He’d earned it.
“Now that everyone is here,” Uilleam said as he finally reached for his suit jacket. “Let’s discuss.”
“Discuss what, exactly?” Luna asked, trailing him as he left the room.
“It’s been a long time in the making,” he continued, starting up the flight of stairs, thinking of the secret meeting he’d had with her mother and the decision he’d come to. “But it’s finally time.”
“Time for what?”
“Your debt to come due,” he answered, stopping at the top of the stairs to look back at her. “This will be … difficult for you, but once this is done, you’ll finally be free of that time in your life.”
She knew what he meant. He saw it in the way her face clouded over at the very mention of it. “I thought I was already free of that time?”
The smile he offered didn’t quite reach his eyes because he knew, in one way or another, she would never be free of it entirely. Not until she knew everything.
“Not quite.”
Skorpion muttered something in her ear that managed to get a small smile out of her. Which was why he’d called him in—because of all the mercenaries in his Den, he was the one Luna was closest to.
And more than anything, he knew Skorpion would do everything in his power to keep her safe.
The roads he was about to walk might have had demons beneath them, but that didn’t mean he wanted her to suffer.
“We can discuss it more on the flight.”
“What flight?” she asked.
“To California.”
“Kit’s there, actually,” she said, telling him something he already knew.
He’d made sure of it.
The plan was all but foolproof and hinged on the fact that Kit was an important moving part in the grand scheme.
If he wanted to remove Carmen from her seat of power, there was no greater person to see it done than Luna—he owed it to her. For the life she hadn’t got to live and the one she’d been forced to endure.
Luna might not very well see it as a win, in the meantime, but soon—very soon—she’d learn to appreciate what he had done.
The earlier rain had picked back up again, somehow managing to make the freezing weather all the more unbearable.
It all happened in a heartbeat.
Hardly a second of time as he exited the front of the massage parlor, drawing in a deep breath.
“Uilleam!”
He jerked at the sound of Luna’s voice—at the sheer panic that threaded through that one word.
She’d never, in all the while he had known her, called him by his name when they weren’t alone. It was curtesy he’d never asked of her—especially since he had given her his name the first second they met—but one she had extended all the same.
It was for that reason alone that he whirled around to face her, confused by the sudden reaction, but as his gaze settled on her, he found that she wasn’t looking at him at all.
That her gaze was well past him and across the street.
He turned, an unnatural fear coursing through him as he found the object of her panic.
A rider on a motorcycle was idling at a stoplight, a dark matte black helmet covering his face, and just the sight of him was enough to tell Uilleam he’d made a mistake.
That he had been too lax in thinking someone wouldn’t target him.
Because as his gaze lowered to the gun the man held, he knew he wouldn’t see another day.
The first shot was impossibly loud, the bullet ripping through the window of the car that sat between him and the assassin before shredding through his side.
The force of it sent him stumbling backward, his hand immediately moving to clutch his wound, but it didn’t matter.
Not when four more followed in rapid succession.
Not when he felt every single last one of them as they hit various places on his body until all he could feel—all he knew—was blinding heat and pain.
Uilleam felt himself hit the ground, the concrete of the sidewalk digging into his back—the rain light on his face.
Just there, nestled behind gray storm clouds and falling rain was just a hint of yellow and white—sunlight that couldn’t quite break through yet.
In a sea of darkness, there was still that small beacon of light.
Karina …
It seemed only fitting that thoughts of her rose as his limbs felt heavier and a blanket of warmth covered his back.
As cold as he was, it was his own blood that was now keeping him warm.
In the end, he had always thought he would fight to live—that he would only ever leave this earth in a blaze of glory—but now ... he felt no will to fight.
Because maybe, in death, he would see her again, and she would smile at him the way she used to.
Skorpion was suddenly over him, his expression a blur of panic as he ripped the shirt off his own body and tore it to shreds.
“Calavera, hey! Get over here.”
Skorpion had always been good at hiding his thoughts and feelings, but for once, they were so clearly reflected on his face.
He was worried.
Skorpion pressed the wads of fabric to the wounds on Uilleam’s chest, guiding Luna’s hands into place to hold them there.
“Keep pressure on these,” he ordered, though his voice was starting to fade there at the end.
Though … maybe it wasn’t his voice because just as that thought hit him, black spots winked in and out of his vision.
Maybe the end had come sooner than he expected.
Maybe it was time for him to stop fighting.
25
Friends Don’t Punish Friends
So much had changed, yet it all felt the same.
Karina was no longer sequestered away, passing her days in the greenhouse, or sleeping her nights away.
She was back to work, though her trade was a little different.
Now, when she looked into the criminal elite in this city, she wasn’t seeing potential stories and people who needed to be brought to justice. She saw them as potential allies.
People who could, hopefully, give her what she needed the most—a way to get to Uilleam.
It wasn’t as simple as just an attack or trying to explicitly go after him because she would never get close that way. He would have counter measures in place for something like that.
But if she peeled away at his business, layer by layer, by the time he realized something was off, it would already be too late.
Karina sat at her desk with an old copy of the Art of War sitting in front of her.
She wasn’t sure how long she had been there before something—or someone—in her periphery made her look up.
Orion was hurrying toward her—she could see him through the glass doors of her office—and he looked … alarmed? But even that didn’t feel quite right in describing the expression on his face.
Before he made it to her office, she stood and crossed the floor, meeting him at the door.
Karina barely had her hand wrapped around the knob before he was already pushing it open.
“What happened?” she asked, alarm setting in.
And at that moment, he seemed to realize she was actually there standing in front of him—as if he’d been on a singular mission and hadn’t thought of anything else until right now. He blinked at her, seeming at a loss for words as his gaze trailed over her face.
“What is it?” she asked, mindful of the stares in their direction.
Though it wouldn’t be the first time Orion came by the offices, it was the first time he had come like this.
“You don’t know …” he said finally, his confusion only multiplying hers. “I thought you—”
And he stopped. Just like that. His Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. That only managed to make it worse.
“You’re not making any sense.”
Orion took a step back from her, lifting both hands to thread his fingers through his hair. Now, suddenly,
he looked as if he wished he could be anywhere but there.
He seemed to recognize that he had garnered everyone’s attention, so with a hand on her side, he walked her back into her office and shut the door.
“If you’re trying to freak me out—”
“Something happened,” he hedged.
“What are—?”
“Uilleam was shot.”
It was as if he had shoved his fist through the center of her chest, ripping through bone and muscle until he had his hand wrapped around her heart. Each beat that came after was worse than the one before it.
And just as she felt as if the world was crumbling down around her, she pressed her nails into the palm of her hands until the panic went down a notch and the burning behind her eyes faded.
“Is he … alive?” she asked.
Because it was important to know.
Not because she cared.
Certainly not that.
And not because the thought of him harmed reopened old wounds.
“I don’t know,” he answered, and she could tell no matter their differences, he wasn’t happy this had happened.
“Where is he? When did this happen?”
Karina was already moving back toward her desk before the second question left her mouth.
How the hell hadn’t she heard about this?
Chatter about the Kingmaker had lagged over the last little while—something she had come to expect. There were stretches of time when no one mentioned him at all beyond the occasional post inquiring about him—usually by people who would never be in his presence at all, considering they’d had to resort to posting on a forum.
Then, almost as if he anticipated the moment people began to forget about him, he popped back up again, like a plague.
She saw it on his face, that flicker of hesitation. She was almost sure he’d been about to lie to her. “Tell me.”
“From the looks of it, he was targeted by an assassin.”
“There’s no open threat against him,” she said quickly. If there had been, she would know about it.
“They said the man was on a motorcycle—shot him from a few dozen feet away. He even managed to hit him through the glass of a car window.”
That was no easy task.
It would take someone of considerable skill to manage that without—
Her mind caught up with the description he gave. The answer so sudden and clear that she took a step back from him as if he’d blurted it aloud.
She knew of only one person who could have managed it … and only one person bold enough to attempt a hit on Uilleam’s life.
The doors slammed against the walls as Karina shoved them open, bringing all attention to her as she entered the room.
Even with traffic, she had managed to arrive in fifteen minutes, but with each second that passed, her anger grew astronomically.
To the point that she was practically trembling with rage.
But she didn’t care that the men currently seated on both sides of the long table were staring at her as if she were crazy, or even that Elias was seated at the head of the table and didn’t appear bothered by the sight of her.
Katherine might have given him free rein to do whatever he liked as her associate, but there would never come a day when he wouldn’t answer to her.
Elias knew why she was there. She saw it on his face from the moment they made eye contact. He hinted at it when he could hardly contain the smile that threatened to cross his face.
This hadn’t been just an act on her behalf.
No, he’d acted because he wanted to—because she wasn’t doing what he’d deemed necessary.
“I warned you.”
And if he thought she was going to repeat herself, he was sorely mistaken.
Now, she would give him a reason to heed her words.
“Dearest Karina,” he said, not bothering to stand as he did when Katherine was around. “There’s no need to get upset.”
She scoffed, unable to curb the sound if she tried. “If you think this is upset, I invite you to empty this room and say that again.”
Maybe it was the expression on her face, or perhaps it was even because Orion was there with her, but for whatever reason, Elias gave a nod of his head.
“Gentlemen, if you’d excuse me. This is a private conversation.”
If the circumstances had been different, she might have studied the men who worked under him—especially considering this was the first time she’d seen any one of them—but as it stood, not a single one of them mattered enough to make her look away from the man she’d come to see.
“You as well,” Elias said after a moment, directing his attention to Orion.
“He stays.”
He blinked as if searching for patience. “As I said, this is a private conversation.”
“Which is why he stays.”
“Would you like to speak to your mother?” Elias asked with a simpering smile. “She’s just through that door there.”
He didn’t have to spell it out for her to understand what he was implying.
That Katherine knew about what he had done.
That she had condoned it.
Katherine chose that moment to emerge from a private room, but to Karina’s surprise, she didn’t walk out of it alone.
Jackal was on her heels.
That was the only evidence she needed that this was their doing. That Uilleam was somewhere hurt because of them.
“What did you do?”
Katherine looked startled, not necessarily because she was surprised to see her, but because Karina rarely raised her voice this way.
Especially not to Katherine.
“Elias thought it best we send him a message,” Katherine said as if nothing was wrong with what she was saying in the slightest. “And frankly, I agreed with him. That Runehart boy has acquired too—”
“You don’t get to kill him,” Karina snapped, forgetting everything else. “We agreed that he was my responsibility and no one else’s. What gives you—”
“Mind your tongue, Karina, or I’ll have it from you.” Katherine’s gaze narrowed as she regarded her. “In case I haven’t made this abundantly clear, I don’t work for you. You answer to me.”
“Was it you or him?” Karina demanded, not caring at all about being polite.
Not right now.
As far as she was concerned, they didn’t deserve the courtesy.
“Karina—”
“There’s nothing left to discuss.”
“I can see that you’re upset, though I can’t for the life of me understand why you would be. He not only left you, but he also nearly killed you, or have you forgotten Poppy so soon?”
It was a cruel thing to say, but if there was nothing else Katherine was good at, she excelled at being unkind.
“This wasn’t the agreement,” she said, her voice tight.
“I’m aware that the agreement was for you to target and eliminate Uilleam Runehart. As far as I see, the only thing you’ve done is steal a painting? How exactly does that serve the job you’ve been tasked with?”
Karina dug her nails into the palm of her hands. “What I choose to do and how I choose to do it is none of your concern.”
“Actually—”
“There is no actually,” Karina interrupted. “Either I do this the way I want, or I’ll walk away and you’ll never get another chance at him. Or are you forgetting that Gaspard had tried to murder him as well and found himself in a coma mere weeks later. Jackal.”
He moved without question even as Katherine held an arm out to prevent him from walking away from her. She couldn’t possibly match his strength, so if he wanted to move, he did.
And in doing so, he made it abundantly clear where he stood, even if some part of him felt indebted to her.
Karina didn’t know how they had forced him to do what he did, but she wouldn’t allow them another opportunity.
Katherine wanted to argue—it was written all o
ver her face—but she wasn’t one to take needless risks.
She also knew Karina wasn’t wrong.
“Then proceed. Quickly. My patience is wearing thin.”
But Karina was no longer looking at her mother. Her attention was on Elias and the grin he was trying to hide.
It was at that moment she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, she would kill him painfully.
And that day couldn’t come soon enough.
She wiped away a tear before it could fall, knowing that as soon as the first one came, she would never be able to stop.
There were so many painful memories she kept tucked away in the recesses of her mind if only because she never wanted to linger on any one of them, and in all of her twenty-something years, she hadn’t thought it was possible for someone to hurt the way she did.
And as the years went on, that pain had transcended anything she had ever thought.
Here she was, standing in an empty alley across the street from an unlisted warehouse.
“Yeah,” a voice said, breaking the silence. “I got her.”
She turned in time to see Orion tuck his hands into his pockets as he joined her in the mouth of the alley.
“Kava,” he explained, though she hadn’t asked him to. He always seemed to know the question she was about to ask. “I told her I’d find you.”
Ah, she suspected he would.
He was the one who’d given her this address, after all, once they’d left from seeing Katherine and Elias. She hadn’t wanted to talk about what was said, nor could she go back to the office and focus on anything when she had no idea where Uilleam was or what had been done to him.
Orion had taken pity on her.
Somehow, he had found the answer to where Uilleam was since he wasn’t in any hospital that she could find. A favor from a friend of a friend of an enemy—how he usually acquired his information.
“He in there?” Orion asked with a nod of his head in the warehouse’s direction.
She’d never thought such a simple question could hurt the way it did. “I don’t know. It’s been two hours, but no one has come out yet.”
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