The Rain King: A Dark Gang Romance (A Murder of Crows Book 1) Read online

  The Rain King

  A Murder of Crows

  Book One

  Selena

  The Rain King

  Copyright © 2022 Selena

  Unabridged First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except in cases of a reviewer quoting brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, and events are entirely coincidental. Use of any copyrighted, trademarked, or brand names in this work of fiction does not imply endorsement of that brand.

  Published in the United States by Selena and Speak Now.

  ISBN-13: 9781955913607

  Cover © Go On Write

  For Michelle.

  acknowledgements

  This book would not exist without the amazing input and encouragement of so many!

  First and foremost, the main character was named and inspired by Michelle, one of my amazing Patrons who gave me a reason to start a series I’ve been putting off for the good part of a decade. I can’t thank you enough for being the brilliant, supportive, fascinating person you are!

  Next, a huge thank you to Gisell Butler, whose request for recs in a reader group sparked the idea that later became the love triangle in this book. Thank you for your blessing & encouragement to make it happen!

  And lastly, a giant thank you to my patrons who help my books come to life with your generous support, enthusiasm, and kindness. Special thanks to Susan, Valarie, Adriana, Nineette, DesiRae, Amanda, Rowena, Terra, Kandace, Kellie, Emily, Christina, Mindy, Tina, Tran, Alex, Hilary, Jessica, Audriana, Alysia, LRaven, Nikki, Emma, Mrs. A, Amy, Rhiannon, Krista, Crystal P, J, Jennifer, Lena, Jasmine, Megan, Margaret, Jennifer S, Kim, Courtney, Nicole, Nikki T, April, Jennifer S, Tasha, Ashley, Nayomi, Crystal W, Doe, Makayla, Kelly, Rebecca, & Sabrina.

  Table of Contents

  acknowledgements

  blurb

  prologue

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  epilogue

  blurb

  Mysterious. Dark. Deadly.

  They say crows are bad omens, but until I met them, a single crow was my only friend.

  Then the boys next door come to welcome me to the neighborhood.

  Maddox, the mysterious, tattooed, six-foot-four wall of muscle who glares at me like I’m the enemy but protects me like I'm a treasure.

  Lennox, the devastatingly gorgeous flirt who charms me with his criminal smiles and melts me with his gentle kisses... While hiding a sinister secret.

  They’re twin brothers, each more dangerous than the other, each more irresistible. Loyal only to their crew, the Murder of Crows, they refuse to let an outsider like me get too close.

  That is, until they realize the abuse I suffer at home.

  They take me in, but I soon find that these men are no saviors. They’re ruthless kings in a community governed by gang law, where depravity reigns and favors are repaid in blood.

  I should have seen the omen and run, but now it’s too late. My heart belongs to both men, but only one can have me. Suddenly I’m caught between them in a battle that can only end in tragedy.

  But which one of us will be the casualty in this war?

  prologue

  Content Warning:

  This is a dark gang romance. The darkness is not in the gang aspects, but in the romance itself. If reading about fictional men who are toxic, manipulative, and abusive upsets you, please return this book for a refund. There is nothing comfortable or safe about this read.

  If you are 18+ and have no triggers… Welcome to Faulkner, where the city limit is the only limit.

  #1 on the Billboard Chart:

  “If You Had My Love”—Jennifer Lopez

  “Time to collect.”

  I glower at the plain brick townhouse as we cruise by. A light is on in an upstairs window, and her shadow moves inside the room. Low light filters through the blinds over the living room windows. A mixture of fury and finality simmers inside me as Reggie pulls to a stop.

  “Sure you don’t need backup?” he asks, leaning forward to pull his gun from the back of his jeans.

  “I got it,” I say, throwing open the car door. “This shit’s personal.”

  “Just because he’s a pussy, that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous,” Reggie calls as I climb out. I circle the car, and he cranks the window down and reaches out.

  “He’s still my brother,” I say, clasping his hand and pulling us in close.

  “Nah,” Reggie says. “The Crows are your brothers.”

  “The Crows don’t exist anymore,” I remind him.

  We all know it’s bullshit. We will always belong to something greater, something deeper, a brotherhood that transcends blood.

  “You got too much faith in the malparido,” Daniel says from the back seat. “Mess with a guy’s bitch, and he doesn’t think straight.”

  “Learned that the hard way,” I say, cracking a grin and leaning down to speak through the open window. If you can’t joke about that shit, it’ll drive you insane.

  “We’ll be here,” Reggie says. “Give us a signal if you need us.”

  “I’m going around back to have a smoke,” Billy says, pushing the empty passenger seat forward and climbing out. “In case he’s still a little bitch, and he tries to run.”

  “He won’t run,” I say, the urge to defend my brother coming automatically.

  There’s no use with these guys, though. They are my boys, and he’s not. He’s not one of us anymore. He made that choice, and in their eyes, he deserves no respect. He’s a rival.

  But I know he made it for her. And hell, maybe I’d have done the same if she’d chosen me.

  The thought makes the old rage rise inside me, a phoenix of fury that turns to ashes when I don’t think about it but is ready to burst into incinerating flames the moment I do.

  Reggie sets his gun on his lap and grabs his cigarettes off the dash. “No reason to live with unfinished business,” he says. “Go take care of it.”

  “Gracias, parce,” I say to him, then nod to the rest of my crew who rode with me tonight. Straightening, I tuck my gun in at the small of my back before heading for the door.

  I haven’t seen the inside of my twin’s place since he moved here. He cut ties with more than the Crows when he dipped.

  I’ve driven by, though. Imagined cruising by and scaring them, making them wonder if we’re coming for them. If we’re biding our time before payback. I’ve imagined sliding down the window, hanging my arm out, shooting him in the back while he carries in groceries for her.

  It’s a pussy move, but then, he knows all about those.

  I’ve thought about putting a bullet in her head when she’s in the yard, maybe a few years down the road, when they have kids and he’ll be stuck with them.

  Mostly though, I think about seeing them fucking. If the windows are open one day, the white curtains fluttering, and framed between them, I’ll see his hands on her bare back as she rides him, her head thrown back and her long, dark hair tumbling down as she moves, so lost in her own bliss she doesn’t remember I exist.

  Or maybe he’ll have her bent over the bed, pounding into her from behind like a man possessed, the way he used to fuck the initiates, so lost in his own lust he doesn’t remember she exists.

  After the crew girls, it’s hard to fuck a girl normally, but I guess they worked it out. Rae wouldn’t stick around if she wasn’t into his game. She’s a runner, after all.

  Which will only make it that much sweeter to catch her tonight. To let her cry and beg, and make her think I’ll have mercy, only to take what I’m owed in the end.

  I don’t have to worry about treating her right or having her stick around.

  I’m not the one marrying her tomorrow.

  I’m just here to take what I was promised last year, when things were simple and she was just a piece of ass. When I still had a brother.

  Tonight, he’ll pay for what he did.

  And she’ll pay for making him do it.

  one for sorrow

  one

  Two Years Before

  #1 on the Billboard Chart:

  “Hypnotize”—The
Notorious B.I.G.

  Rae West

  I look up from my book at the sound of a hard, insistent tap on the window startling out of my fictional world. I’m on the second floor, so there’s no way a person could be tapping, but before my rational brain can supply that information, my heart lurches into my throat and I almost fall out of the window seat. My eyes don’t meet that of a person or a tommyknocker from a nursery rhyme, though. They meet the solid black eyes of a crow.

  “Poe,” I say through a startled laugh. “You scared me.”

  I rise carefully, and the bird hops back a few steps and caws demandingly. After only a few weeks, she’s barely afraid of me.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m hungry too,” I mutter, crossing my room to grab the sandwich waiting on my plate for when she—or he—came back. I’m not really sure how to tell a male from a female crow. In fact, I named her after Edgar Allen Poe thinking she was a raven. By the time she cawed at me in her bossy, impatient way, it was too late. I figure Poe’s a good name whether male or female, but I’ve decided she’s a female looking for a place to make a nest.

  I set the plate down and heave the window up with both hands. It was painted shut and doesn’t have a screen, so I know it’s not meant to be opened. But what my parents don’t know won’t hurt them. The porch roof extends under the window, so it’s not like I can fall. Which might not be their number one concern if they knew that my only friend in Faulkner is a bird that eats carrion as well as my bread crusts.

  Holding the window with one hand so the impossibly heavy thing won’t fall shut and behead me like a guillotine, I quickly stack up a dozen fat paperbacks to hold it. Poe hops closer, giving me an impatient caw and cocking her head like she’s trying to figure out my methods. She’s a smart bird. I bet if she had hands, she’d show me an easier way to keep the window open. At this very moment, she’s probably thinking how ridiculous I am.

  Picking up my sandwich, I lean down and slowly push the plate out so as not to startle her. She hops onto the edge and caws angrily at me before I’ve even released the plate.

  “Hungry little thing, aren’t you?” I ask softly, tearing off a crust and dropping it onto the plate. She snatches it up with her beak right away. The poor bird always acts like she’s starving.

  The first few days, she stood on the porch roof and stared at me while I ate my sandwich in my reading nook. I felt bad eating when she had nothing, so I started to throw out the crusts and close the window before she arrived. But within a week, she knew she could trust me to put food out while she was at the far edge of the roof. Now, after only two weeks in the big new house, I’ve gained her trust enough that she’ll eat off my plate while I’m so close I could touch her.

  I’m working up to that, but I don’t want to scare her off. For now, we share our lunch in companionable silence. I tear off each bread crust and toss it out when she finishes the last one. I hear other crows in the neighborhood, but she’s the only one who visits.

  Maybe she’s new and without a flock, alone like me.

  “Honey?” Mom calls, her voice a soft plea as she taps on my door. “Can you come downstairs? Your father wants to talk to you.”

  I quickly toss out the last crusts of bread and pull the plate in, close the window, and brush the crumbs off my cushion. Then I pick up the book I left open, keeping a finger in the yellowing pages of the battered paperback. Until I get a library card, I’m rereading the handful of books I snuck here in the bottom of my box of clothes before the move. My parents think books are not a necessity and should be left behind.

  I hug The Tommyknockers to my chest like it might hear those ugly words echoing in my memory. “What does he want?” I call back.

  “You need to get outside,” Mom says. “You haven’t left the house since we got here.”

  “Gee, I wonder why,” I mutter to myself. I know it’ll just piss off my stepfather if I don’t obey, though. I quickly tear off the corner of a page in my composition notebook and slide it between the pages of my novel to mark my spot. I leave it in my window seat—the best thing about the new house—and join Mom in the hall. She smiles nervously and tugs my shirt straight, picking at me like a nervous little bird, nothing like Poe’s assertive demands. If Mom was a bird, she’d be one who was scared of shadows. Her thin face is tense, her mouth drawn into a thin line and her eyes drooping with exhaustion.

  I return her smile with an equally tight one of my own. She’s not an ally, but she’s also not the enemy. I try not to shoot the messenger more often than I can help it. I just have to survive one more year until I turn eighteen, until I graduate and move the fuck out of here.

  “’Late last night and the night before,’” I sing under my breath as I follow her down the stairs, pressing my fingernails into my palms to steady myself before facing Lee.

  I step into the living room where my stepdad sits smoking and squinting at the little boxy TV that looks too small for the room. I don’t know how my parents could afford this place, though in all honesty, it’s a dump. Or “fixer upper” as my mom said when she told me we were moving here. It’s not a mansion, though it might as well be after our last place. It’s at least twice as big as our house in Ridgedale, probably more like three times. It’s also probably a hundred years old.

  “You know we got a pool out back, or you been too busy holing up in your room with your nose in a book?” Lee asks.

  “I didn’t figure you’d want me bringing pies to the neighbors,” I say with my sweetest smile.

  “You getting smart with me, girl?” he asks, glowering at me from under grey brows on his protruding forehead. The asshole looks like a caveman elder, but I’m saving that little insult for when I walk out the door for good, flipping him the bird as I go.

  “No,” I say. “Just stating facts.”

  “Get your ass outside and start cleaning it,” he snaps.

  “I don’t know how to clean a pool,” I point out. “Do I just skim it or…?”

  Lee grinds his cigarette out in the ashtray sitting on the arm of his worn chair, his eyes boring into me with such intensity I’m pretty sure he’s imagining putting it out on my face. “I don’t pay the bills around here for you to sit on your ass like some pampered princess, reading whatever nonsense is in those books of yours,” he seethes. “You don’t know how to do something? Fucking figure it out, Rae, or I swear to God…”

  An involuntary quake goes through me despite my efforts to be brave, and I shake my head, my bravado gone. “I’ll figure it out. Just sit tight while I get my shoes on.”

  I race back upstairs and shove my feet into my tennis shoes, my heart pounding. The minute my shoes are on, hugging my feet like a pair of familiar, comforting arms, the craving to run almost overtakes me. I glance up and see the roof empty outside my reading nook. A pang of loneliness goes through me.

  If I were a bird, I’d fly away too.

  Not really. People who say they want that for a superpower are crazy. Flying sounds terrifying to me—being buffeted by the wind, careening out of control, maybe caught up in storm if you weren’t careful. I prefer my feet on the ground.

  Lee is right, anyway. He does pay for everything, since Mom doesn’t have a job and won’t file for disability because then she’d have to explain all the mysterious injuries she never went to the doctor about. I haven’t rushed to get a job, either, looking the way I have for the past few weeks. Not that Lee would have let me. He has to keep up appearances. But maybe I’ll put in some applications now that I can leave the house without people staring.

  Mom meets me at the back door, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Make yourself useful for an hour, just to get your father off your back,” she says, giving me an apologetic smile.

  “It’s fine, Mom,” I say, pushing her hands away when she starts picking at me again. “I could use the fresh air, like you said. I might even go for a run before I come back.”

  “What are you two hens squawking about?” Lee demands.

  Mom cowers. “Don’t be out too late,” she whispers to me, darting a glance back to the living room. “Remember, Faulkner has a city curfew.”