Shattered King(3)

“Jesus.”

Shoved to the back of the bottom drawer, under a stack of Playboys, was a notebook. The fucking moron had actually written “passwords” on the front. I found the code I needed, then checked the time. There was still ten minutes on the clock.

I had the safe open in five seconds.

Empty. I had another flick through the notebook, just in case they had more than one safe. Nothing. It was a long shot, but this guy was obviously a total idiot. Definitely dumb enough to keep the painting at his own house.

I was heading for the door when a photo sitting on a bookshelf caught my eye.

My legs just fucking—stopped. Like a nail had been driven though the tops of both my feet mid-step, pinning me to the goddamn floor.

It was a family photo.

A Carson family photo.

I looked around the room again, almost giving myself goddamn whiplash, confused as hell.

Where the hell had my brother sent me? Anger flared to life, growing steadily, pumping through me.

Jesus fucking Christ.

One of those assholes lived here?

My eyes were drawn back to the picture, like someone else had control over them. Fuck, I couldn’t look away, heart hammering in my chest.

Standing there, big smiles on their faces were Elizabeth and Pierce. Lulu’s mother and stepfather. Alongside them her aunt and uncle and their kids.

A rough sound rasped up my throat, past my lips. Lulu. She was a little ways off to the side, on her own. She looked about sixteen here. She’d been a couple years older when I first met her, but her hair was the same—down and a little wild. Her gray eyes were aimed at the camera, and they sliced right fucking through me. I wasn’t prepared to see her face, hadn’t had a chance to sure up my defenses.

Something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in a long time, hammered me from behind. I hadn’t seen her, not even a picture, not since she came to see me in prison.

And there she was. Tormenting me. Mocking me.

I picked it up, stared into her traitorous eyes. But the fury I’d lived off like fucking oxygen the last three years wouldn’t come, because this wasn’t the Lulu that tore me to shreds. She was a kid here, a kid who looked a little lost, and a whole fucking lot lonely.

The urge to fire it across the room nearly got the better of me.

I quickly put it down and got the hell out of there, before I did something stupid.

Jude was coming up the stairs when I hit the hall. Jude Wayland, ex-cop, and at six-foot-five, two hundred and fifty pounds of solid muscle, not someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of. He still had good reliable contacts on the force, not to mention his expertise with security systems—namely how to shut them down. Add to that his size and ability to be intimidating as hell, he’d become our go-to guy when someone needed to be leaned on. Persuasion was one of his specialties.

“Company.” He tilted his head to the front of the house.

We jogged down the stairs and I moved to the French doors off the living room, while Jude did his thing, reactivating the security system. We were shutting the doors behind us as the front door opened.

I turned to Jude when we were outside, fighting the rage pounding through me. “Who lives here?”

Jude rubbed the back of his neck, looking guilty as hell, and then tilted his head toward the living room window.

We’d walked out the door two minutes ago and already there was a woman bent over the back of the couch, pants yanked down around her thighs, while some guy, not her husband, fucked her from behind like he was in the throes of a fit.

I recognized her instantly.

Lulu’s aunt.

Jude shook his head, a look of disgust on his face and held up his hands. “You need to talk to Van. I’m staying outta this shit. I fucking told him this was a bad idea.” Then he turned around and walked off.

I’d be talking to my brother all right.

Twenty minutes later I was back in Queens, striding across the underground parking lot toward the elevator that would take me up to our offices.

Van and I opened the King Agency before I went to prison. We started off doing personal protection and security, private investigation, mainly corporate, but some domestic as well, then moved onto high-risk fugitive recovery and missing person and kidnapping investigations. Coming from a rough neighborhood, living on the streets most of the time, you acquired certain skills to get by, to survive. Turned out that was better than any college education in our line of work. Clients started coming to us with jobs that other agencies refused to take them, either because they were too dangerous or crossed lines they weren’t willing to cross. We’d never had that problem. Higher risk meant higher pay. We were good at what we did, the best, which was why getting taken down for arson when shit was finally looking up for the King brothers had fucking near torn me apart. Being set up was bad enough, but being forced to put my life on hold damn near did me in.