“I think you broke his nose, Kaius.” Nolan chuckled lightly before tossing the kid a towel.
The initiate thanked him, pressing the cloth on his face and moving out of the ring. Nolan stepped up, tapping his knuckles up as he went.
I shook my head. “I’m done for today.”
“No, you aren’t,” Nolan argued, bouncing from one foot to the other. “Something is bothering you, and you need to release that on someone who can actually keep up with you.”
I scoffed. “And you think that’s you?”
Nolan’s face darkened at the challenge. “You know it is.”
Wiping the sweat from my forehead, I waited for him to make the first move. Nolan struck quickly, holding nothing back. He had always been impatient in the ring, never giving any thought to his moves until he was halfway through the fight. I blocked the punch, then struck back with a powerful jab to where he left his right side exposed. Nolan coughed out at the impact but continued to charge forward, this time clipping my jaw with his fist. I opened and closed my mouth, retreating backward to avoid his next one. We danced around each other, slipping through each attack. With every punch, the anger I was trying to repress from my conversation with Alec began to rise to the surface again.
The helplessness in his tone had struck a chord in me, and I had agreed to his terms—agreed to marry a woman I had only ever met once. The princess of the Death Dealers, Emersyn Spade, would be mine in a week. I had been no older than thirteen when we had met briefly, but what I did remember of the young girl was her bright blue eyes that held onto every word her brother said to her.
The crunch of Nolan’s fist slamming into my cheek broke me from the memory. My head snapped back, and I groaned in pain. Brushing my fingers against where he had landed his blow, I sighed. Nolan stepped closer to me, already unwrapping his hands. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Do you remember Alec Spade’s younger sister?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. Nolan narrowed his eyes at me and nodded once. “What do you remember about her?”
“That she was too innocent to be a club president’s daughter.” Nolan laughed lightly. “She was sweet, but she also wasn’t around a lot. Her parents sent her off to study in some fancy boarding school. Wasn’t she named like Emily?”
“Emersyn,” I grumbled.
“That’s it.” Nolan snapped his fingers toward me, the memories beginning to resurface for him. “Why are you asking about her?”
“Alec needs me to marry her,” I sighed, running one hand over my face. “And we have to help him kill his father.”
Nolan narrowed his eyes at me. “You? Marry the Spade family princess? Wasn’t the entire point of sending her away to protect her from the big bad monsters in this life?”
“It was,” I said, reaching between the ring’s ropes to grab two water bottles. Tossing one toward Nolan, he caught it and unscrewed the cap to take a long drink. I let the water calm me for a moment before continuing. “But that was before her father got himself in too deep and the Iron Serpents offered him an out that didn’t have him buried six feet under.”
“He’s selling his daughter to the snakes?” Nolan’s water bottle hovered in front of his lips. I nodded once. We both knew that the Iron Serpents didn’t deal in drugs or weapons. They hadn’t for a long time. Their underground sex ring was highly lucrative, and once someone was in it, they never came back. Well, except for one girl, who had escaped right under their noses and was now under my protection.
Dominic, their club’s president, had a new wife every few years, and they all wore the same haunted look in their dead eyes. But catching them in the act was like catching smoke. They moved their location around so many times that tracking them was useless. I had tried. Nolan had tried. Hell, we had even tried to get an initiate on the inside, but that was a dead end as well.
“He used the only thing that would get me to agree.” I stared down my second with a burning rage. The muscles in Nolan’s jaw popped, the fist holding the water bottle clenching tight around the plastic. Water sprayed across the training ring.
“Alec threatened Astoria and is still walking around here without a bullet between his eyes?” Nolan growled out, the tips of his ears beginning to grow red, but I could tell he was trying to keep his rage contained.
“He didn’t threaten her.” I crossed my arms over my bare chest. “Alec just used the idea of her against me. Asked me if I were in his position, what I would do to keep her safe. The only way to ensure that Emersyn is protected is an alliance between the Knights and the Death Dealers.”
“And the only way that alliance stays in place is if Alec’s father is dead.” Nolan stared at me blankly.
I nodded once, letting him take in the information. There had been no roundtable meeting on this, and I knew that he was pissed that I had made the decision without him, even if it would have resulted in the same outcome. It was dangerous for us not to trust each other, but this hadn’t been about a lack of confidence in Nolan. There just hadn’t been time to fuck around about this deal.
Nolan raised a single eyebrow at me, his lips quirking up at the corners. “Do you think he would prefer to be castrated or poisoned?”
“I was thinking both.”
“All of our books are off,” Astoria grumbled, fiddling with a pencil as she pored over the numbers on the page.
Her light hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun, a stark contrast to the dark clubbing dress she was wearing. Nolan’s zip-up was pulled over her shoulders, the sleeves bunched up at the ends to ensure she could hold the bar’s books properly. She was swimming in the damn thing, but still tried totell me it was her jacket when I snapped at her to stop stealing Nolan’s things.
“Let me see it.” I reached out, not taking my eyes off the marriage contract in my left hand.
It had never been signed by Emersyn Spade, and I still wondered what had happened to her. Alec had left to retrieve her from inside his family home the night of the massacre, but then our entire plan had gone up in flames. Literally and figuratively. If she had been in the home when the fire started, there was no way she would have gotten out. But there was also a part of me that had always thought she might have been the one to start it as a distraction to ensure she could get away.
Her body had not been one of which was identified by the police through dental records, which meant she had either run so far from Arizona that no one knew her name or she was living the hell that her brother tried to save her from. She was the one Spade no one knew enough about, and she could have used that to her advantage. Emersyn Spade had been underestimated her entire life, and that night she could have wanted to prove she wasn’t the innocent little angel her family had labeled her as.
