Page 33 of The Wolf and the Monarch

Benji met his gaze. “No.”

“Okay.”

The two gazed into each other's eyes for a while longer before Sawyer turned his head straight forward again. He could feel Benji still looking at him, which was fine. He didn’t mind. Not one bit. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he admitted, a bit surprised by his own words.

“Do what exactly?”

“Everything. This,” his hand waved at the area around them. “I hate it. I hate it so much.”

“Then why do you do it?”

Sawyer frowned a bit, swallowing. It sounded so loud to him but it was probably nothing to Benji. His heart was pounding in his ears. He had never spoken of his hatred for his job, for what was left of his family. And while it might seem obvious to him, they had no idea. They just thought he was a whiny kid, even if he was going to be thirty years old in just a few months. “It’s just…what I’m supposed to do. My parents, they started this whole operation. But when they were around, it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t this. They had the jobs they were assigned to do and they did them. They weren’t the most savory of jobs, but it wasn’t kidnapping innocent people who were also just doing their jobs and torturing them to death because something didn’t go their way.”

“What happened to them?”

“They died when I was a kid. Dad died on an assignment. Mom killed herself about a year later.”

“So who is that guy then? The main one.”

“My uncle, Milo.”

He saw Benji nod just a bit from the corner of his eye. “I’m sorry about your parents.”

“It’s okay,” he said, “I was nine when my mom died. It’s a weird age. I remember things from when I was a kid but barely. I remember what they looked like. And I remember some random things we did, like…a vacation or two. But I don’t remember anything else really,” he looked back at Benji, “So I don’t really think about them too much. Not anymore. I don’t think I would like them much, to be honest.”

“Still sucks though. I don’t know what I’d do without my family. They’re…everything to me.”

That statement made his stomach drop and he immediately turned his head so he wasn’t looking at Benji anymore. The fact that he knew that father was the one who got him into the situation he was in and Benji had no idea. It was going to crush him. Was it better to tell him now or wait?

Was there even a ‘better’ situation?

Probably not.

“Listen, Benji…” Sawyer said, trying to broach the topic that was at hand. It wasn’t fair to keep it to himself. “I-I did some…digging around when I went upstairs. When you told me you weren’t Andi.”

Benji’s brows furrowed. “Okay…?”

He released a breath. Why was it so hard to say? “I found some correspondence between Milo and a Matthew. Milo first asked about a job from John Raymond.”

His eyes shifted back and forth, clearly trying to find some sort of connection. “I don’t know anything about John Raymond. But my dad’s name is Matthew.”

“Well, apparently, Matthew was supposed to wire some funds from John to my uncle but the funds never made it there.”

Benji sat up, quicker than he likely intended. He swayed a bit from it and placed his hand against his forehead, but proceeded to stay put. “What? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. That’s what Milo said and M-Matthew said that he took the job but didn’t reroute the wire.”

“Yeah, of course he didn’t. He doesn’t know how to do that.”

Sawyer sat up. “Well, a couple weeks later, he reached out to my uncle and he said that it was his son Andi that rerouted the funds.”

“Bull fucking shit,” Benji said but it was more a laugh, “There’s no way he said that. You just…found the wrong information.”

“I don’t think so. I found the files under encryption and the files were named AM. Andi Madison, right?”

He blinked a few times and shrugged, “I-I…mean yeah, probably but that–”

“All adds up?”