by Kyra Davis
“Tell me,” I hiss, “did Jenna say nothing to provoke my mother?”
“Jenna was definitely provocative.”
“And yet somehow that didn’t make it into your testimony.”
“True,” Lander admits with a sigh. “My father, who was following the case much more closely than I was, was convinced that your mother was guilty. He’s the one who urged me to tell the police about the argument after the murder took place. And he also insisted that I be careful not to disparage Jenna while relaying the tale. He felt that Jenna had been through enough. That she had just lost her husband. That she was only saying what any scorned woman would say. And, although you may not want to hear this, your mother hurt her. She slept with her husband—Jenna was a victim. She was innocent of everything. I now believe that your mother was also innocent of some things. But not of everything.”
I hate that he’s right. Even now I know there was no excuse for my mother’s behavior. And to make matters worse, she took Edmund Gable’s advice; she waged an open war against Nick’s wife. She made herself look crazy and, in retrospect, dangerous. It made setting her up so easy.
“‘We silenced Nick Foley,’” I say, my voice low and angry. “That’s what you wrote. You didn’t write that my mother silenced him. You didn’t write that your father silenced him. You used the word ‘we’ and then you put it in your little notebook and tucked it away in a drawer, hiding it from anyone who might find that statement troubling. And you’ve known who I am for God only knows how long—and rather than confront me, you played me. And now, now, you want me to believe that you had nothing to do with setting my mother up? That all you did was tell the truth as you knew it and that you just sort of stumbled into this thing blindly. That none of this is your fault. That—”
“We did silence Nick Foley,” Lander interrupts, his eyes cold. “And yes, I did stumble into it blindly, though that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have the opportunity to see things clearly. I just wasn’t paying attention. I was focused on my own mother, trying to please my father so that he would get her the care she needed.”
“Oh right, your mother,” I say, pretending to think about that. “That would be the woman who died alone because you went off to Oxford and couldn’t be bothered with her, right? Is that the mother we’re talking about?”
Lander grimaces and tosses the ice pack onto the table. “My father took my mother back. She told me she was in remission. They both told me to go to Oxford, and Travis told me that if I didn’t, our father would blame my mother for holding me back. He told me that dear old Dad would stop taking care of her, that she would lose her health insurance and that would be the end of it.”
“And you always trust Travis.”
“I didn’t think he would mislead me about that,” Lander says, his eyes narrowing as he looks deep into the past. “I did everything they asked me to do. I went to Oxford for my graduate degree. I wrote my mother, occasionally we spoke on the phone. I wanted to come home to be with her, but there was always something she thought I should do in Europe, something my father wanted me to do and she would beg me to comply. And Travis was always calling, counseling me, telling me how tenuous my mother’s relationship was with our father. He explained that while it was true that she was in remission she wouldn’t be out of the woods until she was cancer free and stayed cancer free for a few years. We had to be vigilant. We had to keep Father happy. We had to keep the peace.”
He says the last few words with so much sarcasm and venom that I actually shudder. I don’t understand the point of this story. I’m not sure I want to . . . but I’m not really convinced that he’s lying either. Still . . .
“I’ve done my research, Lander,” I say, trying to keep the uncertainty out of my tone. “Your mother died alone in a small apartment. As far as I can tell, the prenup your father had her sign ensured that she got a little less than nothing. And although I wasn’t able to get my hands on her health records, I’m pretty sure she did lose her health insurance. So your story—”
“Is a lie,” Lander says in a low voice. “A total lie told to a naïve son. I didn’t know it then. I didn’t know it until she died, one day before my graduation ceremonies. It was Travis who told me. He looked me in the eye and told me that she was dead and that my father had finalized the divorce well over a year ago. He told me that they lied to me so I could focus on my studies and uphold the Gable name. And then he smiled.”
“He . . . smiled?” He’s trying to make me feel sorry for him. Me. But that won’t happen. Never, ever again.
“He was amused by how easy it had been to fool me,” Lander says quietly. “My father was slightly more gracious. He explained that while he couldn’t make it work with my mother, they both wanted me to be successful. By graduating from Oxford I had granted her dying wish. Of course, he left out the part about her being left to die alone without proper care. About the pain her disease must have caused her, or the loneliness she must have felt. How they really got her to lie to me, I’ll never really know. But as far as my father is concerned, he did a good thing. The point was that he looked out for his son. That’s what was important to him. You see, my father is a cruel bastard. But my brother is simply evil.”
I don’t say anything. I’m staring at the scratches on his face, the slight bruise that’s forming by his left eye despite the ice pack. I did that to him for a reason and now I’m doing everything I can to remind myself that this man is one of the bad guys.
He steps forward and I immediately step back, but it’s the sketchbook he reaches for. He opens it up to a picture of three men. I’ve seen this picture before. It’s titled Bite, Torture, Ruin. But the picture I took of it on my phone isn’t so good. I took it too quickly and it’s a little blurry. And I haven’t figured out this anagram yet. Sloppy work on my part, but there had been so many anagrams to work out I had assumed that this one could wait. After all, what were the odds that the one anagram I didn’t get a good picture of would be the important one?
But now, seeing it in person again, I study it a little more closely. One of the men in the drawing wears a suit with a nail where his heart should be. He’s arm in arm with an older man who has his pockets turned inside out. He appears to be handing over the last of his money to a boy who has extraordinarily sharp teeth. The boy looks like he’s going to take off the old man’s hand with those teeth of his.
The boy looks a little like Lander.
“I’m getting kind of tired of games and puzzles,” I snap. “Give me answers.”
And please, God, I think, give me solutions.
Lander shakes his head. “Just look at the picture. I know you’ve seen this before. If you haven’t gotten the answer it’s because it’s unexpected.”
“Unlike We Silenced Nick Foley?” I ask sarcastically.
“Unlike We Silenced Nick Foley. You were definitely looking for that . . . You may not have wanted to see it, but you were looking for it. But I’m not asking you to look. I’m asking you to see.”
Reluctantly I turn to the picture again. The features of the man in the suit and the old man are indistinct, giving them a rather anonymous quality that adds to the sinister nature of the drawing.
It’s not until I note the briefcase being held by the man in the suit that things start to click. I hadn’t noted that detail before. I mean, I saw the briefcase, I just didn’t pay any attention to it. I didn’t note that it was textured, as if it was made out of crocodile skin or something.
There aren’t many people who have briefcases made of crocodile skin.
But Travis does.
I reach forward and put my finger on the old man. “Is that meant to be Edmund?”
Lander nods and smiles.
Again I look at the title of the drawing. Bite, Torture, Ruin.
Lander leans forward and writes out the letters individually. B. I. T. E. T. O. and so on until they stop looking like words and start looking like the puzzle fragments they are. And then, just like
that, I see it. Without really thinking about it I pull the pencil from him and write the solution to the puzzle.
TRUE RETRIBUTION.
Lander delicately takes the pencil from me as I continue to stare at the picture.
“I’ve had a sense about you from the moment we met,” he says quietly. “I knew that there was more to you than meets the eye. You’re always so mysterious and there’s something seductively devious about you. But it wasn’t until you mentioned the name Talebi that I knew for sure that you had an agenda.”
“That name again,” I say quietly, my eyes still on the picture.
“A name that Travis could never have known. Talebi was one of the people I was thinking about hiring to help me expose my brother for what he is. He’s not involved in insider trading and corporate espionage, Bell. Or if he is, it’s not my primary concern.” Lander takes a moment to pause, and I know he’s doing it for effect, to try to draw me onto his side. “He’s using HGVB to launder money for Mexican drug cartels and Iranian officials. I’m pretty sure about this, and I think Nick knew too. I think he was going to say something and that’s why my family decided he had to go. I even have reason to believe that my brother enlisted members of the Russian mafia to pull off the hit, although I can’t prove it.”
“Oh, God,” I whisper, grabbing for the back of a chair to help support me. The information is coming so fast, I’m struggling to wrap my head around it. But the words that keep singing to me are the words that are written on paper before me.
“When you mentioned Talebi,” Lander says, clearly emboldened by my reaction, “it became clear that you were up to something, and at first I suspected that you were working with Travis. So I did two things. First I made sure that Travis overheard my end of a phone conversation between me and Talebi.” From my peripheral vision I can see him make air-quotes around the word overheard. “I faked the call, of course, but Travis didn’t know that. I made sure Travis thought that Talebi was someone who could be a threat to him, but I was extraordinarily vague about the particulars. Like he was someone who could make my brother look bad in the press or dig up some actual insider trading stuff. I had to make sure that you and Travis were looking in the wrong direction.”
My eyes keep reading and rereading the solution to the anagram, my mind furiously going over all the things it could mean. The picture would suggest that he wants retribution against his family. Of course he could have planted this for me. He could be using this as a way to trick me again, to convince me that he’s on my side.
But then, I found this sketch on the first night he took me home. Before he could possibly have known what I was up to. And I found it with the anagram about Nick Foley. If it was a plant, why allow me to find that too?
“You said you did two things,” I say hoarsely.
“Yes, the second thing I did was hire private investigators. I hired a slew of them, actually, and I promised an impressive bonus to whoever could figure out your identity first. The first one I hired found virtually nothing. The second one found even less. You’ve covered your tracks well. But the third detective, a man who used to work for the intelligence community as a sort of government-sanctioned hacker, he found enough for me to put the rest of the pieces together myself.”
“And when was that?” I ask. True retribution, true retribution, true retribution—the words are marching around in my head like a chant. Like the revelation it is.
“That was this morning, Adoncia.”
I inhale sharply. True retribution.
“My family set your mother up for murder. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d bet my life on it now. And they orchestrated the abandonment of my mother when she was sick and in pain. The murder, the money laundering, the cartels—it took me years of digging and scheming to get the information I needed to put all the pieces together. But now that I have, I’m ready for war.”
Lander reaches forward and taps his index finger against the words I’ve written down. “Let’s stop fighting with each other, Adoncia,” he says softly, and gently he puts one hand under my chin and turns my face toward him so now I’m looking into his eyes. “Let’s focus our energy. And let’s bring Travis and my father To. Their. Knees.”
I search his face for some sign of deceit or jest.
But all I see is honesty and vicious determination.
This man is not my enemy.
This man is my partner in crime.
Again, something inside me just snaps.
And immediately I’m on him. My lips crush against his as he draws me to him. I tear at his shirt as he yanks my skirt to my waist. I want him inside me and I want it now.
I pull at his belt as his hands move to my ass. I’m kissing his neck, his shoulder. I kiss the wounds that I inflicted on him less than an hour ago.
This man will be my partner, in crime and in love.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt this kind of need or this level of urgency.
When Lander pulls my panties to the floor I reach for his belt, but before I can pull it off him he pushes me down onto a chair and kneels before me, tasting me, teasing me, making me insane. I reach my hands into his hair as his tongue circles my clit. This is delicious torment. I can feel myself literally throbbing for him as I throw my head back and call out his name.
Lander, my Lander.
My warrior.
The man who will fight by my side.
My orgasm is sudden and intense and Lander holds on to my hips, keeping me in place, making sure that I can’t get away.
But I don’t want to get away. Not now, not ever.
He rises up and lifts me into an embrace and finally I get hold of his belt and pull it off with speed and force. There can be no more waiting. As Lander pointed out, we’ve wasted enough time. I pull his pants and boxer briefs down and he steps out of them. This time I’m the one to fall to my knees, and I taste him, licking the head of his cock, running my hands up and down its length before tracing that small ridge that leads from the head to the base with my tongue, teasing him, making him so hard he moans, desperate for relief.
He yanks me to my feet and turns me around, bending me over so I have to support myself with my hands on the floor, my body a perfect upside-down V as he enters me. His thrust is powerful and deep, stimulating my clit from the inside as the unique angle allows me to experience him in a brand-new way.
Everything about this is new. He’s not the man I thought he was.
He’s so much better.
As he continues to thrust, his hand moves around me and finds my clit, making the sensation overpowering and complete. I know another orgasm is coming and I give in to it immediately, letting it overwhelm me, letting him overwhelm me.
He grabs me by the hair and pulls me up, turning my neck to the side with one strong hand so he can kiss me again. His other hand roams hungrily over my breasts. And the moment he releases me, I turn and push him down into the chair, straddling him. I lean back and place one hand on each of his knees before raising up to rest my ankles on his shoulders. I rock myself back and forth. He can see every part of me and I can see him. I can see what I’m doing to him. I can see him watching me. And now I can see who he is.
Hands on the small of my back, he encourages my motion. I know that he’s close and I increase my pace, trembling as I do.
“Lander,” I call out again.
“Adoncia,” he whispers, and within moments I feel him come inside me with a volcanic strength. For a moment I don’t move, I just want to feel him pulsing inside me.
And then finally, after I lower my legs and rest my chest against his, after I lay my head down on his powerful shoulders, I say, “Please,” between panting breaths, “my friends call me Doncia.”
I don’t have to see Lander’s face to know that he’s smiling. It’s a new beginning.
And it’s our game now.
acknowledgments
I want to thank Rod Lurie for all his support and feedback and for putting up with
me when I was completely freaking out about deadlines. And I want to thank my friends and family for being so patient and understanding when they didn’t hear from me for weeks on end because I was completely caught up in writing. I don’t know what I would do without any of you!
about the author
Kyra Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of Just One Night, the critically acclaimed Sophie Katz mystery series, and the novel So Much for My Happy Ending. Now a full-time author and television writer, Kyra lives in the Los Angeles area with her son and their lovable leopard gecko, Alisa.
Visit her online—www.KyraDavis.com
Follow her @_KyraDavis—www.Twitter.com/_KyraDavis
Visit her Facebook fan page—www.facebook.com/pages/Fans-of-Kyra-Davis/303460793916
also by kyra davis
Just One Night
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Kyra Davis
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