Page 7 of Vicious King

This can’t be real.

“You’re telling me that the woman I love, my fucking wife, is alive out there somewhere?”

“I think she is,” Rose says, her voice stronger now. “Unless something has happened since she ran away. I know that they didn’t catch her, and she was never brought back. They never even tattooed her neck because everything was so chaotic.”

Damien and his trafficking piece-of-shit friends tattooed an X on the back of the women’s necks to identify them as their property.

All I can do is stare at Rose.

Seven years. For seven years, I’ve known, down to the fucking marrow of my bones, that my wife is dead. And now there’s a chance that she’s alive?

“I’m getting my laptop,” Julian says, immediately walking away from the table. He’s our tech guy, our hacker, and if Rina’s out there, he’ll find her.

“She would have changed her name,” Violet says, thinking out loud. “It would have been too dangerous to keep her name. Too obvious. They would have found her.”

“I don’t know for sure what name she would have used,” Rose says. “We talked about that, too, but never said what we’d actually adopt, in case someone tried to get the information out of us.”

I stand and pace behind the table, no longer able to sit still.

My wife could be alive.

“It’s not possible,” I mutter, shaking my head.

“You never saw her body,” Mateo reminds me quietly. “When you were in holding, being fucking questioned by those dirty fucking cops, they told you she died and that they’d already cremated her.”

“Yeah, and as soon as I got out of prison, I killed every single one of them.”

And I wish I could do it fucking again.

“I watched her bleed out,” I insist, reliving that horrifying moment all over again. “She hit her head and the blood was⁠—”

“Head wounds bleed a lot,” Violet says. “And sure, she likely was unconscious.”

“She was,” Rose agrees. “When they brought her to my room, she was knocked out, and she didn’t wake up for a couple of hours, and I was freaking out because I didn’t know what to do. When she finally came to, she was hy-hysterical.” Rose shakes her head. “She was so scared. Then, about a week later, Damien came in to see us, and he told her you died. He’d killed all of you.”

“Fuck,” Spider mutters, tapping away on the screen of his phone. He’s almost as good at tech as Julian is.

“Seven. Fucking. Years,” I growl as I stalk out of the room, afraid of scaring the girls, and out the back door to the gardens, where I fucking scream. I need to tear someone apart.

I turn around and find my three brothers standing there. Their faces are hard, full of anger and grief.

“We’re going to find her,” Julian promises me. “I already have software working on facial rec, and Spider’s working on name combinations. It’s only a matter of time.”

“I want her now. If Rose is right and my wife didn’t die that day, I’m going to fucking destroy anyone who stands in my way of finding her and bringing her home. How could I be so goddamn stupid? Of course he didn’t kill her. He wanted her for himself. Just to fuck with me.”

“And he had the police in his fucking pocket,” Mateo says in disgust. “We failed you both.”

“We’ll make it right,” Rome says. “If she thinks we’re all dead, she’s going to have the shock of her life when we find her.”

“I want to believe it,” I say, shaking my head. “You know I do, but it’s not fucking possible. It doesn’t make sense. She wouldn’t have run away.”

“Yes, she would,” Mateo says. “Her father still beat the shit out of her on the regular, and she was a grown-ass woman. If she thought the four of us were gone, she never would have come back here for help because there was no help for her to come back to. She absolutely would have run away, changed her name, and done her best to blend in somewhere.”

I don’t want to hope that it’s true because losing her again will only destroy me. I’m already the worst of the worst. I can’t even consider what I’ll become if I get this close only to lose her for the second time.

“Boss!” Suddenly, Spider comes running out of the house, his phone up, his face whiter than I’ve ever seen it.

“Report,” I snap.