Cruel Crown: A Dark Romance (Sekten Book 2) Read online

  Slowly I opened the door and checked on the girl. She was still sleeping, probably long enough for me to shower. More often than not, Bas used more than enough sedatives to put down a horse, and I was sure it was the case for her.

  Closing the door again, I got rid of my clothes and took a shower. Under the warm spray, I thought back on everything that had happened in the last week.

  Damian and I had agreed that for the Colombians to trust us, they had to be pushed into our corner, and therefore, be forced into taking our hand. That’s where Bas came in. Damian left him a car with night goggles, cash, and coordinates into the enemy’s camp. That’s why he had to go earlier and convince them to attack. Not that it would have been hard with the cash and the promise of keeping the cocaine.

  That paramilitary group got to go against their enemies and steal from them. At the same time, the Sekt helped Sergio with retaliation, thus further earning their trust.

  Unknown to Damian, while Bas did what we had agreed upon, I was going to double-cross everyone and get the princess home. Stealing her myself had not been the original plan, but once in the jungle, I knew they had no intention of negotiating her freedom. She would be sold or wind up dead as a sign of strength and power.

  Damian didn’t give a shit about her nor the Estacados; he didn’t care if she lived or died. With all the chaos, no one would think I took her. I made sure that people saw me going into my tent early and had told them what day I was set to leave beforehand. No one saw me sneaking into Gideon’s tent. By the time I slipped out, everyone was too busy trying to save themselves; they didn’t pay enough attention to see me coming out.

  The first one I clocked was Robinson, Sergio’s right-hand man. I ran to him, and luck was on my side because when I was almost by him, someone started shooting at us with an Uzi. I threw him to the side, my body hitting the ground next to his.

  He gave me a tense nod; that was all the thanks I would get because I had a pussy and not a dick. Whatever, that was his mistake to make and not mine. When we got up, I stayed back and mostly took cover and not because I was a woman.

  I was Sekten, and therefore my life was precious. As I ran, trying not to get hit by a stray bullet, I saw the Rivera boy and his sidekick getting in a jeep and taking off. His father would wage war with Colombia if something happened to him. He was the heir to a throne of lies.

  Shortly after, two soldiers offered me a ride, which I was more than happy to accept. As soon as we were away from prying eyes, I shot them. Jumping out of a moving car was a bitch, but time was running out.

  When the car crashed, I knew it would cause attention, so I ran toward it and shot at the gas tank, making sure it exploded—the less evidence they found, the better.

  Having memorized the camp, I started running toward the tent where they had the Estacado girl, but I didn’t have to go very far because Bastian emerged from the shadows.

  A wave of relief washed through me making the heaviness I carried since walking out of Gideon’s tent diminish a bit. I hated it. I hated this weakness that was growing in me. Bas smirked at me. He was everything I always wanted in a brother—I would never be that lucky.

  Perched on his head were night googles. He wore his commando get-up just like I did with a bazooka strapped across his shoulder and the Italian princess over the other.

  “I gave her a little something. She started screaming as soon as she saw me.”

  I shook my head, but I smiled at him, for a second forgetting what I’d had to do to get to this moment.

  “We should go,” I said.

  He nodded, then brought his hand to his head and fixed his goggles. He took off jogging, and I followed him until we reached the jeep Damian had left for him.

  “The jet should be on standby already,” Bas said.

  Nodding absently, I got in the passenger side.

  “Did you do it?” he asked me.

  I couldn’t look at him when I answered. “It’s done.”

  There was a moment of silence as Bas strapped the girl in the back seat. When he was done, he came to my side.

  “Get out of here,” he told me as he handed me the keys. “I need to take care of a loose end. I’ll meet you when it’s safe.” He then leaned in, kissed my forehead, grabbed a backpack from the back of the jeep, and left me.

  Tipping my head back, I let the water wash over me as if that would clean tonight’s events off me. I had no idea what Bas was doing, I didn’t even know if he survived, but I sure fucking hoped so.

  I got everything I wanted, and I felt worse than I ever had.

  Once showered, I walked out and changed, glad that the girl was still sleeping. I left the room, locking it from the outside. Having captives wasn’t anything new to me. I didn’t like it because it usually ended in one of two ways. One, the captive tried to run away, and I would be forced to kill them. Two, the prisoner would kill me. So far, one had worked well for me.

  Making my way to the bar, I looked at the selection of drinks and gave a dry chuckle as I went for the whiskey. Good, let it burn. Once I poured three fingers, I remembered his voice the night we were in Sinestre. It was a lifetime ago, but it still felt like it was only yesterday.

  That’s the thing about time. It passed by, but moments stayed frozen, keeping the memory alive. A memory could take you back and awaken tingles, make you shiver, and feel like you could taste the desire. A memory had the power to kill you all over again.

  I slammed back the drink letting it burn my throat. I put the cup away and went to the compartment where I hid my stuff. You needed a code for the latch to open, and I was the only one who had it. If Damian knew about it, he never said. I pulled out a passport and cash.

  Grabbing a few thousand, I walked to the cockpit. The pilots sat a little straighter and didn’t utter a word. I knew they were scared of me, and that’s how I liked it. When people feared you, they didn’t cross you. They had been forced into this world of secrecy by their fathers.

  It must be hard living with a foot in both worlds. I imagined it got rather exhausting.

  “If anyone asks, it was Bastian and me on the plane… Only Bas and I.”

  They replied, “Yes, ma’am,” in Russian.

  Leaving the money on the floor for them, I went back to my seat. The jungle was long gone from my view, and I wondered if it was the last I would ever see the lone wolf.

  The more I thought about it, the sillier it seemed to have this—attraction. No, attraction was too tame of a word. My theory was that we lived life on the edge. Every moment was heightened, knowing that any day could be our last. I think living by the sword made us get attached to people who saw us right away. Relationships took time, people revealing little by little all their negative qualities. In this world—my world—everything was already ugly. When people saw you, they saw the ugly first. They had heard of your sins, and if, for any reason, they stayed, it meant they knew what you were capable of and didn’t care.

  There was a reason why the Sekt made us emotionless, because emotions were cancer that made you weak. Feelings made you exploitable. Caring about someone made them a target, and I never wanted to someone to bear that burden.

  Location: Italy

  Castles were pillars of hope. A strong structure meant to house kings and queens, keeping them safe from the outside world. Castles were also a prison when you were on the inside looking out.

  My mother burst into my chambers first thing in the morning. Since winter was harsh and cold, the sun hadn’t even risen, but that didn’t matter, not when business awaited. It might have been early, but my mother was dressed to the nines already.

  “When you are a woman, everything is a weapon. The way you sway your hips, talk, smile, and laugh. How you smell, and how you say things. Use every weapon you have, and use it to kill.” Yeah, my mother and I had one fucked-up relationship. The older I got, the more she would see me as competition.

  My father said my beauty was starting to surpass hers, and she hated
it—as did I.

  “What are you still doing in bed? I told you last night you needed to get ready; we have a special visitor today.” She said it like I had a choice to comply with her request.

  If she wasn’t my mother and if she hadn’t trained me, then I would believe she actually cared about my feelings. My eyes remained blank, with no emotions on my pale face. I looked calm and collected, but on the inside, I was raging. I wanted to beg someone to get me out of this hellhole.

  My babushka was no longer here to protect me, not that she could really interfere. Besides being a founding member, she had to play politics, and some things, she wasn’t able to do on her own. Unfortunately, I was one of those things. Even if she would have helped me, there was nowhere on this green earth we could hide from the Sekt. She knew it, and so did I.

  Sekten was part of my family’s legacy. Something that could have been great had it not been for men like my father. Power blinds and corrupts you. Power turns your moral compass upside down.

  My father was a mercenary who fell in love with the power my mother had. He craved it, and she wanted him—the first person to probably show her affection. She latched onto that so-called love. When you are deprived of affection, you will do anything to hold on to it once you get a taste. I thought he cared for my family, but he fell in love with power—the power the Sekt’s founding members had. Little by little, Sekten changed. Sekten grew under my parents, but it also deviated from what it was meant to be. The change happened slowly. Rankings were shifting, alliances flipping. By the time people noticed, my father held too much power for them to turn against him.

  I looked at my mother and smiled at her.

  “Give me ten minutes and I’ll be downstairs.” As soon as the door closed, I did what I did every morning. I searched my room for hidden bugs; I didn’t trust my family since my grandmother’s untimely death. I became a lone wolf in my family’s pack. Once I was sure there was none, I started to get ready.

  Already knowing what was expected of me, I grabbed a navy blue gown that had a deep V at the front and a long slit on my left side. The dress was far too revealing for a sixteen-year-old, but I knew this was what my mother meant when she mentioned for me to get ready.

  I made my way downstairs feeling uncomfortable since I wasn’t allowed to wear undergarments to these types of meetings. The castle was cold since the only way it got heated was from lighting the chimneys. The portable heaters worked great in the rooms, but in the halls, with the stone halls, it was a bitch.

  “Don’t you look ravishing!”

  I stopped abruptly and looked up, my eyes meeting Damian’s, as he gave me a cruel smile. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt and had bear fur wrapped around him for warmth.

  From a young age, I learned that he couldn’t be trusted. We were cut from the same cloth, yet there was something that set us apart. He had a dick and I had a pussy. He was a king and I was a pawn. Monsters weren’t born; they were made, and they made us into two different demons.

  “Do you know who is accompanying us for breakfast?” I forcefully made my voice sound meek. He was so arrogant he probably thought I was afraid of him. We rounded the hall together; but his answer didn’t lessen my nerves.

  “You’re finally going to get the independence you’ve always craved, my sweet a—”

  I woke when a scream pierced the air. Honestly, I was expecting her to wake up sooner. We were due to arrive in about an hour. I hated long flights. The feeling of being caged made me want to crawl out of my damn skin.

  Grabbing the drink I had left next to me, I finished it, ignoring how it tasted disgustingly warm. When I stood, I took off my weapons and left them on the seat. Captive people became rabid, and they gave it their all when they attacked you since they had nothing left to lose.

  I had training, and she didn’t. If it came down to her or me, I would not hesitate to end her life. Before I walked inside the door, I took a deep breath, preparing myself for her hate and accusations. She would never know we had a lot in common when it came down to it. We were both heiresses to different thrones, but both stood in a graveyard of bones with rivers of blood running through them.

  When I opened the door, she came at me like a fucking cat, screaming and scratching.

  She was weak, and I was not. I hated myself a little when I brought my knee up and kicked her in the stomach. Then I pushed her back, and her back hit the edge of the bed and she slid down to the floor with a defeated cry.

  Rebeca Estacado. She was the older of the only two females that hailed from the Estacado line. She was the easier one to kidnap. Franco Estacado was more than mafia, more than arms and drug dealers. He took his parents’ small kingdom, and along with his brothers, he grew it into an empire.

  People weren’t crazy enough to try and steal from under his ruling. But the Sekt weren’t just anybody, and the Colombians and Mexicans wanted the whole pie to themselves.

  That was the problem with the world—everyone wanted to be a king. It was getting fucking overcrowded at the top, or should I say at the bottom since the underground was running out of space for men who wanted a crown.

  “Devi calmarti,” I told her in her native tongue. People found comfort in things that were familiar to them.

  She hugged her knees to her chest, her lips trembling and her body shaking. Two weeks. She had been missing for two weeks, and the jungle had not been kind to her.

  I looked down at her, and this was the part where I should have felt some remorse, yet I felt none. Damian and I planned the trip to Colombia down to every little detail. Hours of us going over every scenario that could go wrong.

  “We can’t be the ones to take the girl,” I told Damian, “and neither can the cartel because that would start a war.”

  He sat at a desk that had belonged to Tsar Nicholas II, a desk fit for a king. He leaned back and put his Hermès loafers on the old wooden surface. “What is it that you suggest we do?”

  We might hate each other, might plot ways of bringing the other down, but when it came down to it, we were both Sekten through and through, and in moments like this, we were allies and not enemies—just for now.

  “Hire someone who has no allegiance,” I told him. My back was facing him as I inspected the bear head he had mounted on the wall opposite from his desk.

  “Hmmm.” He thought it over, but I felt his gaze on my back. I did the best to ignore it. “Someone who belongs to no one. Do you have Gideon’s information?”

  Without missing a beat, I turned around. “No, but ask Francesca. She might.”

  The words burned as I said them. How I sounded calm and unaffected was beyond me. Not getting what he wanted from me, Damian turned his head, thinking about what I suggested.

  Damian had a file on everyone in the Sekt. He always found out the thing that a person held dearest, and then he used it as pawn to get his way one way or another. He had something on everyone except for me. The only person I once had was my babushka, and since she was six feet under, there wasn’t anything he could blackmail me with—and it was crucial it remained that way.

  London had been a wake-up call. In London, I discovered that even monsters could learn to love, and I’d never wanted to learn that.

  I turned to leave, but his authoritative voice halted me.

  “I need you to go to New York.”

  Yeah, fuck what I had to do.

  “Why is that?” I arched a brow. I knew what he wanted, but I liked to keep him guessing if I played dumb or aloof.

  “Time’s up. People need to pay. Or else it sends a message to the world that you can make empty promises to the Sekt and there will be no consequences.”

  “What did you want with the Ember anyway? That is nothing compared to the Amber Room, and we can’t even show that off?”

  Damian rolled his eyes at me. “And people suspect we have that. It gives us more power. How do you stop someone who has the unattainable?”

  “I’m at your orders.” I forced t
he words to come out. He seemed pleased and then shooed me out of the study.

  “I don’t want to go back to my father.” The hoarse girl’s plea broke through my thoughts. “I want t-t-t-to d-d-d-die.”

  I crouched so that I was at eye level with her. Her caramel skin had a grayish hue rather than the golden tan she used to sport. Her hair was a knotted mess that was dirty and grimy. She had bruises all over her bony arms. She had lost some weight in the two weeks they’d kept her.

  Slowly I reached my hand out and pushed away the stray hairs from her face.

  “If it makes you feel better, one of the men who did this to you is now dead.”

  “Yeah, well, I want to be dead too,” she spat at me.

  I gave her a sad smile. “You are of no use to me dead.”

  My hands went to her neck, holding on to her pressure points so I could make her pass out. As for the Italian princess, she just let me, having abandoned her fight.

  When I thought about my life, I liked to think about the silver lining, and my father being the monster that he was, he didn’t make me a damsel but a huntress. I might hurt, I might be bleeding all over the floor, but I would never stop fighting.

  Past

  Location: London

  “Through here.” I turned around to look at Gideon through hooded eyes. My heart was barely getting back to normal after all the running and the adrenaline that was coursing through my body.

  As soon as I opened the door, I removed my headband and threw it on the side table. Some of the decorations that adorned it were diamonds, others were infrared LED lights that made me invisible to the outside cameras. So, when Yates looked at them, he would only see my body, and my face would be shielded by blinding lights.

  Gideon walked in right after me. His presence seemed to take all the space of the cabin I owned in the outskirts of London.