Cruel Riches: A Dark Captive Romance (Cruel Kingdom Book 1)

by Stella Hart

  My heart skipped a beat. “So everything he said about my dad was a lie?” I said in a small voice.

  “Yes. I don’t even know everything he said, but whatever it was, it fucking worked. Brought you right to us.” Nate rubbed his jaw. “I should really give him a bonus.”

  My legs felt weak all of a sudden. I slumped down to the thin mattress on the floor. “You can’t do this,” I said, voice barely above a murmur. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “That’s not true.” Nate crouched to my level again. “You know, I used to think you just wanted revenge for what happened to your father. But that’s not the whole story, is it? You actually enjoy killing people, don’t you?”

  “No!”

  “Yes.” He sneered. “Daddy’s little monster. He’d be so proud.”

  “I told you, I didn’t do anything!” I said. “You can’t keep me here!”

  “I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

  “People will notice I’m missing, Nate. My family and friends. My professors, too. They’ll notice when I stop showing up for classes and exams.”

  Nate pulled a phone out of his pocket. My phone. He waved it in the air. “I took care of that. I emailed the Dean of Students on your behalf, letting him know how traumatized you were by the deepfake sex scandal, and now the campus murders. I told him you’ll need a while to recover mentally, so your professors shouldn’t expect you in class.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What about my friends?”

  “I told them the same thing—that you need some time alone to deal with all your shit. I also hinted at therapy.” He unlocked my phone and looked down at it. “Laurel said: I’m glad you’re getting help. You’ve had such an awful time lately. Let me know if you ever need anything. I’ll be right there.” Nate chuckled darkly. “How nice of her. And here’s Ruby’s response: I understand, babe. I totally forgive you for what happened in the library yesterday, so don’t feel bad about it at all. I hope you feel better soon. Love you! Xoxo.”

  “What about Sascha? She’ll notice something’s wrong.”

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget your sister. I told her you’re absolutely slammed with assignments and exam prep, so she shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t hear from you for a while. I also figured I’ll text her in a couple of weeks and tell her you went back to the apartment to see her, but she was out. Then she’ll feel like it’s her fault she missed you.”

  “It won’t last. She’ll figure it out eventually.”

  Nate smiled thinly. “I know. But with everything I’ve set up, your friends and family won’t start to get suspicious for at least three or four weeks. Maybe even five.” He took hold of the bars with one hand and leaned closer, danger glimmering in his eyes. “That’s just enough time for me to do what I want with you.”

  “And then what?” I put my hands on my hips. “You think after five weeks I’m going to magically forget what you look like?”

  “Why would you need to—” Understanding suddenly dawned on his face, and he started laughing again. “Oh. Poor, stupid Alexis. You actually think I’m going to let you go after I’m done playing with you.” He shook his head again, amusement playing on his lips. “Do you really think I’d show you my face if I was going to do that?”

  “But you said you only need four or five weeks to do what you want with me. So…” I stopped and slumped backward as the dark realization crashed over me. “You’re going to kill me.”

  “Of course I am. But not before I make you feel everything you made those girls feel first. Trapped in the dark for weeks, begging for their lives. Terrified and tormented.” Nate slowly shook his head. “You’re going to get everything you deserve.”

  Black spots appeared in my vision as dizziness overwhelmed me. My new and horrifying reality was finally setting in.

  “No…” I shook my head. “Please, Nate. You’re wrong about me. So wrong.”

  “I’m not. You’re just like your father. A filthy fucking murderer.”

  “For the millionth time, that’s not true!” I shouted. “He never did anything! It was the Golden Circle!”

  “The what?”

  “The Golden Circle,” I repeated. “They’re some sort of secret society. Or part of a mafia organization, maybe. I don’t know. But whoever or whatever they are, they framed my father ten years ago. They were protecting the real Butcher!”

  Nate snorted. “Jesus. You actually expect people to believe that a big, mysterious criminal organization is responsible for setting up a random professor a decade ago to protect another killer—for no apparent reason, by the way—and now they’re probably doing it again?”

  “Yes,” I muttered, knowing how ludicrous it sounded. “My father told me about them. They’re real.”

  He raised a brow. “I know for a fact that you weren’t allowed to visit him in prison while he was there, so how did he tell you?”

  “He wrote a letter to me and gave it to his lawyer to pass on to me when I got older,” I explained. “The letter directed me to some of his old notes. That’s how I know about all of it.”

  He let out a short, amused snort. “You know the simplest answer to a problem is almost always the correct one, right? That means your father, whose office was fucking packed with evidence of the Butcher murders, was the killer,” he said, cocking his head. “No mafia. No secret society. Just your father.”

  “That’s not true,” I spat out. “Why are you so obsessed with me and my dad, anyway? He never did anything to you, and neither did I!”

  He went silent for several beats and looked at me coldly, as if I were a specimen in a lab. “You’ve never spoken to any of the families of the Butcher’s victims, have you?”

  I shook my head, confused by the change of topic. “No. But I know the names of all the victims, and there wasn’t a single Lockwood.”

  “No, there wasn’t. But family isn’t always about the last name you have, is it?”

  “I guess not,” I mumbled.

  Nate shifted in his spot, lips pressed together in a grim line. “Do you remember the name Emilie Santal?”

  “Yes. She was a twenty-three-year-old grad student at Blackthorne. The Butcher killed her.”

  “Yeah, he did.” He rubbed his chin. “Her mother Colette has worked at my family’s estate for over twenty years. She’s always been like a grandmother to me, seeing as my real grandparents aren’t around. Emilie was similar. She was thirteen years older than me, so from the minute I was born, she helped out with me. At first she was just a babysitter earning pocket money to help my parents out, but after a while she became like a sister to me. Or a second mother. It’s hard to explain. But she was my family.”

  “I’m sorry she died, Nate,” I murmured. “But—”

  He lifted a hand to silence me. “I used to blame myself for what happened to her.”

  “Why?”

  “I was a really shitty child. Typical rich, spoiled brat.”

  “What’s changed?” I mumbled under my breath.

  Nate gave me a filthy look and went on. “Emilie was the only one who could ever deal with me and calm me down. I think it was because she was around so much compared to my parents.” He went quiet for another beat before going on. “A few weeks before the murders, I was being a little prick again. Mom couldn’t deal with me, so she called Emilie and asked her to skip her classes that day to take care of me. They ended up deciding to take me on a picnic at a park down in Thunder Bay. I’m sure you know the one I mean. It’s the one with the wildlife reserve and giant playgrounds.”

  I nodded. “My dad used to take me there,” I whispered. The memory was like an arrow piercing my heart.

  “Well, I don’t really remember this part, but my mom told me that I was being a total brat in the car that day. Shouting and kicking her seat even though Emilie was there, trying to calm me. Mom ended up having to stop halfway through the drive and pull over at a rest stop. It’s just off the eastern coast highway, about a half
-mile after the lighthouse.”

  I nodded. I knew the place he meant. It was a small grassy area with a wooden picnic bench, slide and swing set for kids, and a surprisingly clean public bathroom that backed onto a thick cluster of pine trees. I’d stopped there a few times when my bladder demanded it while I was out driving.

  “The second my mom stopped the car, I got out and raced over to the forest behind the picnic area. Mom chased after me because she was scared I’d get lost. It only took her five minutes to find me, but when we got back to the rest stop, Emilie was gone.”

  “Oh.” Another arrow pierced my heart. I knew what happened to Emilie that day. Poor girl.

  “At first Mom thought she’d chased after me as well. Then she thought maybe she’d gone to the bathroom or back to the car to grab the picnic stuff. But we couldn’t find her anywhere. We called and called and called. Looked everywhere together. But she was gone.” Nate held up all the fingers on his right hand. “That was all it took for the Butcher to snatch her. Five minutes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You can imagine how I blamed myself. I was too young to know any better,” he said bitterly. “But after a while I realized it wasn’t my fault. I was ten fucking years old. How could I have known there was a psychopath hiding at a rest stop, waiting to snatch up the first pretty young thing he saw?”

  “Of course it’s not your fault,” I said.

  “No shit. It’s your fucking father’s fault. He took Emilie. He kept her hidden somewhere for four weeks, and then he gutted her like a fish.” Nate rubbed his jaw. “It doesn’t end there, by the way.”

  “Why? What happened?” I asked.

  The longer I kept him talking, the longer I had to plot a way out of this place before he started torturing me or starving me.

  “Everyone went to pieces after she went missing. Colette had to take leave from work at our house, understandably, and Mom and Dad were always upset. But we still had hope. We tried to tell ourselves that Emilie just got lost looking for me in the woods, and she’d turn up soon. Or maybe she just so happened to meet a rock-star at the picnic area and ran off with him on tour.”

  I nodded slowly. I knew how hope could be terrible sometimes. Like thick bars in between you and the thing you really wanted. You could picture it, hear it in your mind, even taste it… but you couldn’t have it.

  “One morning I refused to go to school because I was still upset about the whole thing. Colette wasn’t around to look after me, for obvious reasons, and Mom had some event that she couldn’t miss. So Dad had to take me for the day. He had a meeting over at Blackthorne for some reason, so I had to tag along with him. He told me we were going to get there early so he could show me how nice the campus looked in the morning with all the snow covering everything.”

  “And then?”

  “I think you know what happened then.” Nate gave me a murderous look. “We got to Blackthorne just after eight in the morning. People were standing around near the quad looking freaked out, and there was police tape everywhere. Dad tried to stop me, but I was a curious kid. I ran over and sneaked under the tape. Then I saw her. The cops still hadn’t taken her down, so she was hanging right there from a branch. No eyes, and her face was covered in blood… but I still recognized her.”

  “Because she was practically your older sister,” I said softly, scooting closer to him. “I’m sorry, Nate. That must’ve been horrible.”

  I wasn’t trying to suck up to him now. What he’d described to me was truly terrible. I couldn’t imagine seeing a loved one strung up like that when I was only a kid.

  “I’m still not done,” Nate said, rattling the bars to my cell again. I shrank back to the mattress. “Your father didn’t just kill Emilie. He took so much more from me. He broke my whole fucking family.”

  “I understand,” I said. “The Butcher destroyed everyone who knew the victims, and he—”

  “Shut the fuck up and listen,” Nate growled. “I don’t mean he emotionally destroyed my family. I mean he literally destroyed it. He killed my father and uncle.”

  I shook my head, brows puckering with confusion. “What?”

  “Like I said before, after Emilie was found dead, everyone went to pieces. It was fucked up. Dad started drinking. Not huge amounts, but it was frequent. Enough to numb him.” Nate paused to scratch the back of his neck. “One day he and my uncle decided to drive up to Pickersgill to meet up with an old friend. You know where Pickersgill is, right?”

  I nodded. It was a town on the northwest side of the island, which was lined with treacherous cliffs and dark forests. Farther inland, there was a rugged national park with steep snow-capped mountains and remote valleys teeming with wildlife. It wasn’t a region for the fainthearted.

  “Mom said she saw Dad drinking a glass of scotch before they left. She assumed my uncle was driving, because he was sober, but when she looked out and saw them heading up the driveway, she realized my dad was in the driver’s seat. She tried calling them to make them stop, but no one answered.”

  A heavy feeling settled in my stomach. “They crashed?”

  “It was worse than that.” Nate’s nostrils flared. “Dad lost control of the car on a stretch of road that was covered in ice. If he was sober, he probably would’ve been able to skid over to the other side. But when you drink, your reflexes aren’t as fast.”

  “I know.”

  “They went off the cliff. Crashed right onto the rocks below. The car ended up wedged between two big rocks, all smashed up and half underwater.”

  “That’s awful,” I murmured.

  “It gets worse. You know what they have up in that area?”

  I shook my head. “What?”

  “Sharks. They hang out there to hunt for seals on the rocks, even in cold weather,” he replied. “When the car fell all that way, my dad and uncle were killed by the impact, and there was blood everywhere. The windows were all smashed out, and like I said, the car was half underwater. So you can imagine what was left of the bodies.”

  Bile rose in my throat. “Shit,” I whispered, wincing at the mental image Nate had left in my mind.

  “They found my dad’s head and torso with one arm missing, still partially strapped to the driver’s seat,” he went on. “That was all that was left of him. I guess the sharks were too full to eat all of him, seeing as they’d already taken most of my uncle from the passenger seat. Wanna know what was left of him?”

  “What?”

  Nate threw up his hands. “Nothing. Just a few bloodstained chunks of his clothes on the rocks, and more of his blood in the car. So that’s all we had to bury after the accident. Bits of my uncle’s shirt, and my dad’s head, chest, and one arm.”

  “Nate, I’m sorry that happened, but I don’t—”

  “Don’t think it’s your dad’s fault?” he said, cutting me off. There was a fire of pure hatred in his eyes. “Yeah, I know it was my father’s choice to drink and drive that day. He caused the crash that killed my uncle and himself.” He paused and lowered his voice. “But here’s the thing, Alexis. It wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t so fucked in the head after what happened to Emilie. He just slipped like so many other people would in that situation.”

  More arrows sliced at my heart. “I get what you mean, but—”

  Nate cut me off again. “Your father set it all in motion. He killed all those people and tore their friends and families apart,” he said, shaking his head. “So he may have killed thirteen at Blackthorne, but I can tell you the human toll of his crime was a lot fucking more than that.”

  A thousand emotions churned inside me, fighting each other for dominance—guilt, sadness, pain, fear, and so much more. “Nate, I’m really sorry that you lost so many people like that. I don’t disagree with you, either. You’re right. Your dad and uncle might still be alive if your dad wasn’t so screwed up after seeing Emilie like that. But it’s not my father’s fault. He wasn’t the Butcher. He was innocent. Someone else killed all
those people.”

  “Bullshit!” Nate roared. “Everyone knows it was him! You’re the only person still trying to defend him. Even your mother and sister think he did it!”

  I licked my parched lips. “I know,” I muttered. “But I know he didn’t do it. And I didn’t do anything, either. Someone else killed Claire and Nessa. Probably the same old Butcher from ten years ago.”

  “The new one is a copycat,” Nate said, eyes blazing. “Haven’t you heard? The kills weren’t exactly the same. Just very similar.”

  “So he changed his style. Or maybe he was rusty after so long between murders.” I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “But it’s him. I’m telling you.”

  “No. It’s you.”

  I scooted forward again. “Nate, please listen,” I said, widening my eyes. “I’m innocent. You can’t keep me here and punish me for something I didn’t do.”

  “I’m punishing you for something you did do.”

  Anger flared inside me. I was never going to get through to him. He was too fucked up.

  “Someone will find me here eventually. They’ll hear me scream,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “But if you let me go now, you won’t get in any trouble. We can just talk this out. No charges. I promise.”

  That wasn’t true, but he didn’t need to know that.

  A sudden smile curved up Nate’s lips. “No one will hear you. Do you have any idea where you are?”

  “No. Where?”

  The smile grew wider. “Let me show you.”

  He fumbled in his pocket and produced a key for the padlock on the chains that were keeping the cell door locked. He opened it, stepped inside, and yanked me to my feet. “Don’t try to run,” he said. “There’s nowhere for you to go.”

  He pulled me out of the cell and pushed me ahead of him into a dark passage, keeping one hand on my shoulder while the other used the flashlight app on his phone to illuminate our path. I could hear water dripping from somewhere, along with the sound of critters scurrying over dirt and crunchy dead leaves.