitting his target of an elder clean in the middle of her back as she attempted to flee.
Nate caught the third elder by the back of his robe and slammed him against the floor with a sickening crunch before he was spear-tackled by three of the black-masked guards, going down in a tumble of limbs and robes.
I’d finished off the immediate threats to me, so I strode over to the elder Nate had just caught, delivering a swift kick to his ribs as the man tried to crawl away.
My kick saw the elder flip onto his back, the golden mask falling off his face, and I sucked a sharp breath when I recognized the blank, unfocused look in the older man’s eyes.
It wasn’t because of any head injury, or not just because of that—it was hypnosis. I was as sure of that as I was of my own name. I’d put money on it that every person in the chamber was under Jocelyn’s control in some way, which made my stomach twist painfully.
Then, before I could feel bad for the man, I stomped heavily on his face, putting the full force of my weight and anger into the motion.
Bones crunched and cartilage crumpled under my boot, giving the sensation of stomping on a full egg carton.
Blood and fluids ejected from the man’s head in a satisfying squirt, much like an overripe tomato being squashed.
All of a sudden, the room was quiet, save for a pain-filled moan, which quickly cut off when Royce located who’d made the noise and paid them a visit with his pocketknife.
When he straightened up, he held a chunk of meat between his fingers, and it took me a long moment to realize he’d just cut the man’s tongue out.
“Holy fuck,” Carter murmured, sounding impressed. “You’re kinda scary when you’re in love, Royce.”
“No shit,” I croaked. Then again, a quick glance around the room would say the same about all of us. No one touched our Ashley and lived to tell the tale.