Page 6 of The Villain

Jace was a fast little fuck, but I snatched him up just before he made it to the shed door. With an arm banded around his waist, I hauled him off his feet as he went into crocodile-death-roll mode.

“Get off me!” Jace howled, slashing the knife in the air like some amateur serial killer. “I want him to bleed!”

I dropped him and shoved him back with a growl. “Calm down. Quit acting fucking feral.”

Jace’s light amber eyes flashed like wildfire, and he feinted left in a juke before darting right, like a running back. He was smaller and more agile than I was, and he got the slip on me. He would have made it all the way to the shed if Rhys hadn’t gotten there in time, scooping him off his feet. Jace flailed and screeched in his arms, like he wasn’t a full-grown man.

Rhys was undeterred—he didn’t even look angry as he held him in a two-handed grip—while Jace bared his teeth like a rabid raccoon. “Let me go!”

He didn’t let go, and eventually Jace went limp in his arms. Even then, Rhys didn’t ease up, because Jace was a little faker. If we gave him an inch, he’d take a mile. That was when I noticed Rhys’s pale hand dripping blood, and the knife stained with it.

“You stupid fucker.” I snatched the knife from Jace’s hand and pointed the tip between his eyes. “Look who you made bleed instead.”

Jace’s face blanched, and Rhys finally relented his grip. As soon as Jace’s feet touched the ground, his body bowed, head down as he stared at Rhys’s bloody hand. “R-Rhys… I-I’m sorry…”

Rhys fisted the front of his own T-shirt and wiped the blood off. He didn’t say anything, didn’t accept Jace’s apology, which only seemed to make my half-brother more miserable.

“What did you think you were doing?” I asked him. “A knife? Really?”

Jace whirled on me, eyes flashing again, now that his attention had shifted away from Rhys. “Just one little cut. I deserve it.”

“You could have slipped. You could have hit his jugular. And then all of this would have been for nothing.”

His chin lifted as he stared at me defiantly. “He was my dad, too.”

I was reminded every day of how differently Jace and I had grown up. I’d been born into this life. My mother had been Patrick’s first wife, a strong woman who’d kept her husband’s more violent tendencies in check. My memories of her were vague, but I knew she’d stood up to my father when he’d disciplined me too hard. She’d read me bedtime stories. She’d cut my hair, and cooked me good food, and was probably the only reason I was somewhat sane now. Because I could still remember somethinggood. I knew what it meant to be loved.

But she’d died of cancer when I was six, and then there’d been nothing standing between me and Patrick’s worst impulses.

Patrick hadn’t known Jace existed until he was dropped off outside the gates of our compound at eight years old by his mother, who was about to serve a long-term prison sentence for drug offenses. He’d been small and skinny, probably because he’d been so malnourished as a kid.

I’d been twenty then, and I’d loved him immediately. He’d been sweet, obedient, and so excited to have a dad that he’d been in full denial that Patrick had been a fucking monster. I’d tried to shield Jace from the worst of Patrick, which hadn’t been veryhard. Overall, Patrick had shown no interest in Jace. No matter what Jace had done, he could never get Patrick’s full attention, and it had twisted something inside of him into a feral little brat. I’d indulged him, Rhys and I both had, because we loved him. And now we had a knife-wielding, twenty-three-year-old maniac to deal with.

I tapped the tip of the knife on Jace’s cheek. “Stay away from the shed. There’s a plan, and you stabbing our captive isn’t part of it.”

His amber eyes shifted toward the shed, but then his attention got caught on Rhys’s bloody hand again. His expression immediately fell, and his hand lifted as if to touch Rhys, but then he dropped it back to his side in a fist. “I-Is it deep?”

If Jace had stabbed me, he wouldn’t have apologized or given a shit about whether I needed stitches. Not that he didn’t love me, but he probably would have said I’d deserved it.

But with Rhys…

Rhys was different. A big brother who wasn’t an actual brother, half or otherwise. His father had been my father’s best friend, but he’d died in a shootout when Rhys and I were fifteen. We’d been raised together since birth, and when Jace had come along, he’d slotted in easily as a little brother to us both.

Rhys flexed his injured hand, eyes steady on Jace. It looked like the bleeding had already stopped. “No.”

“I just?—”

“Don’t do it again,” Rhys said in that deep, big-brother voice he only used on Jace.

“Yeah, okay.” Jace hung his head.

I narrowed my eyes in irritation. Everyone in this crew listened to me the first time. My word was law, even to most of the old-timers who still preferred Patrick. But Jace was defiant.He was usually defiant toward Rhys too, but lately I’d noticed Jace listening to me less and to him more.

“You need to understand how important this is,” I said, lowering my tone in case there were any curious ears around. “Devlin Walsh is the key to me gaining full control of the crew and taking down the Bonnams.”

The Bonnams were a neighboring crew who would love nothing more than to wipe out me and all my men. They’d been testing the boundaries of our territory lately.

“You do something to that man under my watch,” I continued, “and I could find myself with a knife in my back. Is that what you want?”