SEBASTIAN HUNG UP and stared at Paul, trying to process what he was seeing.
Paul had killed five people—no, six, including Jolie’s unborn kid—just a couple of hours ago. He had just dropped an atomic bomb, creating the single worst cataclysmic disaster Sebastian had ever experienced in his business, and the prick decided to swing by here to take a dip in the pool?
Sebastian unlatched the gate, wanting to bolt into the backyard and leap into the water, on top of Paul, and then, after bashing his head in a few times, hold the stupid son of a bitch underwater until he drowned.
But Paul wasn’t a skinny teenager anymore; he was a man, and he had come back from overseas with an extra twenty pounds, all of it solid muscle. Then he had gotten heavily into bodybuilding and put on more. Sebastian was twice his age and while he worked out nearly every morning at the health club, doing weights and running on the treadmill, he was a far cry from the man he was during his boxing days—and a little soft, too, carrying an extra twenty pounds from indulging in too many expensive dinners.
In terms of pure physical strength, Paul outmatched him. But in a fistfight? Sebastian was sure he could take him.
Or maybe he would just shoot the bastard. Sebastian carried a legally registered subcompact 9mm Glock in a shoulder holster. California had eased up considerably on its gun restrictions when carriers started getting abducted from their homes at all hours, from schools and on the streets. Sebastian was just another card-carrying NRA member wishing to protect himself.
Only a gunfight wasn’t going to happen here in his quiet neighborhood, where the slightest odd noise would be reason enough for someone to pick up the phone and call the police. The house was neutral territory—which was exactly why Paul had come here. Paul knew Sebastian would have to behave himself.
But that didn’t mean Sebastian was going to go in unprepared. Always expect the unexpected, he thought, removing the Glock from his shoulder holster. He slid it into his right front pocket as he moved into the backyard.
When Paul’s outstretched hand touched the pool liner, instead of turning around underwater and doing another lap he came up for air. He saw Sebastian looming above him and whipped his head to the side to whisk away the water.
“There you are,” Paul said. “Thought you might swing by here.”
In times of great stress, Sebastian had learned the importance of keeping a lid on his anger—not because it was the right or civil thing to do, as the prison therapist had suggested, but because it was the smart play. Killing Paul out here in the open was off the table—for now. He had to put his anger on hold—for now. Put it on hold, get Paul to Long Beach, and then he would unleash his rage. Take his time.
Savor it.
Paul hoisted himself out of the pool, splashing water on Sebastian’s shoes and pants cuffs. He straightened to his full height as if to remind Sebastian of his size and physical power.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Paul said, padding away and dripping water as he walked toward the opposite side of the pool.
Sebastian stayed right where he was.
Paul retrieved the towel draped over the back of a chaise longue, Sebastian looking at the ridiculous tattoos covering Paul’s muscular chest, arms, and back—those decorative, brightly colored skulls, set in candy, with flowers and jewels for eyes; a gingerbread man with a mean and ugly face, and jagged teeth biting down on the blade of a bloody machete. Paul had gotten them halfway across the world, in tattoo parlors in Iraq, but as for the significance behind them, what had inspired Paul to turn his body into a nightmarish version of the board game Candy Land, Sebastian had no idea. He had asked Paul about it a couple of times, but Paul never answered, just shrugged.
Paul finished drying off and tossed the towel onto the grass and pulled out one of the chairs arranged around the patio table where the three of them had shared many meals together, as a family.
He’s not my family, Sebastian reminded himself.
Paul crossed his legs. “You talked with Frank, I take it?”
Sebastian didn’t answer. He didn’t want to have this conversation outside, their voices carrying so the neighbors or someone walking by with their dog could hear. He walked over to the table but didn’t sit, glared at Paul from behind his sunglasses.
“Care to explain just what the fuck you’re doing here?”
“Was just about to ask you the same question,” Paul said. “Frank told me you were meeting us in Long Beach.”
“I had to stop here. Because of you,” Sebastian lied. He took off his sunglasses, eyes flat as he looked down at Paul. “You’re going to need cash so you can hide out until I clean up your epic cluster—”
“Relax. The police aren’t coming anywhere near here.”
“Yeah? And how do you know that?”
“You’re not the only one with friends on the force.” Paul said it like he knew, exactly, the names of those within the LAPD he and Frank had on their payroll. “Trust me, we’ll be fine.”
Paul suddenly reached over the side of his chair to grab something sitting on the ground, behind the table. Sebastian stepped forward, ready to lunge if needed, when Paul stopped and cocked his head up at him, grinning.
“You think I’ve got a gun down here? That I’m going to shoot you in our house?” Paul chuckled and came up with two highball glasses—the set of Baccarat crystal given to Sebastian as a gift by a real estate client who had no idea he was an alcoholic who had been sober for over two decades. Sebastian kept the glasses on a kitchen shelf, where they had gathered dust. Paul, Sebastian noticed, had cleaned them up.
When Paul reached down again, that shit-eating grin still plastered on his face, Sebastian looked over the tops of the neatly trimmed hemlocks, to the house sitting on the hill above them, the sun burning gold and red against the back windows. The windows were shut, always, because nobody was home. Nobody lived there anymore. Sebastian owned the property, had bought it for privacy, and thought maybe he should take Paul down right now. He had fired the subcompact Glock many times. The report was no louder than a car muffler backfiring.
Hand in his pocket, Sebastian threaded his fingers around the Glock and clicked off the safety as Paul came up with a dark bottle of something and placed it on the table. The bottle had a gold crown on the top. Paul turned it around so Sebastian could see the label: thirty-eight-year-old Royal Salute Stone of Destiny blended Scotch whisky.
“You once told me your biggest regret was not having tried this before you got sober,” Paul said.
It was true. Sebastian eyed the bottle, aware that his mouth was actually watering over the thought of having one measly sip.
“This shit’s rare. And expensive,” Paul said. “This bottle cost me almost two grand.”
“And you, what, decided to pick up a bottle today after murdering six innocent people?”
Paul’s eyebrows rose at the word innocent. “Bought it a while ago, actually. Was saving it for a special occasion. And today is a special occasion—it truly is.” He opened the bottle and placed the little gold crown on the table between them. “Guy who sold it to me said it’s important to let the Scotch breathe for a few minutes before you drink it. Why don’t you go grab us some ice?”
Sebastian pulled out the chair next to Paul and sat. He could smell the chlorine wafting from Paul’s skin.
“That mean you want me to go get the ice?” Paul asked.
Sebastian didn’t answer. Paul leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs again, and smiled, and right then Sebastian realized Paul had very skillfully manipulated him to get him to sit down at the table, make Sebastian think that he had done it of his own accord.
But that was what psychopaths did. They manipulated. The intelligent ones, anyway.
“Right now,” Paul said, folding his hands against his hard, flat stomach, “I’m guessing you want to kill me. Understandable, given the circumstances. That won’t solve anything—will, in fact, just lead to a whole new set of problems, the first of which being the cops. You don’t want the LAPD—or the Feds, especially—to start poking around this wonderful facade you’ve created. You’re an ex-con who murdered one of their brothers in blue. Who knows what sort of shit they’ll uncover?”
Was that a threat? On paper it sure as hell would look like one, but the way Paul delivered it—like he delivered everything, in that soft voice of his, like he cared about you and your well-being—made it seem like he was offering sound counsel, one close friend to another.
“How much?” Sebastian asked.
“Excuse me?”
“How much money do you want? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“You think I came so I can extort you?” Paul chuckled, shook his head. “I could have done that over the phone—could have done that months ago, if I’d wanted.”
Paul’s smile felt like a knife.
“I don’t want to take money from you, Sebastian. I want to make it for you. I’m talking the kind of money that builds empires.” Paul poured a drink, his expression serious now, all business. “All that charity work you love to do, so you look like a pillar of the community? You can fund any charity you want, a whole stable of ’em, for eternity. They’ll name buildings after you, parks and streets. You’ll be immortal.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“After you make me immortal, then what? What else are you offering?”
“Whatever you want, my man.” Again with the cutting smile. “Whatever you want.”
You mean whatever you want, Sebastian wanted to say, glancing at the little gold crown on the table. Men like Paul were never content with their current status. Make them a prince, and they’d want to be a king. And when they finally managed to take the throne—always by force, by blood and deception—then they’d want to be a god, and even that wouldn’t be enough, because with men like Paul the wanting never stopped. Their bellies were never full, their egos never satisfied.
Paul took a sip of his drink. He closed his eyes as he swallowed.
“Wow,” he said. “You really, really need to try this.”
Paul poured the second drink.
“Alex and Jolie,” Sebastian said.
“Yeah,” Paul sighed. “That was unfortunate.”
“That’s what you call executing two kids? Unfortunate?”
“It had to be done.” Paul put down the bottle. “If they’d lived, they would have told the cops everything.”
Only they hadn’t known anything. Sebastian took great measures to keep the salient details from his donors in the event one of them somehow escaped. It had never happened.
He didn’t need to share any of this with Paul. Sebastian said, “Your only job today was to keep an eye on them, make sure things went smoothly. Instead, you brought the cops—”
“No, sir, I did not. They just showed up out of the blue. Why? Because someone in our organization must’ve tipped them off.”
Our organization. Sebastian wanted to reach across the table with his fist, punch that smirk all the way back to the center of Paul’s sick brain.
“Vargas’s dog got out of the yard,” Sebastian said.
Paul narrowed his eyes at him.
“One of the kids let it out of the yard, and the cops found it—and a message,” Sebastian said, pleased by how calm and reasonable he sounded. He needed to stay that way if he was going to get Paul to go with him to Long Beach. “Someone, either Alex or Jolie, wrote a message on the dog tag. It said, ‘Help us.’ That happened under your watch.”
Paul stared down at his flat, hard stomach.
“Then,” Sebastian said, “I come to find out that you took blood from Jolie. Only you know she’s not allowed to give blood because she’s pregnant. Because it’s not safe, places her at risk of anemia. Because it could kill—”
“Her blood is different from all the others.”
“Different how?” The words jumped out of Sebastian’s mouth before he could stop to consider them.
“With Pandora,” Paul said, confidence creeping back into his voice, “I know a lot of people get super horny after a transfusion—a full-body transfusion. But if you take the blood from a pregnant carrier, it’s insane how potent this shit is. Think of it as Pandora on steroids. Pandora makes you look five to ten years younger? My shit makes you feel like a god. And the best thing is that it only takes a few units to get the results I’m talking about.”
“Too bad you killed the golden goose.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Jolie,” Sebastian said. “You killed her.”
Paul opened his mouth, about to speak when he snapped it shut. His face brightened. “Oh, I see. Forget Jolie. I’ll replace her with one of my donors.” Paul caught his expression and said, “I found some of my own carriers—for testing purposes, you understand. I wanted—”
“The stickman at Vargas’s house. He’s one of Anton’s.”
“I borrowed him, to do me a favor. He’s not a part of this. Anton. No one is. I’ve been doing the testing on my own, and on my own time. You’re the only person I’ve shared this with—the only one I wanted to share this with.” Paul frowned. “Wipe that look off your face. I had to get some of my own carriers to test out my theory. I didn’t want to approach you with some half-baked concept—and it’s not. My product is rock-solid. Let’s call it Pandora two point oh. Together, we can—”
“What are you mixing it with?”
“Are you asking me to share my secret recipe?” Paul shot him a sly grin. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“How many donors do you have?”
“Three.” Paul frowned, then said, “No, two. One of them lost the kid. She’s not back in rotation yet. I’ve got to give her some time to, you know, heal up before I breed her again.”
Breed her.
Sebastian didn’t harbor any illusions about what he did for a living. When you boiled it down to its core, he abducted carriers—young kids and teenagers, more often than not—and stole their blood and sold it. He took only carriers who came from broken and shitty homes and gave them not only a better life but a safe one, where they would never be hunted or abused. He was as good to them as he knew how to be, given the circumstances—not out of guilt but because it was the right thing to do.
But what Paul was talking about—it was unthinkable.
Paul looked at him with those boyish, innocent eyes. “It doesn’t matter who knocks ’em up—Jolie proved that to me today. Although, I’ve got to say, with her I needed to use less blood for some reason. Maybe it’s because another carrier impregnated her, makes the blood a bit more potent. Maybe we should shoot for that down the road—carriers breeding with other carriers. For right now, though, anyone can— Where are you going?”
Sebastian had gotten to his feet. “I want to see it,” he told Paul, masking his disgust and anger.
“See what?”
“Your farm.”
“It’s not really a blood farm. It’s more like a holding pen, and a crappy one at that.”
“Still, I’d like to view your operation. How you harvest the blood, how you store it, the medications you’re using, et cetera.” And once you take me there, Sebastian added privately, I’m going to blow your brains out.
“So we’ve got a deal?” Paul asked.
“What you’ve got is my interest. After I see everything with my own eyes, we’ll sit down with Frank and discuss terms.”
“Then a toast.” Paul slid the second glass across the table.
Sebastian didn’t take it, his mind seized on a string of questions: Have any of his carriers carried a baby to full term? What did he do to the kids? What does he want to do to the kids? No, don’t ask.
“Just one sip,” Paul said. “You can do that, right? Just take one sip?”
Sebastian felt his lunch sloshing around in his stomach. “Get up and get dressed.”
Paul remained seated, squinting up at him. “You do realize what I’m offering you.”
“And you realize what I’m offering you.”
“Capital and infrastructure.”
And that, Sebastian believed, was the leverage he had over Paul. If Paul had wanted to launch his own operation, he would have put something together already. But undertaking such an operation took a tremendous amount of capital. Paul didn’t have that, or an infrastructure, which was why he was here. Paul needed him in order to produce his ungodly product.
Which was never going to happen. After he killed Paul, he’d take in Paul’s carriers and give them a good life, treat them properly.
“After the farm,” Sebastian said, “we’ll go to Long Beach and—”
“Why go all the way to Long Beach? Frank didn’t say.”
“We got a house there where you’ll be safe until things cool down.”
“I’ve got my own place. I can—”
“We purchased this place in the event something happened and we needed to lay low. It’s got state-of-the-art security and, in case cops or anyone else decides to come snooping around, a well-hidden panic room. You’ll be safe there. No, don’t argue with me on this. One step at a time, okay? That’s how I work—how you need to work if you want to go into business together.”
Paul considered him. Sebastian saw traces of the kid buried in the man, the boy who, when his mother had asked him to finish his vegetables or to put away the cookies, would stare back at her as if to say, Make me—I dare you. Paul was staring at him that way right now.
His face suddenly relaxed. “You’re right,” Paul said. Sighing, he got to his feet, his muscles flexing as he walked over to his clothes.
Sebastian stood several feet away, near the table, his hands in his pockets. His right hand gripped the gun, just in case Paul tried something. Paul seemed relaxed—too relaxed, Sebastian thought. It bothered him. Put him on edge.
Paul slid into his sneakers. “I’ve got to be honest, Sebastian. You’re not showing the level of excitement I expected.”
“Lot of shit went down today. I’m still trying to process everything.”
Paul worked his T-shirt over his head. “What if I say no to Long Beach and taking you to the farm?”
“Then no deal.”
Paul sighed. “What I thought.” He shook his head and stared off in the distance. “I know what you do there, you know. At Long Beach.” His eyes cut back to Sebastian. “I know everything about you, Frank, and your operation.”
An inner voice urged Sebastian to pull the gun, put him down now. It was the right thing to do, no question—and he could make up a story. He could spin it for the police. Spin it in a way it wouldn’t come back to bite him in the ass. Do it now, before he—
“I was going to make you an emperor,” Paul said sadly, extending his arm above his head and performing the kind of hand signal Sebastian associated with SWAT and military special operations commands. Paul was giving a command to someone, but to whom? And to do what?
Sebastian caught a wink of light coming from the house on the hill. One of the windows facing him was now cracked open, the mesh screen gone, the sun reflecting off the glass lens of what he was sure was a sniper scope. He turned as the report of a rifle echoed through the air, the round slamming into his chest and knocking him off his feet and sending him tumbling backward, over the edge of the pool.
Sebastian sank through the cool water, grabbing his chest and thinking only one thing: Ava.