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GABRIEL
I’m not typically one for day drinking.
But today, I’m fucking day drinking.
My fingers clench the crystal rocks glass in my hand tightly. The 1964 Glendronach fifty-year-old is perfect smoke, peat, and sweetness on my tongue as my gaze stabs out the window over midtown Manhattan.
I built all this—Crown and Black, that is. Alistair, Taylor and I were young, ambitious, and fucking good when we laid the first stone of what would become this empire. None of us was handed shit. None of us was given a leg up, or an easy road. We built this place with our blood and sweat.
Today, for the first time ever, I wonder if I’ll lose it all.
I looked at Fumi’s computer after she stormed out.
It’s bad.
Not silver bullet to the heart bad. But any freshman attorney with the ink still wet on his license to practice could take what she has to court and destroy me with it.
Part of me is actually listening for sirens, waiting for the police to storm out of the elevator screaming at me to drop the three-thousand-dollar glass of booze and kiss the floor.
But an hour later, I’m still a free man.
Two hours later, I’m confused, and maybe a little worried.
By hour three, I’m done fucking waiting, and I’m definitely done giving Fumi whatever “space” she needs.
She doesn’t need space.
She needs me. And today, I come with a side order of the truth.
All of it. Every gritty, gory detail. I’ve already opened myself up to this woman in ways I’d never dreamed I’d be able to.
She’s stood at the very fucking edge of my black abyss and stared longingly into it. She’s met my monster. She’s been intimate with him.
She’s fucked him, hard, and begged for more.
Perhaps realizing that I’ve killed people is a shock. But discovering the true nature of my savagery and my full capacity for viciousness shouldn’t be that much of a stretch for her, given what she does know about me.
But now she needs to know the why. The how. And she needs to hear it in my own words, from my own lips.
She needs to know all of me in a way not a single person ever has.
That thought doesn’t fill me with dread, or fear. It doesn’t concern me that I know I need to rip myself open to this woman.
Because she already has ripped me open and crawled inside. She just needs to be made aware of what she already is…
Everything.
But Fumi isn’t home when Trevor drives me there. Tate, the nurse I hired to take care of Hideo who may or may not also be a former Green Beret and surveillance expert, confirms that she’s not over there, either.
She’s not at any of her go-to restaurants or bars. Nor at the bookstore on Fifth and East Seventy-ninth I know she loves to lose herself in.
She’s not with any of her friends. Her phone is off. And when I ask Chase, the tech guy at work, to trace her company cell, it’s back in her office.
My pulse starts to pound as my nerves begin to fray. It’s not that I’m worried she’s going to turn me in. She would have done that by now if she was going to.
But I’m worried.
I’m really fucking worried.
