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My eyebrows fly up as the dots finally begin to connect and I realize why they’re telling me this. “You? All three of you?”
Marcus nods. “And Carson and Dominic, among others.”
“So you’ve all been put forward as possible successors for the most powerful man in the city, and that’s why Carson doesn’t like you.”
“Not quite.” Theo pulls a face. “We weren’t just put forth for Luca’s consideration, and one day he’ll pick one of us and that’s that. He wanted to make sure whoever takes his place will actually be able to keep it, just like he has for so long. So he set up a game.”
“A game?” My stomach drops a little at the way he says the word. “What does that mean?”
“It means every one of the twelve heirs he chose was set in competition with the others.” Marcus’s voice is hard. “It ends when one person has either eliminated or gained the support of all the others.”
A chill rushes through me. “Eliminated, like… killed?”
“Yeah.” Theo lets out a humorless laugh. “But Luca knew it would just be a bloodbath if he left it at that. So he set rules. We’re only allowed to openly attack each other or use violence of any kind during a seventy-two-hour period once a year. During the game.”
I blanch. What the actual fuck? That’s insane.
But so many things make sense now that didn’t before. That tense standoff in the hall between the guys and Carson, and the way he taunted them about getting their chance to come after him soon. The strange desperation in Marcus’s touch when he dragged me into the bathroom at Duke’s before telling me he had to go away for the weekend.
For three days.
Seventy-two hours.
“That’s what’s happening right now, isn’t it?” I ask, my voice paper-thin. “The game. That’s why Carson was trying to lure you out, to use me as bait. Because he’s allowed to kill you now.”
“Yeah.” Theo pulls his phone out of his pocket and glances at the screen. “For the next… five hours and forty-two minutes.”
I don’t even know how to respond to that. I don’t know how to process any of this.
“Is that what this was?” My fingers absently reach up to brush against the scar tissue on my chest, remembering the feel of bullets tearing through my skin. “A game?”
Marcus swallows, his jaw clenching. “Yes.”
Goose bumps creep over my skin. “And the man you killed? Devin. He was part of the game too?”
“Yes.”
“So you did kill him in cold blood.”
He doesn’t answer, but his silence says enough.
Oh, fuck. I wrap my arm around myself, laying my damaged one over it as if that will somehow make a strong enough barrier to keep the horror out.
“None of this is in cold blood, Rose,” Theo says quietly. “For seventy-two hours, it’s kill or be killed, and that’s all there is to it. You hesitate, you die. You let your guard down, you die. Marcus may have killed Devin, but I guarantee you Devin would’ve killed him first if he’d gotten the chance.”
That hardly eases the heavy pounding of my heart. I don’t know what the hell I expected the men to say when they agreed to explain this all to me, but it sure as fuck wasn’t this.
“How long?” I glance around at their tense faces. “How many games have there been?”
“It started when we were eighteen,” Ryland says. “So, four years.”
“How many have died?”
“Three.” Marcus is watching me carefully, and when I turn to look at him, I feel like an abyss has opened up between us—a cavernous gap filled with all the things I didn’t know about him until today. “Devin Brooks, Xavier Holt, and Benjamin Windsor.”
Which leaves nine players left. How many more years will this go on? How many more people will die before one person consolidates power?
“None of us asked for this.” Theo speaks again, and I recognize the bitterness in his voice. It’s always tinged his tone when he talks about his family, and I never knew why. “None of us wanted it. Our parents volunteered us. Luca accepted. And that was that.”
