By Blood To Avenge: A Forced Proximity Secret Society Romance, page 1
BY BLOOD TO AVENGE
A FORCED PROXIMITY SECRET SOCIETY ROMANCE
SINNERS DUET
BOOK 2
NATASHA KNIGHT
CONTENTS
Note from Natasha
1. Blue
2. Ezekiel
3. Blue
4. Ezekiel
5. Blue
6. Ezekiel
7. Blue
8. Ezekiel
9. Blue
10. Ezekiel
11. Blue
12. Ezekiel
13. Blue
14. Ezekiel
15. Blue
16. Ezekiel
17. Ezekiel
18. Blue
19. Ezekiel
20. Blue
21. Ezekiel
22. Blue
23. Blue
24. Blue
25. Ezekiel
26. Blue
27. Ezekiel
28. Blue
29. Blue
30. Ezekiel
31. Blue
What To Read Next
Thank you
Also by Natasha Knight
About Natasha Knight
Copyright © 2024 by Natasha Knight
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
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NOTE FROM NATASHA
I claimed her, but I never intended on falling for her.
I see the scars Blue hides. The secrets she keeps. I want to collect all the broken pieces of her.
Her enemies are closing in faster than she can run.
When she’s taken from me, I hunt down her abductor and give in to my rage.
I spill blood for her. I’d do it again.
But the game turns deadly when some of the most powerful men of The Society attack.
I won’t let them touch her though.
I won’t fail Blue like I failed my sister, even if she will be my undoing.
By Blood To Avenge is book 2 of the Sinners Duet. You must read By Sin To Atone before reading this book.
Click here to buy By Sin To Atone!
1
BLUE
“Looks like we’ll get that chance to be together after all. And I owe you, you little bitch.”
No.
It can’t be him. I saw him at the compound. Did he get out before we did, while Isabelle and I were in the bathroom? It’s not possible. He was guarding the Councilors. He couldn’t just leave, could he?
The car swerves and I’m thrown backward then propelled in the opposite direction. I slam against the trunk wall, the blow to my head making my ears ring, making stars dance before my eyes. It takes all I have to keep them open.
Now isn’t the time to puzzle this out. To try to make sense of how he got to me. I need to think. I need to keep my eyes open and not pass out. I need to find an escape.
I take mental inventory. My body aches. I was out of my seatbelt when the car collided with ours. Was it him? What was his name? Wyatt Hoxton? Was it him who hit us? Had he recognized me and followed us out?
Where was Zeke? Jericho went back to get him. We should have been safe with Dex.
I’m not sure if my eyes are open or closed. It’s pitch black in the trunk. He’s moving at a fast speed and when he takes a turn, I go rolling again, this time my face colliding with something hard. I black out. I only know because when I manage to open my eyes again, the car is slowing to a stop. I hear a beep, and then we’re moving again.
Gravel crunches under the tires. How long have we been driving? How long have I been passed out? After what feels like an eternity, the car comes to a stop and the driver kills the engine. I’m wide awake now, my heart racing. The car door opens, slams shut. I smell cigarette smoke. I feel around myself for a weapon, something to have ready when he pops the trunk open. But there’s nothing. I reach for a shoe. Those heels have to be good for something. I can stab him in the eye, disorient him and run. One of my feet is bare. I must have lost a shoe somewhere. But the other one is still on, and I pull it off, grip it in my hand.
I hear the popping sound of the trunk. My heart races as light appears in a thin line, then widens as he opens the trunk. I see Wyatt Hoxton’s face. His leering grin. It sends a familiar chill through me, because that I remember, but it’s worse now with those scars that run from the corners of his mouth to his ears making an eerie, inhuman grin.
He reaches in and I smell the cigarette he just smoked. Before he grabs hold of me, I draw my arm back and swing, aiming the heel of my shoe at his eye. He’s surprised, clearly, but he’s fast. And fuck he’s strong. He catches my wrist and slams it against the side of the car. I cry out with the pain as the shoe goes flying from my hand.
“I should stab you in the eye, you little bitch,” he says, both hands on me now as he hauls me out.
“No!” I scratch at him, my fingernails claws.
He shakes me so hard my brain rattles against my skull. “You want rough, little girl? You’ll get rough. Don’t push me.”
I fight him, managing to drag my nails down the side of his face. He stops and the sound he makes more animal than human. I realize my mistake when he grips my hair in his giant fist and drags me out by my hair, throwing me onto the gravel drive. I land on all fours, stones digging into my palms and knees. I look back, see the blood on his cheek. I try to crawl away, but he reaches me and with a swift kick to my stomach, sends me down.
He crouches as I hug my arms around my middle.
“I said don’t fucking push me.”
He once again grips my hair and I scream for help when he hauls me up by it. I can barely straighten as he shoves me forward, dropping me with such force the wind is knocked out of me when I hit the driveway. Tiny, sharp stones cut into every inch of exposed skin, tearing my dress, my flesh, before I’m pulled up again.
“Help me! Someone help!” I cry but he just laughs. He doesn’t attempt to shut me up.
“There’s no one to hear you,” he says and as if to prove it, he makes a sweeping gesture with his arm and he’s not lying. It’s dark, pitch black and all around us is nothing. Absolutely nothing.
A phone rings, startlingly out of place. It’s coming from his pocket. His face darkens. Holding on to me with one hand, he pulls it out, mutters a curse then silences it before returning his full attention to me. He marches me toward a decrepit looking house, the only structure for as far as I can see.
Where the fuck are we? How is anyone going to find me?
Is anyone even looking? Is Zeke? Will he come for me?
But it’s worse than that horrible house, I realize, when, once we reach it, he walks me around the back to another building that wasn’t visible from the other side. This one is newer, still dark, pitch black. It’s a large shed or something. We get to the door where I notice the small keypad. Keeping hold of my hair, he punches in a code. There’s a beep before a click and the door opens.
“In,” he says, and shoves me only releasing me when I’m inside. I stumble into the musty smelling place. He closes the door behind him before switching on a light and I look around the windowless room, take in the ancient looking huge bed against the center of the back wall, the leather cuffs hanging off each of the four wooden posts. The mattress is bare and there’s nothing else. No pillows. No blankets. No one sleeps here.
But this isn’t a place for sleep.
The walls are painted black and against one stands a wooden cross. It has leather restraints at the top and bottom for wrists and ankles. From several large, rusted-looking nails hammered into the walls hang various whips. What the hell, is this some sort of kinky playroom?
I turn to look at my captor, take two steps backward. The floor beneath my feet is dirt. Just dirt. My gaze moves to the rings nailed into the ceiling beams, the restraints hanging from them and when I see his grin and watch him pull on a pair of black leather gloves he takes from his pocket, I think no. No. This isn’t a kinky playroom. It’s a torture-room. Worse.
“Where the hell are we?” I ask as he takes a step toward me.
“Somewhere where no one will hear your screams,” he says, advancing toward me so fast, I barely have a chance to make any sound, to turn and try to get away before one of those big, gloved hands closes around my throat. I clutch his forearm as he walks me backward to the wall before slamming my head against it once, twice. My hands fall away from his arm and the room spins before I crumple to the floor.
2
EZEKIEL
Blue is gone. Vanished into thin air.
Paramedics load Isabelle onto a stretcher. She’s conscious and Jericho is by her side.
“The baby. The baby,” Isabelle is saying. She’s disoriented and cries out when they strap her onto the stretcher.
“She’s pregnant,” Jericho says.
“Let’s get her in the ambulance. Sooner we’re at the hospital the better.”
“Zeke?” Isabelle calls out.
I turn to her trying to process what the hell happened. Where Blue is.
“Zeke, where’s Blue?” she asks as if reading my mind. She lifts her head. Jericho tries to calm her down. “The man. Oh God. The man—”
Her wide eyes collide with mine. I see both pain and terror in her expression.
“What man?” I ask. “Where is she?”
“Sir, we need to get her into the ambulance.”
“There was a man,” she says as they lift the stretcher. “I saw his face. He crashed his car—” she cries out in agony as the stretcher tilts.
“Christ! Take it easy!” Jericho barks.
The paramedic and Jericho follow her into the ambulance. I grab hold of the door to stop them closing it.
“What man?” I ask.
“From the dinner. The one you were looking at. One of the Councilors’ guards.”
Jericho and I exchange a look. “I need to take my wife to the hospital. Now,” Jericho says. He glances over my shoulder, then back at me. “Go home, Zeke. Change your clothes. Wait there for us. Look in on Angelique. Tell her we’ll be home soon. She’ll expect us to check on her.”
I nod, glancing at Isabelle then back to my brother, realizing how bad this could be for them. Isabelle is only a few months pregnant. What if she loses the baby? “Let me know how she is, will you?”
He nods and I close the door.
Dex is just waking as they load him onto a stretcher. I rush to it.
“Where’s Blue?” I demand.
He blinks, pupils not quite focused. I want to shake him.
“Sir, step away please. Give us room to do our work,” a paramedic says.
“Where is she, Dex?”
“It was no accident,” Dex manages before they roll him away and into a second ambulance.
Police are rerouting traffic. Where the fuck is she? She couldn’t have disappeared.
I scan the street and realize something. The car that crashed into their Rolls Royce is gone.
“Sir, you can’t be here,” a police officer says.
“There was another woman in the car. Where is she?”
The officer looks over my clothes and I follow his gaze, realize why Jericho told me to go home and change. I’m covered in Wyatt Hoxton’s blood.
Did Isabelle mean she saw Wyatt Hoxton? That’s impossible. I killed him. His blood has seeped through my clothes and into my skin. He is as dead as can be.
“What other woman?” the officer asks.
“And where is the vehicle that crashed into them?” I ask.
“We’re looking into that now, sir. You need to remove yourself from the scene.”
A few feet away, a woman is pointing in the direction of a road that leads out of town. I step closer to listen.
“He was a big guy. I saw that when he got out. He sped up to crash into them. I swear. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Then he took the woman. He lifted her out and just—”
“What was he driving?” I cut in. “The woman, was she—”
“She was awake. She tried to get away, but he threw her into the trunk and took off.”
“Sir, this is a police investigation,” the officer starts.
“Which way did he go?”
She points out of town again. “It was a sedan, white. That’s all I know.”
“Ma’am, I’ll need to take some more information and sir, you need to leave.”
I look in the direction the woman pointed, and I see it then. One of her shoes. It’s lying in the street a few paces from the open door of the car.
I scoot under the police tape and grab it. The heel is broken. I stalk back to the Rolls Royce and pull the back door open.
On the floor of the car is her purse. I pick it up, open it. Inside is her phone and along with it, a flash drive. She had it with her all along.
“Sir this is an accident scene. You need to step away. Now.”
My phone rings just then. I nod to the officer and answer right away. “Blue?”
“Ezekiel? Robbie here. There’s something you should know.”
“Now’s not good. There’s been an accident.”
“What accident?”
“Isabelle and Blue… Blue’s missing.”
“Shit.”
Something in his tone worries me and I walk back toward Jericho’s car. The keys are still in the ignition, the driver’s side door still open. I start the engine.
“I’ll have to call you back,” I tell Robbie.
“Wait. If she’s missing, then I think I may know who has her.”
“What?”
“Wyatt Hoxton has a brother.”
3
BLUE
When I open my eyes, I’m lying on the bed. My arms are bound to each of the posts, as is one of my legs and Wyatt is wrapping a leather restraint around the other. I scream and kick, manage to get him in the nose.
“Ah fuck!” He stumbles backward, cups his nose. When he pulls his hand away, we both see the blood pouring from it. “Fuck you, cunt! I’ll make sure to break your nose while you can still feel it.”
He wipes the blood away with the back of his sleeve, gives a strange shake of his head then returns to bind my leg so I’m tied to the bed spread eagle. I test the bonds. Nothing gives. I didn’t think anything would.
“Let me go!” I can barely move a few inches if I twist my torso but I’m not going to make this easy for him.
He looks me over, grins as he meets my gaze. He’s bigger than I remember but the look in his eyes is the same. And that tattoo on his neck sends a chill down my spine.
“What do you want?” I ask.
He takes off his jacket calmly. It’s bloody from his nose and probably from my cuts. He hangs it on a coat rack standing in the corner. From inside the breast pocket, he takes out his phone, pushes a button and puts the phone to his ear. He mutters a curse a moment later.
“Bitch is at the cabin. Where the fuck are you? I will start without you, Brother.”
Brother?
He disconnects, returns to the bed. I scooch as far away as I can, which isn’t far. Wyatt sets the phone down on the nightstand and walks over to a table set along the far wall. It has a top that he lifts open. I can’t see what’s inside. A moment later, he reaches in, takes what he wants and turns back to me.
My heart drops to my stomach when I see what it is. A hunting knife.
“What do you want?” I scream, unable to keep the terror from my voice.
He grins, and when he reaches the bed, he sets one knee on it.
“Do you remember me?” he asks, looking me over, setting the flat of the blade against my cheek right where my scar is. I’m sure my makeup has smeared and it’s visible now. “Do you? Of course, I was prettier then. Didn’t have the clown’s mark.” He says this with disgust and a part of me wants to tell him he was never pretty, but the smarter part tells me to keep my mouth shut.
The blade is cool as he slides it down over my cheek, my jaw, my throat, to the strap of my dress. With one tug, the strap is useless.
“That’s thanks to you. Don’t worry, before I break your nose, I’ll slice you a set. Make a clown out of you like you did me.”
