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“Are you sure? You don’t have to do that. I can move everything. I don’t expect you guys to always be running around after me. I just wanted to know what you thought.”
“It’s fine. Besides, I think Carver could use the physical labor to work out some of that bullshit energy he’s been bottling up. He’s bound to snap at some point, and when he does, it’s best if he’s not so … energetic.”
“If you’re going to talk shit about me,” Carver calls from his bedroom, “at least have the decency to do it to my face.”
Grayson smirks, looking down at me with his eyes sparkling like twinkling stars in a dark sky. “See what I mean?”
I can’t help but laugh, and after turning around to take in my reflection and fixing up the bird’s nest that sits on top of my head, I look back at Grayson. “Let’s get this shit over and done with so we can focus on finding Paris.”
“I’ve never heard such sweet words.”
Twenty minutes later, the boys and I sit around the massive round table, the first ones to arrive. We weren’t exactly thrilled with the idea of all the big guns around here watching me hobble in with another injury, so we got here early and hid me behind the table. I was the first to walk in and I’ll be the last to leave.
Cruz and Grayson sit across the table, taking up the spaces usually reserved for their fathers, but King stands. He has every right to claim the seat, but he looks uncomfortable and awkward about actually sitting in it. It’s not been long since his father was poisoned, and I can only imagine that it’s still messing with his head.
Carver though, he has absolutely no reservations about taking what was his father’s. He leans back in his seat, his arm casually thrown back over the chair with his feet propped up on the massive table. He looks across the room at Grayson. “What happened with those bugs? Did you run the tracking on them?”
“Yeah,” Grayson says, leaning forward and propping his elbows against the table. “Took fucking hours and came back with nothing, so we’re back at square one. The fucking thing took me on a wild goose chase and I ended up with nothing but a bullshit fake account. Whoever did this must have bought them out of the back of some dodgy semi on the side of the highway. It’s a dead end.”
“Fucking great,” King mutters, hanging his head as he lets out a deep breath.
“What’s the point of trying to track them? Isn’t it obvious that they were put there by Harding or Scardoni? It makes sense. They’ve been feeding the information back to Paris. Hell, maybe she was the one who bugged the place. She’s probably been there a million times by now. Who knows what she could have done.”
Carver shakes his head. “While it’s the most obvious answer, what if it wasn’t them? What if we’re wrong and there’s another threat out there? It could have been Sara. The crazy bitch just admitted to stalking you for the past few weeks, or maybe it was someone that we don’t even have on our shit list.”
“Okay, okay. I get it,” I say just as the door to the big room opens and Cruz’s father steps through with Harlen Beckett and Matthew Montgomery.
Both Grayson and Cruz instantly get out of their fathers’ seats, and before their asses have even hit their chairs, Earnest Brooks and three others are making their way through the door.
Within the space of three minutes, every single seat is taken except for two—the space reserved for the head of the Harding family and the space that will never again seat a Scardoni.
“Shall we get started?” I ask, glancing around the table at the questionable men surrounding me, wondering who the hell are allies in this twisted game and who’s waiting for their turn to shove a knife deep into my back … or abdomen.
Harlen Beckett scoffs in a tone so similar to his son, that for a brief moment, I have to look up and double check who’s talking. “I hardly think so,” Harlen says. “You have been here long enough to know the rules. We wait until every member is present at the table. Harding is a prompt man, he will be here shortly. Waiting two minutes isn’t going to kill you.”
I bite my tongue. Clearly Harlen has been living in a fantasy world because over the past few months I’ve come to learn that two minutes is more than enough time to kill me. Hell, the explosion during the ball happened in less than a second and killed countless people, something we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of.
I glance across the big room and meet Cruz’s stare. I nod and without a single word, Cruz walks around the table with the eye of every man in the room on him. He pushes through to an adjoining room and when he walks back out with Michael Harding bound and barely able to keep on his feet, the outrage begins.
