Prologue

King

The average time spent between incarcerations for a career criminal is six months.

I’d only been out three.

I’d expected to find Max in that car. Instead, cold metal clinked around my wrists, and the asshole pig had the audacity to laugh when he tightened the cuffs to the point of pain.

I didn’t wince, though. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He pressed down on my head roughly and shoved me hard into the back of the old police cruiser. I landed on my side, and my cheek slammed against the sticky seat. It smelled like vomit and bad decisions. My hands tingled from the loss of blood flow.

The motherfucker was lucky I was in cuffs.

Three years. They already had me for three fucking years, and they were going to have me for a whole lot longer.

Kidnapping wasn’t exactly rewarded with a light slap on the wrist, especially for someone whose record was as long as mine. I promised I was never going back, but keeping my promises is just another thing I was never very good at.

I was all out of fucks to give though. The system could have me. I belonged to them, but they didn’t fucking own me. They would NEVER fucking own me.

She owned me.

Heart and black fucking soul.

I will walk to the fucking chow line with a shit-eating grin on my face wearing my scratchy orange jumpsuit every motherfucking day. I will play cards with the worst of the worst and make nice with the guards who are willing to cut me some slack. At night, when I’m alone in my windowless cell with my dick in my hand, I will remember what it was like to have her in my bed; how her innocent wide eyes stared up at me as I moved inside her. The way she arched her back into me as I made her come over and over again.

I kept telling myself I didn’t have anything to offer her, but that wasn’t true.

I had love.

Pup. Doe. Ray. Whatever the fuck her name was. I loved her more than what was normal, rational, or sane, and I would gladly rot in fucking prison with a smile on my face if I knew my girl was going to be okay.

But I didn’t know that. I couldn’t know that.

I should have known that motherfucker was going to fucking cross me.

“The notorious Brantley King,” the pig said with a smirk as he got into the front seat. The plastic-like leather squeaked against his belt as he closed his door and started the engine. “You’d think you’d have learned your lesson by now, boy.”

He laughed and shook his head. It was obvious this guy was getting some sort of sick pleasure out of being the one to put me in cuffs.

“King,” I corrected him defiantly. Nobody called me Brantley but her.

“Excuse me?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at me through the rearview mirror.

I sat up straight, meeting his gaze with mine, as if I were staring straight through to his pussy-ass soul. “They call me King, mother fucker.”

The rage inside me grew to epic proportions. That’s when I noticed the detective didn’t turn onto the main road but instead drove straight onto the path through the woods.

This guy was no fucking cop. I spotted his gun; he’d set it on the dash. It was a Judge, not the kind of gun that was standard police-issue. This guy wasn’t taking to me jail.

He was taking me to ground.

There was no time to waste.

My girls needed me.

More than that, I needed them.

The moron had cuffed me in front. That should’ve been my first indicator that something was off. A real cop would’ve never done that unless he was transporting a nonviolent criminal.

Which wasn’t me.

Using the chain that connected my cuffs, I trapped the fake detective’s neck against the headrest and yanked back with all my might until I felt like my biceps were going to explode.

His hands left the wheel and flailed about as he tried to connect with my head, but I dodged him by lowering myself behind the seat.

The car veered off the path and bounced from side to side as it ran over a patch of knee-high roots.

The pressure mounted behind my eyes as I tugged back on the cuffs, squeezing tighter and tighter. I didn’t release my hold until the car came crashing to a stop and every inch of life had drained from his body.

The fake cop was right; I would never be anything more than the notorious Brantley King.

That was fine by me because the senator had a lesson to learn. You did not take what was mine and not expect to pay in blood, sweat, or pussy.

He took my girl. He wanted to take my life.

His payment would be in blood.

Chapter One

King

Revenge is sweet.

That’s what they say anyway. But it wasn’t until I crawled out of the wreckage, picking shards of glass from my skin, that I realized how true that saying really was.