Chapter Twelve
Lachlan Grant steepled his fingers together and glanced at the two men closer to him, and meant more to him than if they’d been blood brothers.
It had been five days since they were back in their own house, with its sleek glass and chrome architecture and panoramic private beach views.
Five days of sleeping in their own handcrafted beds, luxury epitomized. They were showering in their own real gold and diamond-specked bathroom. Wearing their bespoke suits, with their million-dollar cufflinks, Patek Philippe private collection watches, and Italian-made shoes.
All of it materialistic things they didn’t care a fuck about. What they did care about was power, and true power came with the prerequisite of having wealth. Fuck tons of money. But like money was to some people, they craved power more and more, and still, it hadn’t been enough for them.
They’d been invincible. Dragons of the universe. Their company name was Dragon Peak Enterprises, a reminder of who they were, where they’d come from, and what they were made of.
Would Cara have been taken from them if they had the same power they possessed now when they were eighteen? The answer was that no one in the whole fucking world would dare cross them. They worked hard at being gentlemen on the surface, but beneath that polished veneer, they were hard, ruthless, and merciless. They took no fucking prisoners.
When Swan House had come knocking on their door, they’d been at a gross disadvantage. They understood their chances of escaping their fucking dungeon grew slimmer by the day, and with Cara’s room littered with poisonous gas if they tried anything, debilitated them even more.
They’d been prepared to die in that cell, and still, they would have died more superiorly than the fuckwads who messed with them. Their enemies were men of note, powerful, and not afraid to accept a challenge on neutral ground first before they struck. Swan House were a bunch of fucking cowards, so even in death, they didn’t beat Slade, Cian, or him.
But Cara appeared before them in the darkness. Their sister, whom they had thought had been killed in a fire, when instead she'd been taken as leverage against them.
She cried her heart out, telling them she thought she had imagined them and that they weren’t real. She also told them that her sister, Alexandria, had made it possible for them to escape. She spoke repeatedly about finding Alexandria and her other sister, Rhea, because she loved them as much as she loved Slade, Cian, and him. She begged them to find her sisters, their enemies. Something Cara needed time to accept.
Alexandria.
That was her name. The stunning beauty who had sat on their cock and squeezed her cunt around them when she came, when they ordered her to come with only their words and their thickness deep inside her. They’d wanted to kill her and sacrifice the Swan House princess in front of her fucking parents and the damn council of dicks that dictated everything.
They couldn’t differentiate her from her family, and it didn’t matter how she quivered against them, how she tasted when they bruised the skin above her nipple, or how the overly-tight satiny-wet walls of her pussy gloved their cocks and rattled their control.
They hadn’t allowed themselves to feel anything but hate for her when they knew they were going to die. But now it was different, and her scent, her eyes, her hair, and her hot, sweet, inexperienced body further corrupted their minds.
But they were not that weak. They could compartmentalize and prioritize, and right now, bringing down Swan House in every conceivable way possible until they were left with nothing but the clothes on their backs was their sole priority.
With Cara safe and untouchable, they’d evened out the playing field, and they were coming for Swan House for daring to go after them.
That night, with Cara safe in their sight, they took down over twenty guards with their bare hands just to get to the exit out of the dungeon, the little bottle of pepper spray Cara held in her hand unused. They’d unleashed their fire, and that was only a portion of their wrath because no one could do what Swan House did to them and get away with it.
They’d used Cara against them. Cara, the baby they had found near the river that ran through the trailer park. They thought they’d lost her—dead in a fire—only to discover it had all been part of a colossal plan that involved rituals and fucking virgins and them being imprisoned in their dungeon, their cooperation blackmailed out of them. They’d needed their sperm to give birth to a Swan House son.
Over their fucking bodies, would a child of theirs be raised with the Swan name.
If she were pregnant, she would never see that child until she took her last breath.
It had taken them five days to learn everything there was to know about their bloodline. First, they’d put their best research team on it but they’d come up empty-handed. Then they remembered the professor at the trailer park, the one who taught them all about economics in his own eccentric way.
They recalled him always saying something about the history of Dragons Peak, and then he’d get really paranoid and defensive, claiming he said nothing, looking over his shoulder to see who was listening. Those episodes usually happened when he was drunk on his ass, so they brushed them aside.
Finding the professors with their resources had taken a few minutes. Despite being a functional drunk, he looked exactly the same as he did close to fifteen years ago, after the fire and then the sale of the land on which the trailer park had stood.
He lived in his defunct mobile home in another park, his books still intact. He had recognized them instantly but hadn’t been surprised to see them. In fact, he’d said he’d been waiting for them.
What the professor had told them shifted their world. He had books, scrolls, and stories he had heard from people who had heard them from their great-grandparents, and so on.
Words didn’t need to pass through them to know they were thinking the same thing.
“Ready, Cara-girl,” Cian asked Cara as she walked into the room, her eyes sparkling with happiness at the sound of the nickname Cian had given her. But, there were moments of sadness in her eyes too when she thought about the Swan House girls.
“Yes. I used to be scared to do anything, to go anywhere, but I’m not anymore,” she said brightly, although she paled a little at the sight of the helicopter that dropped down on the pad in clear view from the house.
“You’re going to be fine, kiddo,” Lachlan said, pulling and hugging her to him. “Let’s go see a mountain about our castle, then.”
She nodded and slipped her hand into Slade’s, who gave her one of his rare smiles. The birthmark on her inner forearm was exactly the same as the dandelion they’d had tattooed just beneath the heads of three dragons. She was back home, where she belonged.
They made their way to the helicopter. The professor, who had sobered up for the occasion and dressed in his best suit, had also just arrived in a car they had sent for him. The rest of them wore jeans and boots since they would be right on top of a mountain. Lachlan smiled, whatever floated the man’s boat, he supposed. The professor also clutched a satchel to his chest like it was a treasure, and Lachlan supposed it was in a way.
Two hours later, their pilot announced they were landing, and Cara, exhilarated from her first helicopter ride, squealed in delight.
A mile or so later, they stopped in front of a giant stone structure. Weeds and vines curled around most of it; the stone had crumbled in places, and in others, rain had smoothed it out, but it was unmistakable.
They were looking at the altar of the Dragons Peak, symbolized by three enormous dragon heads.
Lachlan envisioned the altar in its prime more than five hundred years ago. He took a deep breath. Slade and Cian did the same.
This was their home. Their bloodline started here.
“Is this where you’re going to hurt Swan House?” Cara asked softly, her voice already stained.
“Bad people need to be punished, Cara-girl,” Cian said softly. “Do you remember Skulk Williams?” he asked gently this time, and Cara shivered before she nodded.
“He almost hurt you,” Lachlan said, wishing he had his hands on the man again.
“And we couldn’t let him get away with it, could we?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Because no one touches a dragon.”
“And you’re a dragon, Cara-girl.”
She nodded again, but slower.
Skulk Williams had been a twenty-year-old lowlife who hung around kids who were not his own age, and his intentions were not good either. Lachlan, Slade, and Cian had found him scouting out Cara. He had told his friends he was going to take her, use her, and cut her to pieces afterward. She had run to them, crying.
Those were the last words Skulk Williams ever uttered. To say they killed him would be putting it mildly.
“Don’t hurt, Alexandria, please,” Cara whispered. They would give her everything, but this.
Somehow they’d have to make Cara see that no one fucked with them and got away with it, including the Swan House girls. They might have helped Cara get to them, disengaged the trigger that unlocked their cells, and locked the gas canisters in her room. And maybe they were even trying to leave Swan House on their own.
But she… Alexandria, whose body their cocks remembered in brutal fucking detail, hadn’t left soon enough, and now she would be their collateral damage, innocent or not.