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Hell, he didn’t even know if there were any other rooms in the vicinity.
He wondered what time it was. Or even what day it was. How long had he been here?
And where was here?
The last thing he remembered was—
Gideon froze as something moved in the shadows on the opposite side of the room.
Was it just the wind again, shifting the shadows and playing tricks on his already tired mind?
No.
It wasn’t the shadows.
Something moved within them.
Something—someone—was in here with him.
He wasn’t alone.
* * *
Twenty-two days earlier…
Gideon sat in bed, a leather folder spread open across his lap. Notes. Names. Habits. All the information he had gathered on the Brotherhood of the Crimson Fist—a dark, evil, detestable secret society responsible for his family’s death.
Besides the obvious sins, the Brotherhood ran smuggling rings, forged art auctions, and human trafficking operations.
Blackmail. Child brothels. The worst kind of rot.
What Gideon had recently uncovered was that they used various charities to steal money under the pretense of virtue for their evil causes.
Thus, they always left a trail of documents behind, although the names on those papers were often fake. It didn’t stop Gideon from finding a few members and eliminating them.
In the beginning, there used to be eleven titled men atop the Brotherhood’s pyramid. Gideon learned that from the old Duke of Wolverstone’s journal—the man who wore the Erebus mantle before him.
Used to be. This was over fifteen years ago, but the old Wolverstone had taken care of most of them.
He had written it all down.
The original eleven. How he had picked them off, one by one. How he spared a few after they promised to disband. They were his friends, his peers, after all.
Bile rose in Gideon’s throat.
How one could call such vile creatures friends or peers, he would never understand. It sickened him to know that men like that walked the same earth as he did.
The late Wolverstone, however, had been a different beast. Powerful beyond measure, the only reason he had gone after the Brotherhood was to save his friend—the late Earl of Roth.
Even after Roth had betrayed them, handing over The Shadows’ roster to the Brotherhood and getting most of them killed—including Gideon’s young family.
The late Wolverstone protected him anyway.
Gideon wouldn’t make that mistake.
The only reason he even accepted the Erebus mantle—the leader role of The Shadows—was to gain access to all this information.
He had no patience for secret society politics. And it all was going to stop with him.
