Playing With Fire (Games of Chance Series Book 2)

by T. L. Cannon

  The hand that had been steady moments before now trembled as Kira carefully turned the doorknob and opened the door just wide enough to peek out. Seeing nothing but an empty hallway, she cautiously opened the door wider, gripping the small piece of metal tightly in her hand. It didn’t make for much of a weapon but it had gotten her this far so she wasn’t about to let go of it. Besides, as weapons go, it was better than nothing.

  Taking in a deep breath, she ventured out into the hallway. The path to the left dead-ended into a brick wall painted a sickly color green, the path to the right led to a glimmer of daylight. Kira moved slowly towards the light, her eyes watchful. Upon reaching the end of the hallway, she carefully peeked her head around the corner. A large dance floor stretched like a parquet ocean between her and the front door of the seedy nightclub. A long, mahogany bar bordered one side of the dance floor, a couple of dozen tables surrounded by rickety looking chairs bordered the other. The place appeared to be empty. Kira’s already racing heart began to beat triple time a she prepared to make a mad dash for the door. A soft moan emanating from somewhere behind her kept her feet frozen in place.

  Whipping her head around, she expected to see Jeremy or one of his triad goons bearing down on her but the hallway behind her was empty. Once again she heard the moan, only this time it was louder and seemed to be coming from the closed door of what appeared to be a closet of some sort. Apparently, she wasn’t the only person that Jeremy was holding prisoner. A voice inside her head screamed at her to make a run for it. Once she was free she would send the police to rescue whoever it was that Jeremy was keeping in that closet. But, again, the sound of moaning kept her from running. Whoever it was inside that closet sounded like they were in a lot of pain.

  What if they died before she could send help?

  Kira would never be able to live with herself if that were to happen.

  But she was so close to escaping....

  Damn! Kira swore under her breath as her conscious led her back down the hallway and brought her to a halt in front of the closet door. Grabbing the handle of the door, she was surprised when it easily turned in her hand. Discovering that the door was unlocked tempted her to return to her original plan and get the hell out of there but, ignoring that inner voice, she pushed the door open.

  Amongst an assemblage of mops, brooms and other cleaning materials the body of a man lay in a crumpled heap like a discarded dishrag. A disheveled shock of shiny, black hair peeked out from between two buckets.

  “Gabriel!” Kira exclaimed under her breath as she raced to him and kneeled at his side. Dropping the metal coil in her hand, she gingerly removed the gag from his bruised, bloody mouth. His eyes fluttered open in response to the sound of Kira’s voice. His eyes were slightly unfocused as he gazed up at her in confusion.

  Exhibiting what looked to be considerable effort, he struggled to push words from his swollen lips. “I’m not Gabriel,” he rasped out in between haggard breaths. “I'm Jeremy.”

  Shock reverberated through Kira’s body, causing it to vibrate like a tuning fork.

  “What are you talking about?” Kira asked, her face mirroring the confusion on that of the man looking back at her as she took note of his tousled hair, appreciating for the first time just how superficial the physical differences between Yi’s two sons really were. Visually, the only thing that separated one from the other was their hairstyles and choice of clothing. In his current disheveled state, she had no idea who the man before her was. She had just assumed that the man bound and gagged in the closet was Gabriel. Because if he wasn’t…

  “You…you can’t be Jeremy,” Kira stammered, shaking her head with disbelief.

  “Bloody hell, woman, I know who I am!”

  The familiar insolence in the man’s tone sent another shockwave through Kira’s body. She ran her hands nervously through her hair, unsure of what to make of the situation. Numbly, she rose to her feet and began to back out of the closet. The onslaught of questions jumbled in her mind, preventing her from noticing the man standing in the doorway until she'd backed into him. A startled yelp exploded from her mouth as she felt a pair of hands wrap tightly around her arms, halting her movements.

  “You should have stayed where I put you, Kira,” a voice whispered softly into her ear.

  Pulling her arms from his grip, Kira turned around to face the source of the voice, her eyes wide with shock as realization suddenly hit her smack in the face. “Gabriel.”

  “Oh, dear. I see you’ve uncovered my little secret,” he said regretfully as he stood blocking the doorway. “Now you’ve ruined everything.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re the one who locked me up in that room?”

  “It was only supposed to be for a short time. If you could have just exercised a little patience you would have been rescued soon enough,” Gabriel chastised.

  Kira cupped her forehead with one hand, trying to keep her head from spinning. “So it was you who met me at The Atrium, not Jeremy. You’ve been impersonating your brother.”

  “It was very nice of you to tip me off about your plans to set up Jeremy ahead of time,” Gabriel said with a smile. “If you had met with the real Jeremy, my little game would have been over. Instead, I had plenty of time to intercept him before you called him.”

  “And take his place,” Kira added. “Or rather take his place, again. You have been impersonating your brother for quite some time, haven't you?”

  “It was an unpleasant but necessary charade,” Gabriel acknowledged almost sheepishly. “Father needed to be able to see for himself how foolish it would be to hand over the reigns of Gau Lung to Jeremy.”

  “I always knew that “good twin” routine of yours was one big act,” Jeremy grunted as he gingerly moved himself into a sitting position, glaring up at his brother the entire time. “I tried repeatedly to warn Father about you but he wouldn’t believe it.”

  “But he believed it the night he was murdered, didn’t he Gabriel?” Kira deduced as the pieces of the puzzle slowly began falling into place. “You may have been able to fool the rest of the world into thinking that you were Jeremy but there’s no way that you would have been able to pull the wool over Yi’s eyes. He would have been the one person on earth who was able to tell the two of you apart.”

  Gabriel’s lips twisted as if he had just tasted something bitter.

  Kira nodded knowingly at Gabriel’s sour expression. “He hired that private investigation firm to look into the discrepancies regarding The Wayfarer’s cargo. Their investigation led them to Jeremy. Only it wasn't Jeremy, it was you pretending to be Jeremy and Yi knew it. That’s why you killed him.”

  “It was his own damn fault!” Gabriel snapped, his eyes bulging with malice. “If he had just handed over the reigns of Gau Lung to me outright instead of amusing himself by pitting me and Jeremy against each other, all of this could have been avoided. After a lifetime of kowtowing to him, I earned at least that much. Having to compete with a ne’er-do-well like Jeremy was an insult!”

  The anger and hatred emanating from Gabriel came off of him in waves, causing Kira to instinctively take a step back.

  “You should have seen him the night he confronted me,” Gabriel ranted on, squeezing his hands into tight fists. “He was so full of self-righteousness. Telling me what a disgrace I was. Threatening to disinherit me. He left me no choice but to kill him. I only wish I had plunged the real Dragon’s Breath into his back instead of the fake one. The irony of his death being brought about by the thing that he loved the most would have been delicious.”

  “That’s why you stole it from him to begin with. Because you believed that he loved it more than he loved you.”

  “Oh, I know that he loved it more than he loved me,” Gabriel said bitterly. “It’s really too bad that he didn’t live long enough to find out that his precious dagger had been switched with a fake. I went to a lot of trouble to set up that particular humiliation for him but, as usual, he had to spoil everything f
or me. And unfortunately, it seems you have taken up where he left off. I had come up with the perfect denouement for this little charade and now you’ve ruined it.”

  “What do you mean, the perfect denouement?” Kira asked. “It seems to me that you've backed yourself into a corner.”

  “Correction, it seems that Jeremy has backed himself into a corner. He is the one who’s wanted by the police for kidnapping and murder, remember? He's the one who’s got The Chance brothers breathing down his neck. Even that dumb twat, Jade, doesn't realize that the two brothers she's been sleeping with for months is the same person.”

  “How did you manage to pull that off?” Kira asked, buying herself some more time to try to find a way out of this.

  Gabriel gave a nasty snicker. “It was really quite simple. As Jeremy, I convinced her that it was in her best interest financially to keep our relationship a secret. I forbade her from even approaching me unless I summoned her. Thinking that she was setting herself up to be the Queen of the Wong empire, she was more than willing to let me initiate all of our private encounters while, in public, she and the real Jeremy continued to be at each others' throats.”

  Confusion caused Kira to furrow her eyebrows. “But why go to all of that trouble?”

  “In order to kill two birds with one stone,” Gabriel explained. “Jade was making too many inroads at Gau Lung for my liking. I wouldn't have been at all surprised to see Father put her in contention to run the company once I got Jeremy out of the way so I needed her out of the way as well and what better way to accomplish that than to make her Jeremy's partner-in-crime? It really was quite an elegant little plot, if I do say so myself. As Jeremy, not only did I reveal all of my nefarious activities to Jade, but I even got her to use her position at Gau Lung to embezzle money from Gau Lung and then seduce me, as Gabriel, into covering it up for her.”

  “I don't understand. Why would you deliberately implicate yourself in the computer breech at Gau Lung?”

  “You really aren't as bright as I thought you were,” Gabriel said as he let out an exasperated sigh. “That computer breech was the first domino designed to set off a chain of events that would lead to Father finding out all that Jeremy and Jade had been up to. I needed Father to come to me so that I could point him in the right direction.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Kira said as she began to follow Gabriel's twisted logic. “You wanted Yi to find out that you hacked into Gau Lung's computers. And when he confronted you about it you would have, what? Told him you that did it because you suspected Jade of embezzling money from the company?”

  Gabriel nodded, smiling proudly. “Father would have investigated and found proof of her guilt easy enough. And then Jade, being the disloyal bint that she is, would have ratted out Jeremy in an attempt to save her own hide.”

  “Leaving you as both the head of Gau Lung and the good twin,” Kira concluded. “How clever. Just not clever enough to actually work.”

  “That's where you're wrong. As far as everyone outside of this room knows, I am both the head of Gau Lung and the good twin. And if you had stayed put, I also would have become the heroic twin by single handedly rescuing you from your captors' evil clutches while Ethan and his brothers were otherwise occupied with bumbling around trying to come up with Jeremy's ransom money. Sadly, in a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, I would be forced to kill both my brother and my stepsister in the process, thereby wrapping this entire affair up with a neat little bow. The police would have their murderer, I would have control of Gau Lung and you would have been free to return to whatever it was that you were doing with Ethan Chance. Everybody would have lived happily ever after. But now, thanks to your inability to stay put, this whole business is going to have an even more tragic ending.”

  “What do you mean?” Kira asked even though the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach had already given her the answer.

  “It means that my valiant attempt to rescue you from Jeremy and Jade won’t turn out as originally planned,” Gabriel explained almost regretfully as he pulled a gun from inside his jacket and pointed it at Kira. “Sadly, by the time that I reach you, you will have already died at the hands of your captors.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “I found a way to get your money,” Jade announced breathlessly, as she entered the loft style apartment above the nightclub, her darting eyes coming to rest on the sight of Kira and Jeremy, tied and bound to chairs situated in the middle of the sparsely decorated room with a pair of twin gags stuffed into their mouths. “What are they doing up here?”

  “Never mind about them,” Gabriel replied, taking on Jeremy’s distinctively haughty tone. “Tell me about my money. When can you get it to me?”

  “Soon,” Jade replied, her eyes continuing their frantic scouring of the room, this time landing on the image of The Dragon’s Breath laying on a nearby folding table like a discarded butter knife with it’s scabbard next to it. She suppressed the urge to smile.

  “Good girl,” Gabriel cooed as he patted her cheek with his hand. “I knew that you’d come through for me.”

  “I always do,” Jade replied tightly as she began edging closer to the table.

  “Which is why I have no doubt that you will do this one last little thing for me,” Gabriel announced as he grabbed her by the arm, stopping her from reaching the table.

  Jade eyed him warily. “What last little thing?”

  “Kira and my brother have become liabilities. They both know too much.” Gabriel reached into his jacket with a handkerchief and pulled out a small, silver-plated handgun. Taking Jade by the hand, he placed it into her open palm. “It’s time to dispose of them.”

  “You want me to kill them?” she asked, her eyes wide with disbelief.

  “No. Just Kira. I'll take care of my brother,” Gabriel replied smoothly, running a finger gently down the side of her face.”

  “I..I.. don’t understand,” Jade stammered as she studied Gabriel’s eyes closely as if trying to decode the method to his madness. “Why not kill them both yourself or better yet have Cheng or one of your other triad goons do it.”

  “Because I want you to be the one to kill Kira,” Gabriel explained patiently.

  “But why? Surely, you're not squeamish about killing a woman.”

  Gabriel laughed softly as he grabbed a handful of Jade's hair into one fist and gave it a sharp tug. “You know me better than that, darling. That’s why you were so prompt with finding a way to get my money.”

  Jade licked her lips nervously as Gabriel's mouth hovered a mere breath away from her own. “Then why do you need me to kill Kira.”

  “As a sign of unity between us,” Gabriel explained as he released his grip on her hair and began to slowly wrap her fingers around the gun. “We are supposed to be partners in this but it suddenly occurred to me that my hands are a lot dirtier than yours. Or should I say bloodier. By killing Kira, you will prove to me that you are in this one hundred percent, thereby preventing anymore unpleasant understandings like the one that occurred between us the last time I saw you.”

  Jade gulped at the memory of The Dragon’s Breath being pressed to her throat as her eyes once again flitted towards the dagger. Grabbing her by the shoulders, Gabriel turned her body towards Kira.

  “I need you to do this for me, baby,” Gabriel whispered in her ear, making the request sound strangely sexual as his hands slid sensuously down the length of her arm and cupped her hands, coaxing her to point the gun at Kira. “I need you to do it for us. All you have to do is pull the trigger.”

  Removing his hand from Jade's, Gabriel stepped back and waited.

  Tears streamed out of Kira’s eyes as they flicked back and forth between Gabriel and Jeremy, begging Jade to finally realize that she was dealing with Gabriel, not Jeremy. Begging her to realize that she was being set up.

  And most of all begging her not to pull the trigger.

  Kira’s heart sank like a rock when she saw Jade’s hands suddenly tighten around th
e gun, her finger slide over the trigger and her eyes harden with cold determination.

  Oh, my God! She’s going to do it! She’s going to kill me! Kira’s inner voice screamed in warning, causing her to shut her eyes tightly as she braced for the bullet, the only image in her mind being that of Ethan’s face.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  The sound of shock in Gabriel’s voice caused Kira’s eyes to snap open and then widen at what they saw.

  “I’m bringing an end to our little partnership,” Jade replied as she pointed the gun at Gabriel.

  “It’s a little late in the game for that,” he replied, watching her with a reptilian-like coldness. “You’re in way too deep.”

  “I’ve found a way out,” Jade replied as she inched her way to the nearby table. Using one hand to keep the gun trained on Gabriel, she used the other to grab The Dragon’s Breath. “And this is my ticket.”

  After sticking the dagger into her oversized purse she then scooped up the scabbard and tossed it in as well. She then wrapped both of her hands around the gun. “Get over there,” she commanded, gesturing with the gun for Gabriel to move closer to Kira and Jeremy, thereby clearing her path to the door.