Page 93 of Intent to Kill
Dan sat forward, licking his lips, “We were terrified, to be fair, couldn’t give him any reason to believe you survived.”
“You buried bones in my grave?” Adam smiled.
Dan and Carlos nodded furiously, like bobbleheads that had just been struck.
“You buriedbonesin hisgrave? Like complete fucking skeleton-type bones?” Paul sat forward, frowning.
“Yeah, while you fucked off out of town for weeks after Adamdied,we had to clean some shit up, didn’t we?” Dan said, his tone accusatory but doing little to mask his pride.
“Damn right,” Carlos agreed. “Spread charred bones at the site, chucked a few more in your grave. Threw in your gold watch for good measure.”
“And the suit.” Dan smiled, gleaming at Carlos.
Carlos looked excited when his eyes snapped up. “Oh yeah! Three-piece suit. Dressed that skeleton up real nice.”
They burst out laughing, making the others smile in return.
“Huh,” Adam said, stunned into submission. His friends had covered all their bases. All the worry he’d felt, the panic, was for nothing... But the feel of her in his arms last night. Her nose brushing his neck like she couldn’t bear to lose him... Where fear was before, hope blossomed.
Adam cleared his throat. “Alright, that might take the heat off us a little bit, but he’s still suspicious. He cannot—cannot—know I’m alive until it’s in our favor.”
“You’re telling me,” Carlos puffed.
“Well, I’ve got something more to celebrate,” Dan said. “I’ve decrypted the keys from the white book. I’ve started compiling a list of city officials we can get on our side without alerting Blake.”
“That is good news,” Adam said.
“And Paul, I’ve decrypted your files from the range, no idea what they fucking say, but that has nothing to do with encryption. You should be able to read them now,” Dan said, sliding a file over to him.
Paul took the decrypted documents from Dan’s hands, the three of them turning to general conversation and boisterous laughter.
Stuffing back his surprise, Adam locked eyes with Mercedes. She appeared to think the same.
Were they... calm? His friends? No, surely not.
There was a time that any kind of information outside their favor would’ve put them in a spin. But now, they had calmly dealt with an issue. Kept pushing ahead despite the threat of conflict. To Adam, it only made him more sure that this time they were ready to win.
Mercedes floated from her chair and nuzzled up next to Adam, her arms folded but her mouth near his ear. “So…whatarewe gonna do about my lovely future-husband?”
Adam grinned, but chose not to taunt her this time. Blake wasn’t her future husband. He already had plans for who would take that role. “We are gonna keep pushing forward, keep one step ahead, and keep outrunning him until it’s too fucking late for him to catch us.”
* * *
It was alone in his office that Dorian realized he was losing. He was casually reading over files when a papercut snagged his finger. Looking down on the blood, the slick redness coating his thumb, he realized it was the first of his own blood that had been on his hands in years. Was it decades, even? He couldn’t recall.
He was losing his grip on the empire he fought so hard for. And he had fought hard for it. When he was twenty-one years old, he killed his oldest brother. Then, when he was twenty-nine years old, he tracked down and killed his last living cousin, who had been hiding from him for years.
So when he looked down upon the simple, small droplet of his own blood sliding along his thumb, he realized he was perhaps underprepared. So many years spent in power, so many years spent behind a desk, he had become distanced from the brutality he needed to foster in order to survive this life.
Three brothers dead. Six cousins. All for this empire. Every threat he had ever come up against he had squashed. Fiercely. Violently. So he wasn’t going to let someone—some stranger—take it all out from under him this time.
Once he was mayor, there wouldn’t be a power in the city that could stop him. He would have domain over the police, the courts, not to mention the streets he already controlled. The one and only thing he knew was that he had to get there, by any means necessary.
He wiped the blood from his finger across his stark white shirt, right over his heart, so it would stain and serve as a reminder to be harsher than before.
Antonio and T.B. appeared at the doorway just in time to witness the end of Dorian’s revelation. They spied the blood on his chest and exchanged a glance, but ultimately ignored it. Smart Seconds.
“Boss,” Antonio said. “We have the records for you.”
