Queen of Quarantine (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #4) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,254

you were an unconquerable monster. But look at you now, strung up and at our mercy and still incapable of any true and meaningful kind of feeling. I pity you."

"Pity?" I scoffed. "I was the most powerful man in our state. Possibly the most powerful-"

"Was, being the operative word," Kyan cut over me with a snigger. "But you don't look so badass now."

My foot slipped and my heart leapt as I almost fell from the stool, the noose cinching tighter once again.

I pushed my hand into my pocket, reaching for the flick knife just in case one of them lost their temper and kicked the stool away before me and my son had finished this conversation and gotten to the point of it.

"Looking for this?" Kyan asked, smirking as he lifted my knife up before him, waving it at me tauntingly while my fingers closed on nothing and a spike of fear washed through me. I hadn't even noticed him taking it from me.

"This is a waste of time," Tatum said with a sigh as she pushed her way into the gap between Saint and Nash, her hands brushing against both of them lightly and as they turned to give her their full attention, I realised something far more terrifying than the rope which was knotted around my neck.

All four of the men standing before me were watching her with a heated kind of devotion which shone brighter than the midday sun. They were enraptured, enamoured, totally beguiled and under her spell. My son included.

Saint wasn't the king of this tribe of heathens. They were ruled by a queen. And the look in her eyes said my death was already dealt. Panic came for me then as I considered that fully for the first time, wondering if I really might be staring my death in the face right now. But that couldn’t be. I refused to be remembered as some coward who killed himself over the deaths of a bunch of nobodies and a virus that should have made me a fortune.

"There's no point in dragging it out. He won't ever understand the depths of his evil." Her gaze moved from them to me, her head tilting to the side and those blonde curls spilling over her shoulder. She looked almost angelic standing there, made up to perfection in that white dress with the sunlight from beyond the window casting a haze of light at her back. But the look in her eyes held nothing of heaven in it. They were filled with the fury of hell. "Unless you have any last words?"

"Saint," I snarled, looking at my son and urging him to take his place in command of this farce. "You can't seriously mean to end my life for the likes of-"

Nash kicked the stool out from beneath me with a furious snarl and my gut lurched as I fell for an eternal beat before the rope snapped tight and cut off my oxygen instantly.

I bucked and kicked, my gazing moving wildly between them as the five of them stood there watching me, perfectly still with fire and sin in their eyes and not the slightest indication that they were going to stop this.

"This is for the people you thought were worthless when they were really worth a million of you," Nash growled.

"Goodbye, Father. And just so you know, I found the secret will you made where you tried to cut me out of my inheritance and had it destroyed. A new, entirely authentic looking will leaving everything you own to me has now been produced in its place. I just didn’t want you to go into death believing you’d gotten one up on me," Saint added coldly and from those words, I realised that this was no game. There was no end to it beyond my death. No one was coming for me. And nothing I did could stop this fate now.

I kicked and flailed, darkness pressing in on me from all around and Tatum stepped forward, smiling cruelly as she watched me dying right before her eyes.

"I am the dark in the dead of the night!" she cried as her pack of heathens closed in beside her, all of their eyes on me, hungering for my end.

"Hear me roar!" they bellowed, the noise of their cheers echoing on into death with me as I fell away from them. Into the void of the dark and beyond. Into a place without position or power or wealth. Into the