Cruel Shame (Knights of Templar Academy #3) - Sofia Daniel Page 0,24

dick about it? Not everyone’s family owned ten percent of Scotland’s farmland. He probably lived in a castle even fancier than Templar Academy.

“My mother lives here, if that’s what you’re asking,” I snapped.

“Lilah, I wasn’t—”

“It’s fine.” I opened the door and stepped out of the taxi.

What he thought about my origins didn’t matter. I wasn’t the same girl who got kicked out of this house. Mr. Burgh was my real family, as were Gideon and Maxwell and Orlando. Kendrick was… He stepped out of the taxi and smoothed down his herringbone jacket. Kendrick was someone I’d have to tolerate.

Low barks sounded from around the back, sending a shudder down my spine. I also wasn’t the same girl Billy could dangle over the kennels.

Chapter Twelve

I continued toward the house with the winter sun on my back. With each approaching step to the front door, the sound of barking increased to a frenzy. Every fine hair on my body stood on end at the prospect of being close to those bloody dogs.

Behind me, the door to the black cab clicked shut, and Kendrick caught up with me at the doorstep.

“What breed?” he asked, making me flinch.

I turned and met his curious, gray eyes. “What?”

“They sound agitated.”

His question trickled into my skull. “Rottweilers and German shepherds, but he might have added a few others since.”

Kendrick’s brows rose, seeming to ask me to elaborate. I shook my head. It was bad enough hearing those dogs, worse was being near dogs trained by the man who used them as instruments of terror. I wasn’t going to talk about it on Billy Hancock’s doorstep.

I pressed the doorbell and cringed at what now sounded like a chorus of hellhounds. The only thing stopping me from not running out on the street was the knowledge that Billy never let those dogs into the house. At least he didn’t before he went to jail. A shiver trickled down my spine. Before I sent him there.

“Nobody can hear a doorbell over that noise,” Kendrick said.

The second time, I kept my finger on the doorbell at a continuous ring. If Billy Hancock was out there feeding them, he’d hear the sound when the monsters finally stopped barking.

Moments later, the door swung open, and a middle-aged woman with an obvious black dye job stuck her head through the doorway. She looked like one of the overdressed wives of Billy’s associates who would volunteer to run errands around the house whenever Mother became overwhelmed. This one wore thick, black kohl around her eyes and her lips, which she filled with a bright cerise.

“What?” she snapped.

“Is Abby in?” I asked.

The woman paused. “She’s busy.”

I pursed my lips. Busy was the term our housekeepers used whenever Mother was in a drunken stupor or too high on coke to be coherent. “Can I come in and wait?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“Lilah Hancock.”

Her gaze swept from my bleached hair down my body and stopped at my shoes. This was what we call in Richley ‘looking someone up and down.’ Not necessarily an act of aggression unless accompanied by a twist of the lips or some sort of scowl. It was a way of assessing someone without asking tedious questions, such as what they did for a living.

Without a grimace, her eyes flickered to Kendrick, who stood behind me. “And him?”

“My boyfriend.”

Kendrick huffed, sounding like he was about to utter a denial, but I elbowed him in the ribs.

The woman stepped aside. “I’ll let Mrs. Hancock know you’re here.”

“Thanks.” Remembering all that bullshit Kendrick gave me over the Christmas break about not coming in without an invitation, I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him over the threshold.

A faint scent of weed hung in the air, reminding me of the heavenly kush Sammy and I used to grow in the basement of our house on Beddington Road. The hallway was the same as I’d remembered: salmon-colored marble floors, magnolia walls, white skirting boards and a white ceiling.

Two new oil paintings of Mother and Billy Hancock hung on the wall. Some people enjoyed glamor photography but Billy commissioned art of Mother and himself. This latest work was an atmospheric piece of a blood-red sky where a centaur with my stepfathers face and muscled torso brandished a reaper’s scythe. A naked, stylized version of Mother clung to his back, showing a hint of side-boob.

I glanced at Kendrick, but he was too busy gaping at the painting of Billy wrestling a three-headed Rottweiler with the body of a rhino