“The notorious Brantley King,” the pig said with a smirk as he got into the front seat. The plastic-like leather squeaked against his belt as he closed his door and started the engine. “You’d think you’d have learned your lesson by now, boy.”
He laughed and shook his head. It was obvious this guy was getting some sort of sick pleasure out of being the one to put me in cuffs.
“King,” I corrected him defiantly. Nobody called me Brantley but her.
“Excuse me?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at me through the rearview mirror.
I sat up straight, meeting his gaze with mine, as if I were staring straight through to his *-ass soul. “They call me King, mother fucker.”
The rage inside me grew to epic proportions. That’s when I noticed the detective didn’t turn onto the main road but instead drove straight onto the path through the woods.
This guy was no fucking cop. I spotted his gun; he’d set it on the dash. It was a Judge, not the kind of gun that was standard police-issue. This guy wasn’t taking to me jail.
He was taking me to ground.
There was no time to waste.
My girls needed me.
More than that, I needed them.
The moron had cuffed me in front. That should’ve been my first indicator that something was off. A real cop would’ve never done that unless he was transporting a nonviolent criminal.
Which wasn’t me.
Using the chain that connected my cuffs, I trapped the fake detective’s neck against the headrest and yanked back with all my might until I felt like my biceps were going to explode.
His hands left the wheel and flailed about as he tried to connect with my head, but I dodged him by lowering myself behind the seat.
The car veered off the path and bounced from side to side as it ran over a patch of knee-high roots.
The pressure mounted behind my eyes as I tugged back on the cuffs, squeezing tighter and tighter. I didn’t release my hold until the car came crashing to a stop and every inch of life had drained from his body.
The fake cop was right; I would never be anything more than the notorious Brantley King.
That was fine by me because the senator had a lesson to learn. You did not take what was mine and not expect to pay in blood, sweat, or *.
He took my girl. He wanted to take my life.
His payment would be in blood.
Chapter One
King
Revenge is sweet.
That’s what they say anyway. But it wasn’t until I crawled out of the wreckage, picking shards of glass from my skin, that I realized how true that saying really was.
I could practically taste the revenge on my tongue, I was salivating in anticipation of the moment I would be able unstrap a belt from my arm and wrap it around the senator’s fucking neck for crossing me.
It had only been minutes since I’d killed a man.
But it had been a long time since I’d taken pleasure in it.
Adrenaline like I’d never known, in an amount great enough to wake a corpse, coursed through my veins.
I was high on it.
I fed off of it.
It was like I’d pushed my nose into a bowl of blow and inhaled over and over until I felt like I was invincible.
A motherfucking god.
And until I fixed the fucking mess I’d made, I wasn’t planning on coming down. I felt sorry for any motherfucker who had balls big enough to try and stand in my fucking way.
That was the moment I’d first heard it.
Him.
Preppy.
Time to show those cock suckers they fucked with the wrong kid from the wrong side of the motherfucking trailer park. Preppy’s voice was as clear to me in my head as if he stood beside me.
I was going fucking insane.
By the time I’d crawled out from the woods and made my way back to the house Bear was just getting off of his bike. When he saw me, he tossed his cigarette to the ground. He marched toward me with hard, angry steps; his forehead creased with lines, his fists clenched. The dry grass crunched under his heavy steps. “Listen, motherfucker, I didn’t want it to come to blows, but the way you fucking handled that shit just ain’t fucking right. She deserves better than that, better than this, better than to be fucking lied…” Bear stopped when he saw the mud and blood I was covered in. “What the fuck happened to you?”
I pushed past him, ignoring his question, running toward the house, taking the steps three at a time. I threw open the front door so hard, the screws from the top hinge shot out and clanked down onto the deck. “Pup!” I called out. A small part of me held out hope that somehow she had found a way to stay. But the second I entered the house I didn’t have to search the rooms to know she was gone. I felt the emptiness. “Fuck!” I roared, picking up one of the kitchen chairs. I launched it across the room, where it skipped over the glass coffee table, cracking it down the center, punching a basketball-sized hole in the thin drywall as it came crashing to a halt.
Bear followed me into the house. “Are you going to tell me what happened or you gonna tear the fucking house up some more?” I moved passed him on my way to the garage. I needed my bike and some provisions.
The kind of provision that required bullets.