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The room goes quiet. Grace is totally still, but her delicate brows pull together a fraction of an inch.
“What?”
Leland blinks, his puffy face twisting into a grimace. He realizes that he’s fucked up by talking about something he shouldn’t be talking about, but it’s too late. “Nothing.”
“No, not nothing.” Her nostrils flare. “You said ‘the Rooks.’ Is Camilla a member of the Rook Syndicate?”
Hale leans forward slightly, his back rigid. All five of us have tensed, actually. Well, six if you count Leland, who looks like he’s about to shit a brick. He stares at Grace for a long moment, his jaw working. Then something inside him seems to give way. His shoulders slump, and it almost looks like he physically shrinks.
“She’s the head of the Rook Syndicate. The founder. The leader.”
Grace’s face goes white. I know all that shit Leland said about Brian already had her on edge, and now she looks like she’s about to lose it.
She swallows, her chest rising and falling as she breathes. “You’re telling me that my mother is the head of an enemy syndicate, a group who’s been systematically trying to undermine the Novaks for years. And that she paid the man I was going to marry half a million dollars to kill me or deliver me to her.”
It could be a question, but the way she says it, it’s not. It’s a cold, hard statement, as if she just wants to make sure we’re all on the same fucking page.
Leland nods, his gaze skating away from her. “Yes.”
Grace’s body jerks a little, as if that one word was a physical blow, and I have to resist the urge to make Leland pay for it with an actual blow. We need him conscious now that he’s finally talking, and I don’t trust myself to hit him once and stop.
For a second, Grace just stares down at Leland. Then her lip curls, fury and agony flashing across her face.
“Fuck you for working with them both.”
With those words, she turns and strides out of the room. She keeps her spine straight, but as the door closes behind her, I see her footsteps stutter, her head dropping.
Lucas catches my eye, worry clear in his expression. We both glance toward the door, and Hale steps forward, jerking his chin at both of us.
“Go. She needs someone right now. She shouldn’t be alone.” He glances over at Leland, his gaze turning hard. “We’ll deal with this motherfucker.”
3
Grace
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
The word repeats over and over in my head, following the rhythm of my footsteps as I walk quickly up the stairs.
Goddammit. None of this should hurt as much as it does. I thought my mother was dead for years, and I came to terms with it. So how can finding out she’s alive be somehow worse than that?
And Brian. Why does learning how much he was paid off make the sting of his betrayal even sharper?
Maybe because it makes it all so fucking real.
It seems insane that only a few short weeks ago, I was torturing myself over the fact that I hadn’t stayed loyal to Brian. Agonizing over the feelings I was beginning to develop for each of the men. Deep in my heart, maybe I knew part of the truth without realizing it—Brian wasn’t good for me. He never had been. Every moment in our relationship sticks out to me as suspicious now, as a red flag that I somehow missed.
Did he ever actually mean anything he said?
Maybe he loved me in the beginning. But obviously not enough. Not really. He was lying to himself just as much as he was lying to me.
I may have cheated on him—every time I let the guys touch me, fuck me, every time I let myself feel something for them. Every time I let my mind wander into those dangerous thoughts, I cheated on him.
But he was going to kill me.
