Prologue
Jaxon
Here comes the bride, all dressed in white…
I hummed the catchy, cliché tune as I attempted to make the perfect Windsor knot in my black tie. Black because weddings were just fancy funerals; a ceremony of marrying the wrong person and letting that person constrain the rest of your godforsaken fucking life by only doing what they want, slowly smothering you until you pray to finally be alone in that casket.
“Fuck this damn tie,” I sneered at my reflection in the mirror and, with a jerky motion, loosened the knot until I yanked the tie off from around the collar of the white button-up shirt.
“Need a hand?” Sebastian, my best friend, who was more like a brother to me, leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, smirking. I hated it when he smirked because it meant he could do something that I couldn’t. I didn’t like not being able to do something. I was the kind of man that made sure he knew how to do anything and everything.
But a tie? These damn things were my worst enemy, and that was saying something considering my profession and past. No matter how much I practiced, a tie always defeated me.
“No, I decided not to wear one. For your information.” It was a lie, and he knew it, but I didn’t like to admit weakness. He also knew that, so he never made me feel bad about that less than amazing quality about myself.
“Right.” He ran his fingers through his thick head of black hair and lifted his hand from his pocket to look at his Rolex. “We need to leave in five minutes.”
“I’m nearly ready,” I said, not admitting that out of all the jobs we have done together, this was the one I was nervous about.
We weren’t stealing art. We weren’t stealing diamonds, drugs, or money.
We were stealing a woman.
Someone who I have considered mine for an awfully long time.
Quinn Taylor. The only woman who has ever had my heart.
She was going to walk down the aisle today and marry the wrong man, the man who set me up and was the reason why I had to spend ten years of my life in prison for committing third-degree murder— something I did not do.
I got pinned for killing my pregnant sister. Tracy was my best friend. She was good. One of those people you could always count on. She was a much better person than I was. She didn’t deserve to die.
Ten years ago, I still got into shit I wasn’t supposed to, but I never killed anybody. I met Brian Marks, a guy around my age who wanted to get in the drug industry together and make a fortune. I didn’t do drugs, but selling them? A man could make millions. We decided if we went into business together, we would split profits fifty-fifty.
Everything changed when he met my sister. Brian got her pregnant, and when Tracy told him, he was high on cocaine and flipped out. She called me crying, and I got in my car and hurried over to calm her down, but when I got there, it was too late. She was dead.
I had run, what possibly could have happened, in my head a thousand times. It was simple. Brian was fucked up, then he freaked about being a father, and killed her, thinking it took care of a problem. It devastated me to lose Tracy. It was just us since I was eighteen and she was twenty when our parents died in a car accident.
Then Brian did the one thing I never thought he would do.
He sold me out to the cops. Saying he came home and found me strangling Tracy. His word held over mine because he didn’t have a record, and his daddy was in politics. So I did my time, held my tongue, and planned the day I saw him again.
Which would be today, and I couldn’t wait to see his face.
I have been out of prison now for about a year, staying underground with a few buddies and building up our reputation, our money, and waiting until we had the power to go after any personal issues we had.
Me and my friends, we weren’t like other felons. All of us are innocent. So we devised a plan. We couldn’t get a good job because of our records, and I wasn’t the kind of guy who didn’t enjoy the nicer things in life, so we stole.
But we only steal from other criminals.
Drugs, art, money, or whatever the hell was valuable, we planned a heist, and once we had it in our grasp, we sold it, whether it was illegally or at an auction, then we always donated a portion of the money because we were good people. We had hearts of black with flecks of gold.
A portion of the money. Keywords were important. Kindness didn’t pay the bills, so we kept a cut. Sebastian was an internet guru, and people thought we made our money because we got lucky in investing.
I guess, in a way, we did.
Now that we had our feet under us, we all had a bone to pick, and since I formed our little family, I got to go first. With all the heists we did, our revenge should be easy to accomplish.
We succeeded.
We conquered.
We lived like kings.
The Underground Kings. That was what the criminal world knew us as. No one knew our faces, no one knew where we lived, no one knew our reasons, so they bestowed us with the title of royalty, and we ran with it.
Life was fucking good, and for me, it was about to get better.
Not only did Brian Marks set me up, but he stole my girl, and today I was going to get her back. Not because I loved her anymore. This was about revenge. Brian took ten years of my life, and I was going to take ten years from theirs, stopping them from living happily ever after. And then, I was going to torture him until he confessed and cleared my name.
Maybe Quinn would see I wasn’t the monster she was made to believe me to be. We were each other’s first, everything. And when I was charged with murdering my sister, she broke up with me. Her lack of faith in me hurt, the fact that she didn’t know me better than that, so I let her think I did kill Tracy.
Quinn went and fell in love with the actual murderer, the traitor, and I didn’t fucking care about her happiness anymore. I wanted my ten years back.
Lie.
I knew deep down it was more than revenge, but love was a weakness in my world. It wasn’t what made the damn thing go round, money was.
“You ready yet? Jesus. We aren’t going to make it if you keep grooming yourself. You look pretty. Let’s go,” Sebastian said, snapping his fingers at me.
I hated it when he called me pretty. Men like me weren’t pretty.
“Everyone armed?” I asked, buttoning my cuff link as I strolled out of the hotel room.
“Is everyone armed?” Asher scoffed and opened the blazer of his suit to show he had a double holster strapped to his chest with a gun filling each. Asher Haven, also known as Heaven since is he was the pretty boy of the group and had a way with the ladies any time of the day, no matter where we were. Heaven was set up for assault and battery by an old ex. He only spent a few years in prison, so he still had an innocence about him I didn’t understand.
“What kind of question is that?” Owen, the oldest of the group at forty, shook his head. He was set up for murder too, only it was first-degree, and he spent twenty-two years in prison. And time really hardened him up.
“I was just checking. No need to get touchy about it,” I mumbled. I looked left and right down the hall. We were the only ones here. I made sure to rent out all the rooms so no one could bother us. The hotel was extravagant. Marble floors were under our Italian leather loafers and crystal chandeliers hung every few feet.
“Like we would ever forget to go into a job armed,” Grayson chimed in and shut the door behind him. He was accused of rape and served eight years. I knew his girlfriend accused him, and DNA evidence was there because they had sex earlier that day, so everything was against him. She cheated on him constantly, and instead of accusing the right meth head, she brought down a good man.