Savage Monster (Boys Without Remorse #2)

Prologue

prologue

Onyx

Wraith leaned over me from behind, his arms braced on the top of my desk chair, which forced me to lean back. Growling in agitation, I reached behind me, shoving the heel of my hand against his forehead to make him get off. He grunted, his eyes glued to my computer screen, where I had every single camera at Hornet State Park pulled up so I could watch my boy.

Korain Choi.

He was twenty-five with inky black hair that fell over into his eyes more often than not when he didn’t have half of it pulled back into a bun at the back of his skull. His eyes were almost as dark as his hair. The moment I’d become latched onto him, I’d taken a deep dive into his history, desperate to find out everything about him. His biological parents had passed away in a car crash when he was five while coming to pick him up from after-school daycare, and he’d been alone in the world ever since.

Well…up until I’d laid my eyes on him, that was.

My obsession with him had happened instantly. Pops said it was normal—said it was a trait of being a psychopath. Dad, on the other hand, was extremely worried about my near-carnal desire to claim Korain in every single fucking way I could. I wanted him bound to me for life so he could never escape me.

Pops was a psychopath like me and my brothers: Vargas, Ike, and Wraith. We were quadruplets, and every single one of us took after Pops. Our youngest brother, Sabbath, took after our dad. He felt everything , and we protected him fiercely because of it. No one got near him without going through me, my brothers, and Pops first.

“Still stalking him?” Wraith asked.

I gave him a stiff middle finger. “Fuck off, Wraith.”

He snorted. “Pops wants a family meeting downstairs,” he told me.

I sighed, pushing back from my desk. I didn’t want to move away from my computer. Not when Korain was traipsing through the woods on one of the many group excursions he did each weekend. But fuck—when Pops summoned us, we moved our fucking asses.

Wraith left the room, and after locking my computer—not that it would truly keep out my brothers if they really wanted to snoop—I followed, closing and locking my bedroom door behind me.

All of us lived at home still, even though we were adults. We all had more than enough money to move into our own places, but we liked being close to home—mostly due to Sabbath and Dad, who were the more human ones out of all of us. We were…protective.

I wasn’t sure how we would cope with Sabbath going to college next year, though. He would be too far away for us to truly protect and keep watch over, but both Pops and Dad were adamant he get to experience life without us breathing down his neck.

We didn’t fucking like it.

Everyone sat in the living room when I made my way downstairs. Sabbath was chilling on his beanbag, a cup of coffee in his hands. I swore he was a fucking coffee addict. It was the only way we could get water into his body at this point. And Pops indulged him instead of forcing him to be just a little bit healthier.

“Coffee again?” I asked as I settled onto the couch beside Ike.

Ike snorted. “I swear, when he dies, they’re going to find coffee in his veins—not blood.”

Sabbath shot him the middle finger. Pops heaved an annoyed sigh, immediately shutting us up.

“Leave him alone,” he ordered. Dad gripped his arm, giving it a little squeeze. Pops—Winston Dean—and Dad—Kasey Dean, formerly Tobias—were an…odd pair. Their story was one from a horror movie. It was dark and fucked up and depraved, but it worked for them in some weird, twisted way. Dad couldn’t function without Pops, and Pops was completely fucking unhinged without him.

Codependency at its finest.

And to think it all started fucking twenty-three years ago in a haunted forest attraction, where Dad was chased through the woods by Pops, held down, and forcibly fucked until he gave in and bent to Pops’s will.

Yet I was expected to keep my hands to myself when it came to Korain. Expected to monitor him from a distance and nothing else. Talk about double standards.

“There’s a serial killer in the area,” Pops began. The room went deadly silent, the playful note in the air becoming ominous. “Four bodies have popped up in the past week. All with slit throats. All seeming to be murdered from behind. All arranged to have their hands resting on their chests as if they’re fucking Wednesday Addams, peacefully sleeping.”

I frowned. “Why the fuck isn’t this in the news?”

Dad shrugged, leaning forward and bracing his elbows on his knees. “Our guess is that cops are trying to keep it under wraps. Don’t want the community to panic.”

“You all are going to put a stop to him,” Pops instructed. “Split up. Do recon. Do some investigating of your own. Hit me with all your findings. Keep your burner phones on you, and watch your fucking backs.”

Pops, a hitman for a local crime lord, now also ran his own vigilante shit. I knew he occasionally still did hits for his “boss”, but he mostly worked as our boss now. And I assumed we were only on some vigilante shit to keep Dad happy…especially considering Vargas, the oldest of us, had gone off the fucking rails about two years ago and almost killed someone. The only reason we knew was because Dad caught him up late one night, plotting the fucking murder.

Vargas had always been the most unhinged out of all of us—like his humanity was basically a spec. Just enough to keep him from being a total lost cause. Pops kept him on a tight as fuck leash.

“Where was his last hit?” I asked, leaning back and crossing my arms over my chest.

“A mile from Hornet State Park,” Pops informed us.

I clenched my jaw, anger burning in my chest. I rolled my neck around, and my shoulders stiffened. Every part of me wanted to go to that fucking park, drag Korain back here, and chain him to my bed, where he would be safe from this fucking serial killer. Granted, I guessed I was one, too, though I didn’t have a pattern. I just killed when given the order and lived my life otherwise. He would be safe here, even with Vargas’s unhinged ass living under the same roof.

“Do not go off half-cocked,” Dad warned, pinning me with a hard stare. “Keep a level head. Understand?”

I gritted my teeth.

“Understood,” I growled.

I sipped at my energy drink, watching Korain sleep. He had no idea I had little cameras everywhere in his house. I wanted eyes on him at all times when he was at his most vulnerable. Rolling my shoulders, I leaned over, opening the drawer beside me to snatch out a chocolate candy bar. My stomach was growling, but I was too lazy to go downstairs and make myself a sandwich or something. And I couldn’t just throw leftovers into the microwave considering Wraith had eaten all the damn food.

He was such a pig.

Movement on one of the outside cameras caught my eye, and I abruptly sat up, enlarging that screen. Gritting my teeth, I shoved back from my desk and snatched up my phone, dialing Korain’s number—that I’d stolen—while trying to find my fucking car keys.

He didn’t answer. Goddammit ! I called again. And again. And again.

And by the time I parked my car outside out of the park’s gates, he still hadn’t answered his fucking phone.