Tacet a Mortuis Read online

Rage.

  Rage.

  Rage.

  Heat rises inside of me as I think over everything. His touch when I was a kid. What he made me do to Brantley. And what he made Brantley do to me as a kid.

  “Stop!” I scream, my eyes unblinking and fixed on the car in front of me.

  Silence.

  I slowly turn around, noticing Bishop is beside me, kneeling down next to Lucan, who is bleeding out on the road.

  I look at Lucan, tilting my head. Smiling, I whisper, “Seeing you in pain soothes my anger.”

  Lucan looks at me square in the eye. “I will live in your memories, Silver. Forever.”

  Squaring my jaw, I bend down to Bishop’s level, bringing my hand to his boot. I feel up toward where I know he keeps a knife. I feel him freeze, realizing what I’m about to do, but before he can stop me—if he was going to stop me—I unclip the holster and pull out the large hunting knife and slowly raise it into the air. Lucan’s eyes follow it slowly.

  “You see this?” I run my pointer finger down the blunt side of the knife. “It’s a Fallkniven A1Pro Survival Knife.” I smirk, admiring how the boys—except for Bishop, he’s still crouching beside me—watch me with awe, or fear, or a combination of both, and are all standing behind me. They have my back—but I won’t need it. I launch the knife into Lucan’s pelvis area until I feel his bones crunching against the blade. He screams out, a loud, curdling scream, his back arching and tears pouring down his face.

  I bend down to his ear, running my lips over the lobe like he did to me not long ago. Feeling his blood spilling over my hand, I grin and whisper, “You know, since you love to be theatrical… this knife is a survival knife.” I circle the blade, my hand sticky with his blood. It blankets my anger, soothing it like an ice pack on a burn. Putting out the pain.

  Pulling the knife out of him, I inch backward, both hands wrapped around the blade, ready to stab it into his head. Needing it to finally put out the burn I have inside me. The burn has only been temporarily eased when Brantley appears, snatches the knife out of my hand, and stabs it right between Lucan’s eyes. Blood sprays all over me, the tang of blood overpowering every taste bud in my mouth.

  Brantley screams, veins popping out from his neck, his eyeballs almost bulging from their sockets. He has anger; I was right. He has anger just like I did, if not more, because Lucan was his father.

  My breathing slows, and when Lucan’s head drops to the side, his death stinking up the air, I collapse into Bishop, my head resting on his shoulder.

  He wraps his arm around me, kissing me on the head as Brantley pulls the knife out of his dad and launches it back into him again. And again. And again. I flinch, burying my face into Bishop. His smell, his just—Bishop. The only sound I can hear is Brantley slicing into Lucan. Again and again.

  “Come on, baby,” Bishop says into my hair when he sees Brantley isn’t stopping anytime soon.

  “Well,” Hector says, and I turn in Bishop’s grip to face him but away from Brantley making dues with his abusive dad. “This is all lovely, but do any of you fuckers want to tell me what the fuck is going on and why my right-hand man is dead? Brantley, hear that? He’s dead so you can stop that now.” Hector pauses, looking at the mess Brantley has created and then shrugs like he sees that type of shit daily. He probably does. Actually, all of them seem unbothered by it.

  Bishop squeezes me into him. “Lucan would rape Madison when she was a little girl.”

  Hector sucks from his cigar, but just there, below the surface, I can see it enrages him somewhat, and that surprises me because he’s Hector Hayes. I wouldn’t think something like that would bother him. He must catch my notice in him, because he laughs.

  “Don’t take it to heart, sugar. I personally don’t like you, for a lot of reasons.” He looks at his son and then back to me. “But I don’t condone rape.”

  “And…” Bishop pauses but then continues, “…and Brantley.”

  The stabbing sound has stopped; now it’s sobbing. Not the quiet sobbing, it’s the ugly kind, and I turn in Bishop’s embrace, finally bracing myself to look toward Brantley.

  He has his arms wrapped around his knees and is rocking beside what is left of Lucan. Blood drips from his hair, face, and hands, but he just rocks, sobbing loudly. “I didn’t want to. Why? Why did you have to make me do it? All those times…” He shakes his head. My heart snaps. I slowly start to walk toward him, when Bishop grabs onto my arm.

  I turn to face him, and he shakes his head. “Don’t.”

  “What do you mean, don’t? No wonder he hates me, Bishop,” I whisper, searching Bishop’s eyes. “He needed someone to blame, so he blamed me for what his father made us do that day. He blamed me, because if I didn’t exist, that wouldn’t have happened.”

  Bishop shakes his head. “No, babe.” But then his eyes look over my shoulder.

  “Thirty-seven,” Brantley whispers from behind me, and I quickly spin around to face him. “Thirty-seven young girls.”

  What? I want to ask, but I don’t in fear that he might snap at me. Instead, I remain silent, hoping he will say more, which he does.

  He looks at me, the headlights from the car shining on his face now that he’s level with it. Blood paints his face and clothing, the knife gripped in his hand. He tosses the knife over and it lands near Bishop’s feet.

  “You’re right though,” he starts, sidestepping around the mangled corpse on the ground. “I hated you. I never understood why you came back. When we were kids, at my birthday party, I hated all kids, not just you, but my father had already started talking about what he was going to get us to do together.” He pauses. “When you started Riverside, I didn’t know at first whether you remembered me or not. At first, I thought you did remember and you were—I don’t know—fucking with us after some revenge for what Lucan did.” Shit, that makes a whole lot of sense. “But also…” He pulls out a pack of smokes and puts one into his mouth, lighting it. “…You were my first. So there was hate for you from that as well. I didn’t make the Silver connection to The Silver Swan, which I should have. I’m an idiot for not making that connection. I just figured it was because of your eyes. They’re murky green now, but when you were a kid, they were silver.”

  I nod because they were. It was always strange.

  He steps up to me, leaving the smoke in his mouth. “Do you feel that?” he asks, tilting his head.

  I look deep into his eyes, a sense of peace washing over me. The fire I had burning for so many years from undying hate toward Lucan had gone out. Smiling, I nod. “Yeah.”

  He blows out a cloud of smoke. “At least that’s one of us.” He narrows his eyes at me.

  I frown. “You still hate me?”

  His eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “No, fuck.” His eyes dart around the place. “It’s just—never mind. But I don’t hate you. I feel peace with you now.” Then he smiles. The first time I have ever seen Brantley smile, and it’s at me. I want to jump on him and hug him, but that’s probably going too fast for him. Baby steps.

  Turning back around, wrapping my arms around Bishop, I look over his shoulder, directly at Hunter and Jase. My brothers. Biological brothers with Daemon.

  Hunter steps backward, shaking his head and walking straight toward the parked car, slamming the door behind him. I frown, my shoulders dropping. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t for Hunter to act like that. He’s always been warm toward me.

  Jase just stares at me, his dark eyes glued to mine. The last string in my heart is about to snap when he smiles at me. Giving me a wink. For the older brother, that surprises me. I haven’t spent much time with Jase, if any, but I know in that moment that will change.

  Bishop tucks me under his arm as the rest of the boys walk back to the cars. He looks at his dad. “Want me to call Katsia about this mess, or do you want to?” he asks his dad, nudging his head toward the destruction on the road.

  Hector looks at me and then looks at Bishop. “I’ll call her.” T
hen he looks to me. “There was a reason for my bringing you here tonight, and it wasn’t that.”

  I sink into Bishop, and his grip tightens around me. “Though, I did plan to tell you that you’re adopted.” He looks to Bishop. “But you see, as much as I love my son, he did something bad tonight. Something that is against our rules. And we only have one rule, Madison.” Hector looks right at me, and chills break out over my flesh. “So now that your adoption is exposed, I guess it’s only fair I find something else to tell you since my son is so trigger happy tonight.”

  I look up at Bishop. Trigger happy?

  Hector steps forward, putting his hands into his pockets. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the initiation process of a King?” he questions, looking at me. I nod. “Very good. So you know…” He gestures behind him, and Khales reemerges from the shadows. Bishop freezes, his grip turning to steel. “…That Khales was Bishop’s…” My head spins and my stomach recoils. Someone else steps out of the shadows. “…As was your adopted ‘mother.’”

  “Lost is not a place. It’s a soul in paralysis…

  Waiting to feel moved.”

  -Atticus

  Bishop

  Ten-Years-Old

  “I want you to think of a wall, a bulletproof one that no matter how hard any weapon hounds on it, it could never break.” Rob had said, pacing up and down in front of the seven of us. We had been close all our lives, whether by family or by choice, they were my brothers. I chose to care for them, no amount of family influence could have forced the kind of brotherhood we shared—which made us the most lethal Kings created. The generations before us, my father had said they always fought or struggled to get along sometimes. Whether it be by girl or just by personalities not being compatible, it never happened. They never had a generation that flowed fluidly like we did, so they had big plans for us.

  “A wall?” Nate snickered. “You brought us here to teach us about a wall?”

  Rob waved him off diffusely and continued his army march backward and forward in front of us. “I want you to start building this wall inside of your brain, but before you do so, I want you to make sure there are six seats there beside you. Not eight, not two, not any other number but seven total,” he paused, looking down at me. I wasn’t a short kid. For a ten-year-old, I was pretty tall, but staring up at Rob in this moment, I felt two-feet. “I want you to start building this wall today. Work on it, I mean really train your brain to build it, because by the time you initiate in, I need that wall to be solid. To be unfuckwithable. This”—Rob gestured around—“was who you trusted. No one else.”

  “What about my dad?” I argued, looking at the guys who all glared at me like “shut the fuck up.” Rob was scary, but I didn’t scare easily.

  “Even your dad. He went through the same when he was your age, and so will the next ones who come after you.”

  “What, as in we have to have kids?” Hunter scrunched up his face.

  “Yes.” Dad interrupted, walking around the back of the cabin dressed in one of his fine suits. “You will have kids one day.”

  “No, I’m good. I don’t want kids.” I knew at a very young age that children didn’t appeal to me, and I doubted that would change in the future. Call it the only-child curse.

  “Oh I bet you will, I bet you and Khales will have kids by the time you’re sixteen,” Eli snorted, only no one joined him.

  “No. I don’t want them.”

  My dad kneeled down in front of me, searching my eyes. “You will, son, and lucky for you, I have someone lined up.”

  My eyebrows pinched together. “What? Who?” I was still not having kids, but I’d ask him who he thought I could be matched with anyway.

  He reached into his front jacket pocket and pulled out a small photograph, flipping it around to show me. It was a little girl, had to be around the same age as me or younger—unless she was just really small. She had brown wavy hair, chubby cheeks, a bright smile and blue eyes. A couple of freckles were scattered over her cheeks and she was holding a hunting rifle. “This girl.”

  “That girl?” I questioned, obviously my dad was off his meds. That girl wasn’t anything great, I had seen better at my school, but she had something contrastive about her, an imbalance if you will, but her eyes. Her eyes ate up the distance between us, even if it was a photo that she was staring at me from. “Who is she?”

  Dad looked sideways at me, noticing the other guys trying to get a look. He folded it and pushed it back into his pocket, shooting them all a warning glare. “Someone who is going to arrive in your life at the exact moment you need her to.”

  “Like fate?” I asked. I didn’t really know what that word meant, but I had heard it be thrown around a lot with the adults.

  He laughed. “Not fate—karma. Your wake-up call.”

  “What the fuck!” I gasped, stepping backward until I’m colliding against a hard body. Spinning around, my eyes shot straight to Bishop. I searched him for more answers, but as per usual, he guarded his emotions with a wall that was probably built from all the people who died at his hands. His eyes were always evasively beckoning, and could summon me within seconds, but he had kept too much from me for too long. Now I was internally battling with myself on whether I trusted him or not. I tilted my head, scanning his features for something. A simple flick of light to pass over his face—but I got nothing. My shoulders slacked in defeat. I didn’t trust him anymore. I could no longer trust any of them. My mother, who was actually my adoptive mother, was alive. She didn’t shoot herself, and all my brain could manage to think was: well, shit, I got bullied all those years for fucking nothing! That could have something to do with the fact that she had fucked Bishop, though. And then I remembered who else just arrived back from the dead along with her. Khales. Nothing was making sense to me—as per usual. My body hummed with a numbness so bleak that the only thing I could feel was the trembling of my fingers and the sweating of my palms. You will not look weak right now. Through all the revelations that had been laid out tonight, and between the bloodshed, I could feel myself slowly slipping again. Losing touch with what was happening in front of me. Was it possible to have a mental break from the people around you driving you so fucking crazy? If not, I was probably going to be the first one to have it happen to.

  Hector raised a cigar to his lip, lit it up and then blew out a cloud of fog. “Madison, my son never killed Khales, or, so I’ve just found out tonight.”

  I turned back to face Bishop. “I thought you told me you did?” I fought to add to that sentence just like you told me a lot of fucking things. I hissed the ‘me’ to accentuate how livid I was by yet another one of his lies.

  “Well, this is all grand, but that’s not why I’m here.” Khales stepped forward and my eyes cut to her.

  “Don’t you fucking come closer.” Then I glanced at my mom. The person I mourned for years after her apparent death. I realized, there was a lot that went on between her and my father that I probably didn’t know. But even though my gut churned with distrust when I looked at her, I trusted my dad. Amongst all the chaos that he had put me through, I believed he had a good heart, well, at least when it came to me, anyway. I’d been wrong about this type of shit in the past, so at the same time, I wasn’t entirely sure. I was overwhelmed, so overwhelmed that my hand started to convulse, and my legs quivered. A sharp zap started shooting through my bones, leading to my knees, and then suddenly, I was on the gravel road with stones imprinting into the flesh of my knees and palms. Silent tears began to trickle down my face, and in my peripheral, I caught Bishop sinking down beside me, his arm curling around my back. I froze as every sound, every ounce of talking that was going on, started to slip into white noise. The revelations, this world, it had been slowly breaking me since I first stepped foot into the Riverside Prep marble hall. The finery that screamed elusive, now roared at me in caution. I could feel my thoughts tremble as they slowly started to lose the fight. I thought I had my mom, I thought I’d always have her, e
ven when she was dead, I still thought I had her. But it turned out, I had nothing but plastic promises that were delivered by a cheap imitation of what a mother should be.

  The hands that were clamped around my upper arms tightened and began to shake me. I stared at Bishop instantly, but I had nothing else to give. Nothing. My mouth opened, and in my mind, I was ready to tell him to take me away from all this. To whisk me away from the imposters, and the fakes, but…I didn’t trust him. One thing was clear through all of this mess. “You loved her.”

  His eyes searched mine cautiously. “What?”

  “You loved her.” This time it came out as though I was more confirming it within myself and less like I was asking him a question, because deep down, I knew. He must have felt something for her to not have ended her life all those years ago.

  “Madison.” A voice so familiar, it lit up my memory bank like a matchbox full of explosives and drifted through the frosted midnight air, lashing over old wounds that have now opened again.

  My eyes closed in reply. “Don’t.”

  “Madison, there’s—”

  My eyes slammed open and I narrowed them at her, finally, having enough courage to face the monster head-on. I slowly, and on shaky legs, stood from the asphalt, dusting off my pants and squaring my shoulders. I faintly heard a car pull up behind me, but ignored it. All of my focus was on her. I stepped forward and watched as her eyes darted around the place in panic, probably unsure of how I was going to react. I considered lunging at her but figured enough blood had been shed tonight. As much as they were all so used to witnessing scenes so graphic, I was not. She looked the same, too, well, somewhat the same—which angered me further. I guessed I would have liked to think that while I was mourning her fake death, she wasn’t out living a lavish life. My eyes found her wrist, where a white gold watch was fastened around it. It had enough bling sparkling around the face of it to make Flavor Flav jealous. Yeah, she was definitely living a pretentious life.