Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 135958 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135958 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
“So are you?”
I hadn’t heard him move, but his voice was closer. I turned again to find him fully clothed, wearing a pair of dark gray sweatpants that molded to his bottom half the way his shirt did to the top.
He motioned to me. “Come on. I’m tired, and I don’t want to have this talk worrying my little sister’s dear friend might jump to her death.” He snorted to himself. “She’d really be furious with me then.”
There was a twinge in his voice. Exhaustion? I heard it now. I followed him, at a reluctant pace, as he went to the bedroom’s far wall and pushed a button.
Two doors slid open, revealing an entire bar built into the wall. As he poured a glass of bourbon, I saw the slope in his shoulders. There were bags under his eyes, and a tired softness around the corners of his mouth.
I really was an afterthought for him. He’d been somewhere else, doing something else, and whatever it had been had tired him out.
The power and charisma he exuded was still there; it was just slightly diminished. Slightly.
He was dangerous. I felt zapped by his energy, and as I moved into the main room with him, that zap just grew. He sucked the air out of wherever he was—so much that my insides started to feel his same exhaustion.
“Are you going to speak, or do I need to test your vocal chords a different way?” he asked, swinging his heated eyes my way. His nostrils flared as his hand tightened on his glass. “Hmm?”
Make them underestimate you.
My Hider training kicked in, and I lowered my gaze.
I didn’t like the storm inside of me. I was all over the place—feeling enraged, then heated, then other things, but rounding back to hate. I needed him to view me as submissive, timid, so even though my neck tightened so much I could barely move, I forced myself to look at the ground.
The goddamn ground.
This guy—he didn’t deserve having me look down before him.
I knew he’d had thousands killed for the Bennett family. He’d murdered his older brother. And Brooke had never said anything, but I didn’t believe for a millisecond that their father had died in his sleep. Kai had killed him too.
He was a murderer, and he was behind so many girls being trafficked, behind millions of dollars of drugs moving through his territories—he didn’t deserve anything from me.
He deserved to be killed. And if he was the reason for Brooke’s disappearance, I was going to be the one to do it.
I would cut him from dick to throat, in that direction too.
He snorted again, this time with a twinge of genuine amusement. “Don’t kid yourself, and don’t insult me, Riley Bello. You don’t have a timid bone in your body. If you did…”
He started for me, and I couldn’t help myself. I raised my head, and I couldn’t look away.
“You wouldn’t be a Hider for the 411 Network,” he finished softly.
My worst nightmare.
He droned on, sounding almost bored, “You were recruited into their network when your father murdered your mother. Six months after I pulled Brooke from Hillcrest, they told you your mother was missing, but you knew. You knew what happened to her when you went home the next day.”
I was frozen.
“You went to her funeral. You sat beside your father, but you knew the whole time he’d killed her, because that’s what he did. He hurt her. It’s why you were sent away, so he wouldn’t hurt you too. Am I correct?”
I felt sick.
“Their recruiter agents approached you when you were shopping. It was the day after you’d buried your mother in an empty casket. You were at the mall with two of your friends, or two girls your father had deemed appropriate for you. You didn’t even know them, but they were daughters of his colleagues, and you didn’t like them. Am I correct?”
I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t stop listening. I couldn’t do anything as he stripped my world right in front of me.
He knew everything.
How did he—Brooke. Brooke must’ve told him.
He tossed back the rest of his drink. “That was the day you decided to leave, not because he killed your mother, and not because you knew you’d be next, but because they told you the real truth.” His eyes flashed at me, an unnamed emotion there. “Your mother was still alive.”
I couldn’t even swallow.
“How—” I managed to say. “How do you know this?”
“I’m not done, little girl.” A glint of cruelty gleamed at me from his eyes. “Your father did beat your mother,” he sneered. “He did believe he’d killed her. He did order her body to be disposed of, but it was a 411 agent he sent to do it. He believes your mother was thrown to the bottom of a cliff and her body swept out to sea, when instead, she was hidden by the 411 Network. And when they asked you to join them that day in the mall, you said yes so fast you never stopped to think what would happen to anyone you left behind.”