Singe (Guardian Protection #1)

“Get her back from where?” I asked absently as Leo scanned her apartment, my anxiety growing with each room.

“He took her! I knew something was wrong when I didn’t see any of you with her. I made an approach in the garage, but I lost her. Listen to me. I’m tailing them. I’m probably about four car lengths back, but I don’t think he’s tagged me.”

I barely heard his words over the blood roaring in my ears as Leo clicked on the final room in her apartment.

Empty.

Just like my chest.





Perception. Is. Everything.

People aren’t one-dimensional characters. We’re complex creatures. With feelings. Compassion. Morals. And the lack thereof.

To some, I would forever be the villain.

But even the darkest shadows require light to exist.

I spent a lot of years hating my sister.

At first, I hated her because she got all the attention.

And then, years later, after Pete Higgins had forced himself on me for the first time, I hated her because she didn’t get any of the attention. I got every single bit of it. Rhion slept soundly in her bed, night after night, not a fear in the world. Meanwhile, I spent most of my adolescence listening for the click of my bedroom door opening every time my father went out of town.

My first memory of Pete was him straightening up our apartment the night my mother died. As my father’s assistant and best friend, he was such a fixture in my life that I never thought anything of it. Of course he was there that night. A tragedy had happened. Only, in my memories, there were no cops that would later flood the place. It had only been him and me as he righted upside-down tables and washed one martini glass while the other lay shattered next to one of my mother’s shoes on the balcony. No. That realization came much later in life, after I’d learned how evil the man truly was.

It had always been amazing to me how people could share the exact same childhood and come out with such radically different experiences. Rhion once told me that some of her fondest memories were of when we’d been young. Meanwhile, for me, it was a hell I still struggled to forget on a daily basis.

When I became a teen, I started acting out. Lying. Making up shit, silently wishing someone—anyone—would read between the lines and actually hear my cries. They never did. By the time I hit seventeen, I was a ticking time bomb. I had a lot of shit to work through, and that didn’t get addressed until I went to jail. Yeah, God was looking out for me the day I took my father’s car keys. It wasn’t a drunken joy ride the way my public defender claimed at my trial; it was a failed kamikaze mission. Though, regretfully, I never made it to where I was supposed to meet Pete.

Eventually, I broke, dressed in a prison jumpsuit at the county jail, revealing to my father years of abuse at the hands of his dear friend. He told me to stop making up stories to save my own ass. It was the last time I saw my father alive.

I wished I could say I’d been devastated to hear that he’d passed away. And maybe I’d get there one day. But, at twenty, when my prison counselor pulled me into his office to let me know he was gone, the abused little boy inside me celebrated.

That is until I found out he’d left Rhion everything.

I didn’t care about the money. Well, that’s not completely true. Money was fucking great. But that wasn’t why I lost it. My father might as well have painted a bull’s-eye on her back.

Rhion wasn’t like me. She didn’t realize that the world was full of horrible people. She’d been raised in a bubble where skinned knees and broken hearts were her only worry. She was a dreamer with rose-colored glasses. Satan himself could stare her straight in the face and she wouldn’t recognize him. Rhion was not equipped to play in the same league as a money-hungry monster in disguise like Pete.

The moment that will was read, Rhion was as good as dead.

I tried to warn her, but she wouldn’t believe me. She’d been preconditioned from a very young age to believe that I was the bad guy.

So I became the bad guy.

The day I saw her at that charity event with security hovering all around, it hit me.

If Rhion was afraid of me, she’d surround herself with people who could protect her.

I’d never forget the pain on her face as I wrapped my hand around her throat and told her that I’d started the fire. It was for the best, but it shredded me all the same. Mainly because she’d bought it so easily.

After that, keeping tabs on her was relatively easy. She bought the apartment beneath Guardian. Public record. So I rented the apartment over Murphy’s bar. I got with some buddies I’d met in jail and had them teach me everything I needed to know about becoming her shadow. A hundred-dollar security camera aimed at both the entrances of her building and I was in business terrorizing my sister so he couldn’t get to her.

Jude Levitt was the one complication I couldn’t figure out. It freaked me out the night I saw him walk into the bar. I didn’t think twice about following him in. I knew he was the disgraced first responder from the fire, and I feared he was working for Pete. I used the last of my inheritance from my mother’s estate running background checks on him, not satisfied until I knew every single detail of his boring-ass life. While I was doing that, I kept a close eye on him and my sister. It didn’t take long to see that she loved him.

And, as I followed behind Pete’s car as he drove Rhion to God-knew-where, knowing he would kill her before ever giving her the money back, I prayed that Jude loved her too.





I charged out of Guardian, Apollo still talking in my ear, and went straight to the emergency stairs. My heart slammed against my ribs as my gut turned rancid.

What the fuck had she been doing in the garage in the first place? She never left her apartment without me.

As I ran down the stairs, I heard an entire percussion section’s worth of pounding behind me. Step for step. Never faltering. Never slowing. It wasn’t until I pushed through the final door to the garage that I realized Johnson, Lark, and Alex had followed me down. The angry snarls on their faces mirrored mine.

The garage was empty, but a small trail of blood on the ground screamed so loudly that it was almost deafening.

I froze, volcanic lava brewing inside me. I had no idea whether I could trust Apollo or not. He was known for his head games. And he could have very well been playing one with me now, but the only thing I knew for certain was that Apollo Park was never far from his sister.

Climbing into my Jeep, all the guys piling in behind me, I barked, “Where the fuck are you?”