All Hail - J. Bree Page 0,1
the perfect house from my family. The Manor is everything the ranch isn’t. Cold, formal, and full of the dead bodies of hundreds of girls my father and oldest brother murdered for their own sick pleasure.
There’s a reason I hate the place I was forced to grow up in.
“It’s so fucking ugly.”
I roll my eyes at Blaise’s comment and Harley elbows him in the ribs sharply. “Yeah, I don’t think we’re burning it to the fucking ground because the building looks like a mausoleum, dickhead.”
Ash slings a careful arm around my shoulders and leans down to whisper, “Are you sure you’re ready to do this, Floss? We can just hire someone to knock it down… or leave it here and pretend it doesn’t exist.”
I give my twin a sharp look. “Mom and Lips both died in there. Even if the rest of the horrors didn’t happen, I need to destroy it for them.”
My Mounty doesn’t look at all phased as she steps out of the building, Illi chuckling and jogging down the stairs with her. He looks extra… joyful today.
I’m not sure what to make of it.
Lips nudges him with her shoulder and then stalks over to me, a half-smile on her face. “It’s all ready, you guys just have to light the matches.”
I grab her hand and tug her over to where we’ll be safe, behind the fence, and leaving the boys to light it up.
“You okay?” Lips murmurs, and I nod.
“I will be once this is gone.”
She nods and looks back out at the ugly building. It’s not really that ugly but I can’t look at it without seeing all of the terrible things that happened in there, the things that I can’t ever put into words because they’re nothing but festering scars on my soul.
All of the girls my father and brother both tortured inside those walls.
The memories of my mom live inside me. They’re not tied to a place. They’re tied to Ash’s grin and to the angle of Harley’s cheekbones. They’re all the little memories that only mean something to Ash and me because no one else lived through it all.
No one else survived it all.
“Do you want to stick around and watch it burn?”
I glance over at Lips but she’s still staring at the manor. She’s good at that, at respecting your space when the situation isn’t the best. No one knows better than her what it feels like to be breaking open with an audience waiting to pounce on any weakness you might show.
I shake my head. “I’m done here. I never want to come back again.”
Lips gives me a sharp nod and links her arm with mine, steering me back over to my car. We’d come out here together, leaving the guys to ride over in the Cadillac that was packed with all of the supplies necessary to burn the Manor down.
The Phantom drives like a dream. Every time I slide in behind the wheel, I question why it is that I let the guys drive me around so much. When I slide my phone out of my pocket and find thirty notifications, that answers the question for me. Travel time is too valuable to spend behind the wheel.
I very rarely drive myself anywhere.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy driving, I’m far better at driving than Blaise or Lips are, but being around Harley and Ash means I always let them get behind the wheel. Driving is nothing more than operating a luxury piece of machinery to me but for the guys it’s like a shot of ecstasy straight to the blood.
Lips slides into the passenger seat without any hesitation, her hair down and fanning across her shoulders. Her nail polish is chipped and I’ve been meaning to try out a new color with her but time has run out for that.
She’s leaving in the morning.
They all are.
I refuse to let the panic bubbling in my chest show on my face. They’re going to go out and enjoy their lives together for a few months, they deserve that at the very least.
Lips deserves that and so much more after what she sacrificed for us all.
She tried to die for us… succeeded too, only to have her brother save her. The Devil himself and possibly the most unlikely choice for a secret sibling. None of us were expecting the heads arriving to our doorstep to be from the criminal underworld’s most feared and notorious killer.
None of us were expecting him to be such