I woke up around noon the next day, tired and a little achy. I still hadn’t shaken off the aftereffects of the silver poisoning.
But I couldn’t lie around, waiting to get better. I had to keep pushing. Already, two of the seven days they’d given me had passed.
Spider had told me the Kral Syndicate was like a ticking bomb. One more spark could blow everything sky-high.
Andre Redbone’s passing had sent a shock wave through the syndicate, and then Tomas had disappeared too. With my father away, rumors were flying fast and thick.
Some said Redbone was a traitor who’d been staked when he attacked Gabriel.
Others insisted the kapitán had been loyal, that it was Gabriel who was the traitor. They said Redbone was only the beginning, that Gabriel—or maybe me or Rafe—had staked Tomas, too. That we three brothers were coming after all the kapitáns, one by one. With my father’s inner circle eliminated, it would be easy to take him out next. It didn’t help that neither Rafe nor I had been seen in over a week.
Then there were the people who blamed it all on my father, said he’d gone blood mad and was staking all his top people.
My father, blood mad? That was like saying Macbeth had been insane when he’d murdered his king.
Cold, ruthless and complicated as fuck? Yes.
But not insane.
And yet I knew Gabriel wasn’t planning a coup with me and Rafe. So either Andre Redbone had attacked Gabriel and been staked by my brother in self-defense—or my father was somehow involved in this.
I was drenched in sweat. Ridley’s window air conditioning unit was no match for the heat and humidity of a New York City summer.
I got out of bed and dragged my hands down my damp face. Unsure what to do or who to believe. Just knowing I had to do something.
Ridley sat up and swung her legs to the floor. “You’re still here.”
“Yeah. I’m going to take a shower and head back into the city.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
She let out a put-upon sigh. “I’m not asking for your permission, Kral. Either take me with you, or I’ll follow in the shadows.”
I sent her a hard look. “Maybe I shouldn’t have smashed those vials of tranq.”
“Yeah?” Her pretty mouth formed a stubborn line. “Something you should know—I don’t respond well to threats.”
That did it. Bending down, I planted my hands on either side of her thighs.
Her bare thighs, since all she’d worn to bed was a tank and a pair of boyshorts—and damn the woman for making me notice when I should be thinking of Rafe, and only of Rafe.
“Maybe I’ll tie you up and leave you here.”
Her eyes flickered. “You have to catch me first.”
My smile was slow and nasty. “Try me.”
Her inner thighs clenched. The spicy scent of her arousal filled my nostrils.
So the idea of being restrained turned her on. My dick twitched, liking the idea a little too much.
She chewed on her full lower lip. I tracked the movement, itching to sink my own teeth into her soft pink flesh.
And that itch gave my next sentences a rough edge. “Fine. Come to Manhattan then. But you can’t come with me into headquarters.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re going inside Kral headquarters? Why?”
“To get some answers. I have an idea, a way to get information that might help me figure out what, exactly, is going on. But I’m damned if I’ll take a slayer into our headquarters.”
“You can get in and out without anyone knowing?”
“Yeah. Which is why you can’t come with me—it’d be like handing you the keys to the front door.”
Her chest rose and fell. My gaze flicked to her breasts, the nipples hard points beneath the soft black tank.
Her throat worked, and beneath my boxers, my half-hard dick went to full mast.
I pulled back a few inches and focused on her face, trying not to think about how easy it would be to drag off her boyshorts, press her to the mattress and sink into her wet, pretty pussy.
I needed to keep my head clear, and that meant no sex with Ridley No-Last-Name.
“Look,” I told her. “I’m not going to do anything stupid. Not when my brother’s life is on the line. No one will know I’m there. I’ll get in and get out as fast as I can.”
She growled. “Fine.” A lithe twist of her body and she stood a few feet away, looking down at where I was still crouched over the mattress. The woman was a freaking eel. “You take me with you, and I promise to wait outside the building. But I want a shower too. And food.”
I rose to my feet. “We can get something to eat in the city.”
By the time we got to lower Manhattan and ate lunch, it was after three p.m. I left Ridley at Washington Square Park and slipped into the shadows to walk the last few blocks.
The Kral headquarters were tucked beneath a brownstone in Greenwich Village. I approached the building from the small, well-kept garden at the side.
Headquarters was never empty. There’d be a couple of dhampir or human soldiers on security detail, and the cleaning crew and maintenance men would be doing their thing. But if you wanted to sneak inside—and your father had built a secret underground entrance known only to five people—him, his lieutenant, and his three sons—then mid-afternoon was hands-down the best time. Even the PAs and other administrative staff didn’t arrive until five.
I’d already rejected going directly to Father’s office. It was located three floors below the surface and behind multiple layers of security. Instead I shadowed the cleaning crew—a man and a woman—until they were on the floor above his office where Gabriel and Tomas’s offices were located.
No one else but me and Rafe knew this, but Father, Tomas and Gabriel all had a way to put their security cams on a continuous, repetitive loop so to security, it appeared their offices were empty.
The man went into Gabriel’s office and the woman into Tomas’s. I followed the woman.
Tomas’s office was like an upscale version of a 1940s private eye’s office. Plain mahogany furniture and no computer because he didn’t trust modern tech other than cell phones. He kept his notes in old-fashioned manila folders and stored them in metal filing cabinets.
Father shook his head over it, but Tomas was the Kral Syndicate’s muscle, not the brains. Not that he wasn’t smart, but he was smart like a grizzly bear, preferring brute force over diplomacy. He and my father made a perfect team, their strengths complementing each other.
If anyone knew what had really happened between Gabriel and Andre Redbone, it would be Tomas.
I pressed myself against a wall and waited until the cleaning lady finished and left, locking the door behind her. Then I dropped out of the shadows and hit the button under Tomas’s desk to activate the security cam loop. It was set to erase the last ten seconds so my presence wouldn’t be detected.
At first I couldn’t find any reference to me or my brothers until I realized he referred to us each by code. The code was simple enough. He’d named us One, Two and Three in the order of our birth. The tricky part was he used the Slovak words, not English. Fortunately, I’d picked up enough Slovak from him and my father to figure that out.
After that, locating our three files was easy—and yes, Tomas kept files on all three of us.
No surprise there.
I wasn’t even that surprised at the undercurrent of disdain in his notes on us. Most vampires looked down on half-human dhampirs like me and my brothers.
Unfortunately, most of his notes were written in Slovak except for the occasional memo or clipping in English, and my knowledge of Slovak didn’t extend that far.
I focused on his recent notes about Gabriel. I sorted through them, reading what I could.
I found references to Camila Vittore, including photos of her from the years after she’d left Gabriel. So Tomas had been keeping an eye on her. I wondered if my brother knew that.
I found copies of memos that Gabriel had sent Father, reporting on work he’d done for the syndicate, and suggestions for future business. At times Gabriel’s impatience bled through. He wanted more responsibility, and my father was reluctant to give it to him, even though as crown prince, Gabriel was next in line to take over the syndicate.
I kept looking. Yeah, it was interesting that Tomas had copies of Gabriel’s private correspondence with Father, but I needed more.
I pulled out a handwritten note about Andre Redbone. It was in Slovak, but I could make out a few words, enough to tell me it was a record of Redbone’s passing, and that yes, it had been Gabriel who’d sent him to his final grave.
I turned it over and stared at the scribbled English words on the other side. They were in pencil, like Tomas had been working out what he wanted to say in English before writing a more formal note.
He hadn’t bothered with his code. Instead, he used our initials—G, Z & R.
G, Z & R plotting against you? Feeding intel to SI. All or just G?
My fingers tightened on the piece of paper. I wanted to shred the damn thing, but I forced myself to release it before I crumpled it.
Did Tomas actually believe we were plotting against our own father, or was he simply noting something he’d heard?
And had he passed it on to my father?
I snorted. Of course he had. No way Tomas would’ve kept quiet about something like that.
So the real question was, did Father believe it?
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes, mind racing and circling like a hamster in a wheel.
What had made Tomas write that note? A stray rumor? Or something more, something I wouldn’t have heard because I’d been out of touch in Syria?
I took my hands from my face. I’d allowed myself an hour in Tomas’s office. Time to finish and get out.
I flipped the rest of the way through Gabriel’s folder and set it aside. I still had a few minutes of the allotted hour left, so I paged through Rafe’s. There were multiple references to Princess Zoe. Rafe thought no one knew about his short affair with Zoe two summers ago, but apparently, Tomas had known all along.
I set Rafe’s folder down and opened mine. It was thinner than my brothers’ folders, mainly a record of my travels—where I went and why. He’d even noted that I’d never boarded the flight to New York.
I closed the files and returned them to his cabinet. After unlocking his door, I went back to his desk, hit the button that restarted the cam and shot out the door, starting to fade into the shadows as I did so. I pulled the door shut behind me just before I lost contact with the physical world.
The hidden exit was concealed in the wine cellar. There was a cam in the hallway, but I knew my dad didn’t have a cam on the wine. If you were a syndicate vampire with access to headquarters, then you were welcome to help yourself.
I left the shadows, grabbed two bottles and escaped through the hidden door behind a large shelf of bottles. I returned to the shadows until I was out of sight of headquarters, then ducked into an alley and dropped back out.
Reaper was waiting beneath a tree near the Washington Square Arch. She’d glamoured her hair so it was purple, pulled it into two stubby pigtails and changed her features so she looked about sixteen. A sleeveless gray tee showed off her lean, sculpted arms.
“Hey.” She searched my face. “Find anything?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you, but not here. And I got us some wine.” I showed her the bottles.
“Good. We can use it, that’s for sure. Here, give them to me.” She shrugged out of the backpack and took out her Ravens hoodie. She wrapped it around the bottles and stowed them at the bottom of the pack.
I reached for the pack. “I’ve got it.”
Ridley shook her head and settled the pack on her shoulders. “You think I don’t know you’re still fighting silver poisoning? I’m not a human, remember? Stop treating me like one.”
“And I’m not as weak as you think.”
She sighed and started walking. I fell in beside her.
“I know you’re better,” she said. “But I can carry a couple of bottles, okay?”
She was right. I was treating her like I would a human woman, when she was a supernatural like me.
“Fine, carry the damn bottles then. But the same goes for you. I’m not that guy you had to practically carry into the cemetery—I’m much better.”
“Agreed.” She gave me a sidelong glance from beneath her sunglasses. “So, what did you find out?”
I waited for a trio of twenty-something women in baggy shorts and cropped tops to pass us before answering. “We’re not far from the High Line. We can talk freely there—it’s sunny and open.”
“Sounds good.”
The High Line was an old elevated train line that had been repurposed as an urban park. Jogging up the stairs, we joined the stream of people walking the trail.
The Hudson River flowed by on our left, a broad silver ribbon under the late-afternoon sun. A cool breeze blew off the water, a welcome break from the summer heat. A sailboat darted like a dragonfly among the tugboats and barges, and an ocean liner glided downriver like a queen among her subjects.
We walked until we found a park bench set back from the path under some shade trees where we could sit and talk in relative privacy. From thirty feet below came the muted sounds of the city: the hum of traffic, a barking dog, children at a playground.
Ridley put her backpack on the bench between us. I got out a bottle of blood-wine, unscrewed the cap, and offered it to Ridley.
With a nod of thanks, she took a drink and handed the bottle back to me. I took a drink myself, then capped the bottle and put it on the ground at my feet.
“Okay, here’s what I found out.” I laid it out for her—that it had been Gabriel who staked Andre Redbone, the rumors about a possible coup against my father, Tomas’s note. The only rumor I didn’t share was the one about my father being blood mad. I refused to give SI any more ammunition against him.
“A coup.” Ridley’s mouth made a silent Wow. “That’s one serious motivation for wanting you and your brothers dead. Especially if he thinks you’re feeding intel to SI, too.”
“Yeah, but—” I looked unseeingly at the people passing on the trail fifteen feet away. “Father can’t believe we’re trying to kill him. Hell, I’ve been in Syria. I barely had time to text my family, let alone plot a fucking coup.”
“This goes back longer than a couple of months. The planning for this operation began a year ago.”
“Gods.” I grabbed the bottle; I needed another drink. “I have to tell Gabriel. Warn him about these rumors of a coup.”
“No.” She grabbed my arm. “You can’t.”
I shook her off. “Not your decision.”
“You’re forgetting they have Rafael.”
“Like hell I am. He’s all I think about. I go to sleep thinking about him, and I wake up in a cold sweat, picturing what they’re doing to him.”
“Sorry.” She heaved a breath. “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant you have to play by their rules if you don’t want them to sell him to a brothel. And they don’t want you contacting anyone in your family. Besides, what if Gabriel warns Karoly? That would make him impossible to get to.”
She was right, and I kind of hated her for it.
I curled my lip. “But that’s what you would say, isn’t it, slayer?”
Her chin jerked up like I’d smacked her. “Okay, I’ll give you that. But this operation—it’s been fucked up from the start. I’m not in control. I thought I was. I was in on the planning, but so many things don’t make sense.”
I frowned. She appeared genuinely upset, her brow furrowed, her small white teeth worrying her lower lip.
“And meanwhile, they’ve got my brother. How the fuck did that happen anyway? You said he was in Montreal.”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”
“So what now?”
She stared out at the river. “Twilight might know more. I’ll give her a call. But not here. Let’s go back to the Bronx.”