Something Wicked: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  BREATHE HATE

  STAY CONNECTED

  VILE INTENTIONS TEASER

  More Bully Romances

  Chapter One

  KENNEDY

  I’m going to die.

  It was that thought that launched me out of the trunk, making my stiff tendons crack.

  Fire burned through my cold thighs as I forced them into motion.

  Hands grabbed at me, but I twisted through them, pounding over the asphalt toward a dark cluster—the tree line, I thought, but it was hard to see anything in the blinding light. I squinted, willing my eyes to adjust.

  The small, scrubby trees blocked out enough light that I wasn’t completely blinded. Still I stumbled a little, awkward with pain and kaleidoscope vision, wincing every time the sun sliced through the shadows in strips and speckles.

  It was almost as hot outside as it had been in the trunk and every breath rattled dryly in my throat.

  Information came at me in bits and pieces. I wasn’t sweating. That was bad. I should have been sweating.

  My heart felt like a flaming jackhammer, beating too fast even though I was running flat-out.

  I was in better shape than that—but I was dehydrated, exhausted, and it was taking its toll.

  The Seymores were chasing after me, but only one set of footsteps was keeping up. Rudy.

  They’d sent Rudy ahead. He was the only one of them faster than me. If I was in their position I would have sent him too.

  My lower back throbbed on one side just over my hip and my mouth tasted like salted pennies.

  Bad, that was bad. I knew it was bad, but panic along with everything else clouded my mind and I couldn’t remember why it was bad.

  “Kennedy! Stop!”

  Rudy’s harsh bellow was too close. He was yards away from me at most, and I’d seen his long legs eat up that much ground in seconds.

  I pushed harder, sobbing for breath, desperate for energy. I was running on nothing more than the will to survive.

  If I was going to die, it needed to be when my parents were home. When…when someone was there to nice that I’d gone missing and to report it.

  I shook my head and pushed my legs even harder. Survival, that’s what I was supposed to be thinking about.

  How long had I been in that damn trunk? The sun was higher than I thought it would be. I must have passed out, must have lost some time between dawn and the Seymore’s arrival.

  Had they been trying to cook me alive and chickened out at the last minute, or had they just underestimated how long it would take me to roast?

  Did they expect to open the trunk to a very much alive victim?

  Were they happy by the fact that I hadn’t croaked, or just excited that it would cause the fun to carry on for a bit longer?

  A twig snapped behind me as Rudy closed the gap between us.

  My stomach clenched with panic and the throb over my hip twanged, causing sharp, blinding pain to rip through my gut for a second—long enough for me to stumble, fierce enough to rip a cry from my throat.

  Rudy swore in Spanish. The fact that I heard it meant he was too close for comfort.

  I tucked my head down and kept running, begging my legs to carry me just that much faster. To keep with me until I was safe. Which led me to another thought…

  I needed to figure out where I was. If I could get to civilization, I could get help—or at least get somewhere public enough that they wouldn’t dare touch me. Somewhere where there would be witnesses.

  Kidnapping and trying to kill me, as stupid as that was, didn’t mean the Seymores were stupid. They would stop if I was in public; leave me alone if there were people watching their impending crimes.

  My eyes finally adjusted. Shallow slopes all around me obscured my surroundings, assisted by the clusters of twisted trees and spiny cacti. I listened, trying to hear beyond the air rushing over my ears.

  Running water. The river. If I could just make it to the river, I could find my way.

  I veered off suddenly, hoping to lose Rudy around a boulder, and made for the sound. River—parking lot—I’d seen the older guy’s green apron. Where did I know it from?

  Grocery clerk. Not from the place I usually went, but that other place—the one my mom liked to go to when she was feeling Organic—damn it, what was it? More importantly, where was it?

  I leapt over a rock, dodged a cactus, and almost slipped down a sudden, sharp slope. The river was close. The desert had a way of falling apart near the water.

  My detour had only worked for a few seconds, but Rudy was a lot farther behind me now.

  Crunchie’s! Crunchie’s Granola Pavilion. Right on the edge of town. That’s where I was. Son of a bitch.

  I turned again on the far side of a thick tree, doubling back in the direction I’d come from. There was no help the other way, not unless I got really lucky and stumbled upon a truck stop or something.

  Exhaustion and dehydration, along with the pain tearing through my body, was beginning to overtake my adrenaline. I hadn’t had that much left to begin with and what little I did have was getting eaten up.

  I needed to hide somehow, but the woods around Starline didn’t lend themselves to cover. Even the bushes were spindly and bare, conserving their water and only sipping at the flood of sunlight with fuzzy, slender leaves.

  Sand skittered down the slope behind me. Rudy was closer than he should have been which meant that I was slowing down. The thought made me panic.

  I tried to push myself harder, but the strain made darkness beat around the edges of my vision. I couldn’t keep my breath quiet even if I could find a place to hide. Every scraping breath was agony, a loud and rattling sob. I didn’t have enough left in me to reach civilization.

  They must have known that. They’d left me in there so long, they had to know I’d be weak. They could have grabbed me when I was in the trunk. They could have barred my way or struck me—one slap and I would have been done for.

  Hell, they could have left me in the car for a while longer. It wouldn’t have taken much. An hour or two, maybe three, and I would never have woken up from a heat-induced sleep.

  Why did they let me pass them? Sure, they tried to grab me. But I was in shitty shape, and there were a lot of them. I couldn’t believe that I had taken them completely by surprise.

  Had they wanted me to run? Like a fox to their hounds. Maybe the
y liked the chase. Maybe they got off on it.

  I couldn’t let them catch me. I had almost beaten Rudy a couple of times—this time, just this time, I needed to beat him.

  I saw a flash of light ahead—the river or a road, it didn’t matter much—it was salvation.

  I narrowed my focus as my vision flashed red and grey. I didn’t see the root until it caught my foot, sending me sprawling to the ground, face first.

  My mouth and eyes were full of dirt, but I didn’t have time to focus on that too much because I could feel Rudy’s feet pounding into the earth behind me. I struggled, spitting and blinking, trying to force myself from the ground. I turned just in time to watch his tall, furious form hurtle toward me. My hands were still pushing and my legs were still fighting to move, but none of it worked. Not successfully, anyway.

  It was then that I realized that there was no getting away from him. Rudy pinned me to the ground, his hands fighting to take hold of my wrists. His body on top of mine, crushing my ribs, my stomach.

  I fought, scratching and kicking, screaming until my voice gave out, struggling until I couldn’t any longer. Then my face was smashed against his shoulder and he was… holding me tight against him. He smelled like safety and sex and stolen moments on the track. My overwrought mind couldn’t take the conflict.

  I clung to him and sobbed helplessly.

  “Rudy please…please don’t hurt me.”

  Chapter Two

  RUDY

  I didn’t think I could get more pissed off than I’d been when I saw her curled up in the trunk of Thomas’ castoff junker. But when she dug her nails into my back, shaking all over, I saw red.

  When the sharp scent of urine hit my nostrils, all I could see was Thomas’ blood. Bubbling out of his mouth, staining his shirt red, staining his tombstone red.

  I was going to kill him. The bitch who owned him, I was going to kill her too. And I was going to do it with my bare fucking hands.

  “Shh,” I hissed.

  I stroked Kennedy’s hair and my fingers caught in the matted tangles. Sweat, dry and crystalized, flaked off onto my hand.

  I held her tighter, willing her to take a steady breath. And then I focused on my own breathing, taking long breaths against the murderous fury building in my chest.

  If I couldn’t breathe through my anger, I wouldn’t be able to make her breathe through her panic.

  I wanted to say something, needed to say something, to anchor her. To reassure her. To check on her, make sure they didn’t hurt her worse than what I could see. But there were no coherent words in my head. Just a confused jumble of English and Spanish, all soaked in the blood I wanted to spread all over Thomas’ life.

  “Marco!” Bradley shouted from somewhere to my right.

  “Polo,” I called back, my voice sharp-edged with fury. It made Kennedy gasp and shrink away from me.

  I pulled her to her feet as gently as I could, steadying her as she wobbled. The dark purple circles under her dry, bloodshot eyes made every muscle in my body ache for murder.

  My brothers slid down the slope beside us, Bradley in front, Chris and Gary bringing up the rear.

  “Benjamin had to go back to work,” Bradley told me.

  Benjamin, one of our older brothers—or predecessors, depending on how you looked at it—worked at Crunchie’s. He was the one who told us about the car sitting in a part of the store’s parking-lot where nobody frequented with “Suck it, Seymore Lover” scrawled across the back window in blue soap chalk. He was the only reason we had made it to Kennedy in time.

  The fact of the matter was, we made it in time. There was still damage done, though. Kennedy’s skin was pale and clammy, her lips chapped and split, and she couldn’t seem to keep her feet under her.

  When she flopped limply against Bradley—who had always scared her more than the rest of us because he was huge and stern-looking—something snapped in my brain. I started moving before the decision moved up to my conscious mind.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Chris took a step like he was going to try to stop me.

  “I’m ending this,” I growled.

  “Hold on,” Gary said, looking from me to Kennedy and back. “Rudy, come on man. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “We can handle this rationally,” Bradley said. “We’ll go to the cops and—”

  And that was where he lost me.

  I’d been laughed out of too many precincts to trust cops with any damn thing. We go walking in there with Kennedy looking the way she does and they wouldn’t hesitate to slap handcuffs on each and every one of us.

  “Don’t let her out of your sight,” I said as I turned away from them, back toward the grocery store. “She needs water right fucking now. Get her home.”

  “But where are you going?” Chris shouted at my back.

  “Damn it, Rudy, stop!”

  I pushed them out of my head as I ran full-tilt through the scrubby woods. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t slow down, couldn’t even calm down. They almost killed Kennedy with their petty bullshit. My Kennedy.

  I leapt over logs and cacti, running faster than ever before, fueled by the murderous fire in my veins. If Kennedy hadn’t been safely in my brother’s care, maybe I could have held back for a little while longer. But there was no holding back, not now.

  I skidded into the parking lot and found Benjamin dawdling around the cart returns, shooting worried glances into the woods. When he saw me, his face broke in a relieved smile. He looked behind me expectantly, then frowned.

  “What happened?”

  “They’re coming,” I said shortly. “They’re gonna need your car. Get water for Kennedy.”

  “Sure,” Benjamin said, pursing his lips. His frown deepened, but I was already halfway to my Mustang.

  “Rudy, you look pissed.”

  “Because I am pissed.”

  “Where are you going? If your girl needs help—”

  I whirled on him, keys in hand, ready to tear his throat out if he didn’t get out of my way.

  “What she needs is to be safe from predatory prep school pricks,” I growled. “Get out of my fucking way, Benjamin.”

  He fixed me with one of his trademark soft looks, the kind that he got his ass kicked for all through school, and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “You need to calm down,” he said so gently that it made my skin prickle. “Go inside. Wash your face. Have a drink. Call Dad. Then do whatever it is you’re thinking about doing, but not before.”

  I didn’t bother answering him. I pushed him aside and yanked the door open so hard it squealed a complaint, then slammed it shut as I impaled the ignition.

  Fuck all that noise. I didn’t have time for any of that—and neither did Thomas. His time ran out the second he decided to grab my girl out of the goddamn school parking lot.

  Benjamin’s too confident for his own good sometimes. I almost ran him over. He was still trying to talk me down, but I wasn’t hearing him. I was hearing Thomas beg for mercy. I gunned it and Benjamin jumped out of the way at the last second.

  As I looped around to peel out of the parking lot, I caught a glimpse of Bradley coming out of the woods. He carried Kennedy in his arms, her head resting limply against his shoulder. She looked dead, or nearly.

  Her pallid face burned itself into my brain.

  I sped off.

  Kennedy wouldn’t die today. But someone sure as hell would.

  Chapter Three

  KENNEDY

  Things were hazy for a while after Rudy caught me. The thundering in my head didn’t stop and I think I might have passed out.

  For a minute I thought I was dead, floating through the air, maybe on a cloud—but soon I realized that someone was carrying me like a baby.

  The heartbeat under my ear was steady, and a deep male voice was humming a lullaby. I closed my eyes to listen and must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew someone was washing my face with cold water.

  “There you go, princess
,” a soft, almost effeminate voice said. “Drink this.”

  As soon as the water touched my lips my body reacted, one final shot of adrenaline.

  I drank greedily, desperately, draining the cup in seconds. There was another one against my mouth a moment later and I finished that too, and another after it.

  When I couldn’t fit any more in my belly, I took a deep breath in through my nose. Vegetables, vinegar, and that industrial disinfectant every store seems to have filled my head, along with a whole lot of cool, damp air.

  I let my eyes flutter open. At first all I saw was a blur of color, heavily streaked with industrial steel and beige, but soon my eyes focused on the face in front of me.

  It was the older guy, the twenty-something year old in the green apron who had been with the Seymores when they opened the trunk.

  He wore his thick, kinky blonde hair in twists which arched artistically over the rainbow-colored band which tied around his forehead.

  His coloring was similar to Rudy’s, cinnamon skin with robin’s egg eyes, but his features were completely different.

  He offered me a slice of mango and I took it automatically. The sweet tang was the shock my senses needed for reality to click back into place.

  I was in the back room of a produce department. Bradley, Chris, and Gary stood on the opposite side of the room from me, propped against a gleaming stainless steel prep counter with a wide sink in the middle.