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CHAPTER1
KADE
This isn’t the first time I’ve had a gun pressed against my head.
It probably won’t be the last.
Irritation rolls through me when the man clanks his gun against my skull again as he holds a hand around my throat to keep me from going too far.
A sigh escapes me as I grit my teeth to keep myself from doing something… unreasonable. Three of my guards are currently lying dead at my feet, telling me that whoever decided to rain on my damn parade is skilled.
Doesn’t make me any less irritated. There are two men, a sniper who is the more skilled of the two and the gunman behind me who seems to think he needs to be uncomfortably close for his gun to work.
“I’m sorry, am I bothering you?” the man asks.
“Oh? How did you guess?” I ask as I lower my hand.
“Get your hands up,” he growls.
“I just want a cigarette, and it’s not like you’re going to shoot me. If I was supposed to be dead at the end of this, you wouldn’t even be here. Your sniper doesn’t need you—you’re fodder. You’re here to tell me something that’s going to annoy me,” I say as I take out a cigarette and light it. “I mean, really, why else would they send someone who has a quiver to his fingers?”
“Fuck you,” he says as I aim the cigarette for my lips again before thinking better of it and cramming the lit end into his eye.
He howls out and releases me, not shooting me, of course, because he never took the safety off. It wasn’t because he made a mistake, it was because he knew that if he shot me, even accidentally, he’d be better served crawling in a ditch somewhere and offing himself.
He lets out a growl as he shoves me forward and just as I turn around, he punches me in the face because that’s something hecando. I drop my cigarette as I grit my teeth in irritation.
“Sell it,” he orders.
“Oh?”
“You need to sell out to Norn if you don’t want to be dead at the end of this. He’s kindly decided that starting tomorrow, you have seven days to get your affairs in order and transfer ownership to him, and if in that time you don’t, he’s going to raze everything you’ve built up to the ground.”
“I can’t wait,” I say dryly as I pull out a different cigarette since his eye rudely destroyed my last one. He’s quite squinty, and it’s kind of hard to give him my full attention when he’s leaking tears the way he is.
I step up to him and jab a finger against his chest. “You tell your boss that he’s going to regret fucking with me because it’s the very last thing he’s going to do.”
Fuck, just hearing that man’s name makes me irritated.
The gunman is just staring at me as I walk past him and continue toward the casino. Mostly employees park out here, but the mess will have to be cleaned up before anyone else stumbles on it or it’ll raise some attention… not that this city isn’t used to guns and bodies.
Fuck, would I love to knock down that damn sniper who killed my guards, but gun wielding is not my specialty. My father raised me with the mindset that we were always going to be taken care of by those beneath us and that shooting those who defied us was not what we did.
He was a fucking idiot.
As I walk through the casino, the noise pounds around me. It’s something that’s been an integral part of my life since I was a child when my father built the place, so it’s nothing more than background noise anymore.
I push through the doors into the back room where a group of my men are loitering. When they see me enter, they look surprised, having thought I’d gone home for the night.
“There are two fuckheads who targeted me when I was in the back parking lot. A sniper and a gunman. They killed my guards. Someone go kill them and clean up the mess, please,” I say as I sink down in a chair and lean back while my financial advisor, Harker, raises an eyebrow. A couple of my security guys head out the door, presumably to do my bidding.
Harker is a man I’ve gotten to know through the business side of things, but he’s also probably as close to a friend as I’m going to get. It doesn’t mean we actually do much together, it just means I tolerate him more than the rest. And while his title is as my financial advisor, he does a lot more than that.
He’s about five years older than my thirty-seven, with brown hair speckled with gray. His dark eyes are currently watching me in concern behind blue-framed glasses. Honestly, he’s probably one of the only ones who’d care if something happened to me.
“You hurt?”
I shrug dismissively. “It’s Norn Peterson.”
