The Storm King(99)

Lucy tried to pull herself free of Owen, but she couldn’t budge him.

“I’m not screwing around, Owen. Let me go. Let me go, or you’ll be just as sorry as Tom will be.” It was a threat, but fear was carved across her face.

Tom already thought he’d killed Lucy, and not a soul knew she was here. If she reported Tom to the police, Owen and his friends would be torn apart forever.

Instead of loosening his grip, he tightened it.

There was a snap and Lucy shrieked in pain. She came at him with her free hand. He caught it as if it had no more heft than paper. When she kicked at him, he pinned her underneath his bulk.

He held Lucy’s arms against the warped dock and wedged her legs open with a knee. He could hold her entire upper body down with a single forearm. He choked off her scream with a fist gripped around her neck.

After so many years, Owen finally discovered where he fit. The others had brains or looks or money or loyalty, but Owen’s potency was strength itself. He tore Lucy’s clothes like they were tissue. He marveled at his power.



Lucy’s face purpled in his grasp. The tendons of her neck stood out like ropes, just as they did when Nate was on top of her.

Owen held her down and squeezed. The lake surrounded them. He yanked down his shorts, and lake-chilled air kissed his bare skin. Lucy struggled like a flame caught in wind. Furious and desperate.

After a time she stilled.

That’s when Owen knew that neither of them needed the Storm King anymore.





Twenty-one

“And I really didn’t need you anymore,” Owen said. “Didn’t need the others, either. For once they needed me.”

Nate felt as if he’d fallen from a great height.

He imagined Lucy in the panic of her last breath: terrified and violated and disbelieving as her throat was crushed. Five fingers around one porcelain neck. It took a meager amount of pressure on the carotid artery to bring unconsciousness, and a bit more force to crush the trachea and fracture the hyoid. Even after so many lessons, Nate still found it astonishing how entire futures disintegrated because of such small things. A single hand and casual strength could destroy worlds.

“Tom didn’t know I was keeping his secret for him, but I was. And Johnny doesn’t know it, but I’m the one who finally got rid of his dad for him. That way, he’d get the Empire and everything else. He’d finally be his own man. And to be honest, I always thought me and Tom did you a favor with Lucy. She was insanely hot, but can you imagine being married to her? You’ve done so well, with your career and your family and everything. Things really worked out for you in the end, don’t you think?”



That might have seemed true even as recently as yesterday, before Nate had stepped back onto this haunted shore. A wife he loved, a daughter he adored. He enjoyed an everyday happiness that anyone might envy. So, had things worked out for him?

“Yeah.” It was true, but it was also terrible. He’d arrived at a fortunate destination, but reached it by a most treacherous route. Look at the ruin he’d left in his wake.

Owen grinned. Something about his face wasn’t right. Before Nate could figure out what, the massive man lunged at him. One moment, Nate was watching his captor sitting cross-legged in front of him, and the next moment his face was knocked to an entirely new direction, his jaw blaring with pain from a backhanded slap. If he hadn’t been tied into place, the blow would have sent him tumbling across the floor.

“Don’t lie to me,” Owen said. The joviality he’d kept up until now fell away. What remained was cold and razor-edged. “I know you, Nate. I killed your girlfriend. No one can forgive something like that. Especially not the Storm King.”

The tang of his own blood seeped across Nate’s tongue. He didn’t know how he was going to get out of this basement alive.

“You know about these kids.” Owen stooped next to Pete, and he used the dowels of his fingers to push open the boy’s eyelids. Pete’s irises were blank, but Nate saw what Owen didn’t notice: The boy’s right hand tightened into a fist. The kid was still feigning unconsciousness, and doing a remarkable job of it. Owen let the boy’s head roll back against the post he was tied to. “What do they want?”

“They want you,” Nate said.

“Me?”

“James Bennett’s their leader. Lucy’s brother. He has Lucy’s journals. He used them to put together a list of people from the old days who might have killed her. That’s how the vandals choose their targets.”



“Why?”

“They’re angry. Just like we were.” The equations of pain. Agents of karmic justice. Whatever they told themselves, the Lake was a place where one bad thing grows upon another. And it’s an action’s ripples that matter, not its rationalization. Nate understood that now, too late for it to do any good.

“That’s it? They don’t have a plan?”

“I didn’t think so at first. Now I’m not sure.” Nate had to reconsider James’s strategy. After fourteen years of silence, there had—finally—been developments in the mystery of Lucy’s disappearance. This was due to the revelation of her remains, but also thanks to the chaos James and his friends had unleashed on the Lake in the wake of its discovery. Shake a tree hard enough, and something is bound to fall from its branches.