Dynasty (Boys of Winter 1)

I groan and sink further into my bed when I feel a weight dip beside me. “Seriously?” I grumble, throwing the blanket back to find Cruz lying beside me on my bed while King makes himself comfortable at the end. “Do you guys make a habit of welcoming yourselves into girls’ beds or am I just lucky?”

“Trust me,” Cruz says, grabbing me and hauling me up until I’m curled in his arms. “You’re definitely lucky.”

I scoff. “Right, because lucky girls have their sex parties crashed by hitmen and spend the night dodging bullets.”

“Speaking of that,” King says, leaning across the bed and looking at the cuts and bruises over my skin. “How are you feeling? That cut on your arm could use a little attention.”

I shrug my shoulders. “Yeah, maybe,” I say, looking down at my arm to see it covered in dried blood.

“Come on.” King holds out a hand and I reach for it. He pulls me right off the bed and leads me into the bathroom as Cruz groans behind us, complaining about only just getting me in his arms.

I step into the bathroom and suck in a gasp as I meet my reflection in the mirror. Cuts and scrapes cover my body from the delightful little jog I took through the woods, and after leaving them for the last hour, they’re not looking too good.

Cruz joins us in the bathroom as I start pulling at my ridiculous latex bodysuit. King steps in behind me, helping me out of it as Cruz watches the show with an amused smirk across his face. I let out a sigh as I unfasten the many leather straps around my body. “I guess wishes really do come true,” I grumble.

I watch King through the mirror as he glances up, his brows furrowed with confusion as Cruz grunts. “Huh?”

A stupid little grin pulls at the corner of my lips. “When I squeezed into this ridiculous outfit, I’d hoped that you two would be here at the end of the night helping me out of it, only I had something a little different in mind.”

King chuckles, gently rubbing his fingers over my skin as the bodysuit is finally tugged off me. I lean into the shower and turn on the taps before getting in and letting the warm water rush over my body. King and Cruz silently watch me as I shower, and while I’m not intending to put on a show, I can’t seem to help myself.

I grab the body wash and the loofah and rub it all over my sore skin, laughing at the way the boys become mesmerized by my movements. “So,” I say, forcing their heated stares back to mine as I dip low to drag the loofah over my legs. “Are you guys assassins or something like that?”

King laughs, the amusement twinkling in his eyes. “No. We were just trained to do what needed to be done,” he explains. “Just think about it, had your parents still been alive, you would have grown up right alongside us, training with us day in and day out.”

I can’t help but remember walking in to see King and Grayson in the gym and take in just how powerful they were. I could have been like that. I could have had a family, and loyalty, and grown up right beside them, with friends that I’d never have to say goodbye to, or a home that I could actually unpack my things in. I put the thought to the back of my mind. It never gets me anywhere thinking about what I could have had. “So, if all the families are enemies, how come you all grew up together?”

Cruz shakes his head. “You can’t think about it like that. For the most part, the sixteen families all work together like a well-oiled machine. They balance each other out. All the children grow up together, we’re like one big family—”

“More like a cult,” I scoff, cutting him off.

Cruz rolls his eyes and continues. “We’re a family, and in every family, you get the good and the bad. Siblings feud just like the sixteen families have for the past eighteen years. There are rotten eggs, but they all thrive under the Dynasty name.”

I nod, feeling like I understand everything so much more when it comes from Cruz’s calm explanations, rather than Carver’s ranting. “So that’s why none of you flinched when I killed Kurt?”

Cruz nods, grabbing my towel off the heated rack and stepping toward the shower door as I begin rinsing off the bubbles. “That’s exactly what we’ve been trained for,” he explains. “We all grew up in this lifestyle, where instead of speaking to the police or hiring some bullshit lawyer, we handle our problems quietly, knowing Dynasty is always there to protect us.”

“I guess it wasn’t so quiet when I was arrested in the middle of the school.”