Page 30 of Stormhold

She frowned. “Then why did we take the trip? To go see him and have a chat?” she asked with a tilt of her head.

“I wanted him alive. Because I want to collapse the Covent from the inside out and kill every last one of them,” I said pointedly. “And now you’ve taken out my only lead.”

“It was him, the one who took a shot at your family, the same person involved in the murder of my family. There is no point in him living. There was nothing good about his conscience or his actions.”

“Even then, I don’t do well with false promises, Bella. I had a plan, and now it’s ruined because of you, and trust me…” I walked around her desk and pressed my hips to her side of the table. The sweet notes of her lotus and vanilla scent flowed to me as I leaned closer and said in a low tone, “I won’t hesitate to kill anyone who stands against my family, especially little liars like you.”

She didn’t even blink an eye. “I never lied—I don’t ever lie.” Her tone was laced with conviction as her brown eyes held me in place. She was the farthest from scared of my threat. “Nor did I make any false promise,” she continued. “I told you that he wasn’t leaving the island alive, and he didn’t.”

Way with words. She did say that, but I didn’t take it seriously. But I was quickly learning that everything Bellerose Esteal said was plainly just that. There weren’t any underlying innuendos or falsity. She said what she meant or just didn’t speak at all.

“You were never going to let him live after that night, were you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Sometimes a single chance is all the chance you’ll get. I waited thirteen years to meet the man who dragged my sister and me from our bedroom to watch him and his friends rejoice in murdering my family. So, no Stormhold, he wasn’t staying a second alive after that night,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she wasn’t reciting a horrifying incident from her life. Strange, most people would be brimming with satisfaction after avenging their revenge. But not Bellerose—she was neither satisfied nor guilty, the feeling that some usually say they get after carrying out their revenge. It was almost as if she felt nothing at all.

I nodded. I couldn’t say I understood her completely, but in a way, I got why she did what she did. In a different circumstance, I would’ve done the same thing, so I decided to let it go even if it brought me back to square one. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered if I would’ve made the same decision if it were someone else. But I thought of another plan, and if it all fell into the right place, this wouldn’t be a worthless misstep.

“How the hell did you do it?” I asked, genuinely curious. She was with me the whole night. We spoke to Harvey Walters for all of ten minutes. Even then, she never left my side. I always had an arm around her. I did suspect her little friend, but Bellerose Esteal wasn’t one to ask for help with a kill.

“A poisoned thumbtack matching the color of his shoes.”

My brows furrowed. “A thumbtack?”

“Harvey Walters was in a biking accident in middle school that completely shattered his left knee, so he prefers the right and has the tendency to shift his position every minute or so. So in the middle of the conversation, I simply took the thumbtack from my clutch and placed it on the floor, near the edge of the table. Thankfully, it wasn’t noticeable in the dull lights, and on his seventh lean, the damage was done. The poison was slowly absorbed into his skin for three hours, until the toxin suffocated him from the inside out.”

She clearly did her homework and was very good at it. “Clever, tricky, but mostly dangerous,” I said. “What if that didn’t work?”

“I thought I’d excuse myself to the ladies’ room and do the act myself.” She removed her glass and set it aside with a small sigh. “Although I’m grateful that didn’t happen because I’m not good at those kinds of things.”

“Just good at killing then,” I added dryly. “Thanks to you, now we’ve nothing.”

“Not really.” She gave me a look. “I’m not stupid. Here,” she said, nudging a file my way. “Timothy Walters is the next man we’re looking for.”

“His brother?” I asked dryly.

She nodded, sliding a photograph toward me. It looked like it was from some gala several years ago. “As soon as I saw him, I knew he was one of the five.”

“If my memory serves me right, he’s also Ron Sanders’ half-brother?” I asked, raising a brow. Ron Sanders was a former Secretary of Defense. I met him once during his swearing-in ceremony years ago. He was an acquaintance of my father. Most government officials were. As far as I recalled, there wasn’t anything incredibly remarkable about him.

She nodded. “He is, although I must say both half-brothers led very different lives. Timothy is everything Ron Sanders is not. Some could blame it on the twenty-year age gap, but from what I gathered, Timothy wasn’t very bright in his early years and was always shrouded in his brother’s shadow of success. Both his brothers,” she added.

I wondered how she was able to gather this information with little to no help and with great detail, no less. “As far as I know, he’s got nothing to do with the Covent. He left the city long ago to go be with the Sanders side of the family.” When Timothy and Harvey’s mother married Ron Sanders father, she took Timothy with him, leaving Harvey behind. And as far as I knew, the brothers didn’t maintain any communication.

“I don’t think that’s the case. Maybe his leaving was a farce. If Alan Dumfred said he saw five men, I have no doubt that Timothy was one of them,” she said.

I had enough experience to know that nothing in this world was as it seemed. I didn’t tell her that I knew the five men killed her family and that it wasn’t some mere robbery. From the reports I read, the men did well to conceal themselves. I only knew of Harvey’s involvement since there weren’t many men in the city with two severed index fingers.

“What’s in the file then?” I asked, nodding toward it.

“Something I wanted to ask you about, if you didn’t already know—Timothy now works as a spokesperson at the Department of Defense, thanks to Ron Sander’s connections, and he will be here this weekend to meet your brother, Marcus, at the Stormhold Tech HQ.”

“I know of it.” I nodded. “He’s here to collect the test samples for our latest nano-tech weapon system called Invictus. I created it,” I added.

Even though I didn’t involve myself in the business side of our company, I made it my business to know everything. That was fate as the head of the family, after all. To know everything. And it wasn’t easy knowing every vile man’s dirty little secret and all the hidden propaganda that shaped our modern economy.

The business did flag some concern because of Timothy’s entry into the Twins and his blood ties with Harvey Walters, but these kinds of deals happened on a daily basis, and I trusted Marcus to handle them. Even though we Stormholds were taking a step back from our usual business and laying low, Stormhold Tech, on the other hand, had to function as usual. It was imperative to our family name that it did so. Moreover, thousands of lives depended on it.

“I don’t think it particularly has to do anything with the situation, but it enables Timothy Walters easy access to the Twins,” Bella continued. “Seems important, especially now that the city is closed to outsiders.”