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45
River
I blink,staring at the tall man I’ve only seen a couple of times. I know him as a billionaire, the man who hosted the party Julian wanted to go schmooze at, a man at the top of the pack when it comes to the wealthy players in Detroit.
But what the fuck is he doing here?
A second later, it becomes abundantly clear that he wasn’t lying. He has a bunch of men with him, and they emerge from the shadows to surround me and the guys, boxing us in on the corner of the wide wooden dock as water laps at the piles below us.
There’s no need to even wonder if they’re all armed, since their guns are drawn and pointed right at us. I can feel the Kings shifting their weight on all sides of me, tense and angry, not sure what to make of this.
Yeah. Me neither.
Alec glances down at Carter’s crumpled body and shakes his head before nudging him with his foot. The FBI agent’s body is as limp and lifeless as a sack of rocks, and my stomach churns at the way Alec gazes down at it like a piece of trash.
Then Alec looks back up at me, smiling calmly. Something in me shrinks away from that smile. There’s no joy in it, no actual happiness. It’s too smooth, too cool. Utterly calm and controlled.
“You know, for a long time, I thought you must have been acting on someone else’s orders when you killed Ivan St. James,” he tells me. “I thought you were just a pawn, following commands, though admittedly good at it. I didn’t realize you were thequeenon the board.”
My heart is racing and my mouth feels dry. Everything in me is screaming at me to run, to fight, to dosomething, but I can’t. We’re trapped, surrounded, and Alec Beckham clearly isn’t fucking around. He just had his men shoot and kill an FBI agent, so he wouldn’t think twice about murdering all of us.
I’m rooted to the spot, trying to process all of this as fast as I can.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snap, my fear manifesting as anger like it often does.
Alec just keeps smiling, unhurried and unbothered.
“I was the one who pulled Ivan’s body from the river and put it out on display,” he says. “I knew there was a rat in my organization, a traitor who was no longer playing by the rules. Someone trying to leave the Kyrio Society, to get out. I thought Ivan’s death was related to that, and I was trying to smoke out whoever it was.”
Hearing that is like a punch to the gut. All this time, we thought Ivan’s body being dredged up and laid out on that art piece at the gala was about us. But it went deeper than that. Deeper than we ever could have imagined.
“I didn’t realize it was Carter until now,” Alec continues. He glances down at the man’s body again as he speaks and then sighs. “It’s a shame. He was useful.”
He looks up at me again, and there’s something gleaming in his dark gray eyes. A new kind of interest, directed at me.
“You could be useful too, I think. I kept tabs on everything you did to Julian Maduro. How thoroughly you dismantled his life. There were parts that were a little sloppy, of course, but your talent for playing these kinds of games is impressive.”
It doesn’t feel like praise, and I barely hold myself back from shuddering at the way he’s looking at me. Like I’m a toy he wants to play with or something. A toy he wants tobreak.
“What do you want?” I ask, my voice strained.
My mind is working overtime, trying to look for a way out of this. All I can think is that he’s going to kill me and the guys. I can’t understand what else he would be after. He doesn’t seem pissed about Julian’s death, so it’s not like he wants revenge, but he has to know that Carter already told us about the Kyrio Society.
We know too much now.
Hecan’tlet us live.
“Julian wanted to join our society,” Alec tells me. “He found out about it, and he knew we had an empty seat to fill. He wanted in. But he didn’t have the qualities we were looking for. He was too eager, too full of himself with nothing to back it up, and he wouldn’t have added anything to our ranks. But he knew too much to be allowed to live, so he needed to die.” He smiles again, and it makes my skin crawl. “And you took care of that for me so beautifully.”
Something shifts in his expression, and he leans in closer to me, cocking his head a little as he examines me.
The feeling of his eyes raking over my face makes me want to take a giant step back from him, but I stay put, afraid to do anything else.
One wrong move, and he might have us all killed on the spot.
“I didn’t realize who you were at first,” Alec says casually. His voice is eerily calm and detached, like he’s talking about the weather or his stock growth or some shit. “Even after I realized you’d killed Ivan on your own, not on orders from anyone else, I didn’t put it together right away. It didn’t occur to me that a poor little abused lamb would grow teeth and claws and come back to rip the throats out of her onetime captors.”
My stomach clenches into a hard knot as Alec speaks, my breath catching as my throat goes tight.
