by Stella Hart
“What are you talking about?” Greg asked, eyes narrowing.
“I’m talking about the fact that you spent half your life hating her and treating her like shit. Why would she risk her life for you after that?”
An incredulous expression passed over Greg’s face. “I’ve never hated Annalise,” he said. “I love her.”
“You’ve got a weird way of showing it,” I said, crossing my arms.
Anger suddenly flared in Greg’s eyes. He pulled on his chains, making them rattle on the concrete. “I told you, I fucking love her,” he growled. “And she feels the exact same way about me.”
“Why were you so horrible to her, then?”
“I wasn’t,” he said, nostrils flaring. “I love her more than anything. Always have and always will.”
Something about the way he said those words made my chest tighten, like a thick rubber band was squeezing around it. “What are you saying, Greg?” I asked in a low voice, tilting my head.
He turned his gaze to me. “I’m saying exactly what you think I’m saying, sweetheart,” he said, thin lips twisting into a smirk. “You remember what I told you when I had you on my table, don’t you?”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Nate asked, eyes darting over to me.
A bitter tang appeared in my mouth. Greg’s words were echoing in my head; the ones he spoke to me when he had me tied up on that table in my old garden shed.
Sexuality is a spectrum, you know. To me, it doesn’t matter who someone is, where they come from, or what they have between their legs. If I want to fuck them, I’m going to fuck them. But I didn’t want that from any of the people I took.
“No…” I shook my head, one hand fluttering around my mouth. Nausea was rising in my throat, and my skin felt like it was crawling with thousands of insects. “You’re lying.”
Greg smirked. “I’m not.”
“Alexis, what’s going on?” Nate asked.
I swallowed hard and looked at him. “Your mom and Greg… I think they were…”
“Were what?”
“Together,” I murmured.
“Together? You mean…” He trailed off as a look of profound horror blossomed on his face. “No. No fucking way.”
Greg spoke up again. “It’s not that we were together. We still are,” he said. “We have been since we were teenagers. Only ever wanted each other.”
Nate snarled and backhanded him across the side of the head. “Shut the fuck up.”
The older man recoiled from the blow, but the smile remained on his face. “Hit me all you want. It won’t change the fact that I’ve been sleeping with your mother for thirty-three years.”
Nate stepped back, chest heaving. “I know you’re lying. Colette told me how you treated Mom when you were younger. You fucking hated her.”
“Colette is half-right,” Greg replied, cocking his head. “I wasn’t nice to Annalise in public. We decided that it had to be like that so no one would realize how we truly felt about each other. You know how society can be when it comes to relationships like ours.”
“I wonder why,” I muttered sarcastically. My stomach was still heaving with disgust.
“Things were different for us when we were alone together,” he went on, ignoring my jibe. “She was the only woman I ever wanted, and I made sure she knew it. We kept it up for years without anyone noticing a thing. After I left for college, I couldn’t come back to the estate to see her very often because we had to keep up the pretense that I didn’t like her, but we still saw each other as much as possible. She sneaked up to the city to visit me once a week. Kept doing it after she got married, too.”
“You’re so full of shit.” Nate stepped back, red face twisted with fury. “She loved my father.”
“She never loved Francis. Never,” Greg replied in an acid tone. “He was just a means to an end.”
“What end?” I asked.
“She needed to keep up appearances,” he said. He gestured to himself. “See, it’s normal in our world if a rich, good-looking man remains a bachelor. But it’s not so normal for a beautiful woman to stay single. So we knew she’d have to get married eventually to stop anyone from getting suspicious about us. She eventually found a nice, handsome guy and convinced him to be with her, and that was Francis. She didn’t love him, though. She saved all that for me.”
I slowly shook my head. “That’s why you didn’t go to their wedding. You couldn’t stand seeing her with another man. Couldn’t stand knowing that she’d have to sleep with him.”
“Why should I have to stand it?” he snarled, jerking on the chains again. “She was mine! Do you have any idea what it was like seeing her with him, pretending to be happy when she should’ve been with me?”
“No, but that’s mostly because I can’t comprehend being in love with my own sister,” I muttered, shaking my head.
He leaned forward and rubbed his forehead, lips twisting into a grimace. “It was even worse when she started trying to get pregnant. I knew she felt like she had to produce an heir for the family, but it still made me sick every time she told me one of those fucking things was growing inside her. I fed her drinks with Mifepristone and Misoprostol in them whenever she came to see me with that kind of news, but I always knew it was only a matter of time before one of them stuck.”
As he spoke, horror washed through me like Arctic ice. He was evil. Pure fucking evil.
“What are Mifepristone and Misoprostol?” Nate asked.
I looked at him with wide eyes. “Abortion drugs,” I said in a hollow voice. “They make you miscarry if you take them.”
Nate turned his attention back to his uncle. “You did that to her?” he asked, voice soft but deadly. “The woman you supposedly love?”
“I did it because I love her!” Greg said. “Can you imagine seeing the woman you love carrying some other asshole’s child?”
“God, you’re fucking disgusting,” I spat at him.
He rolled his eyes upward and leaned back. “Hey, I let her have one of them eventually, didn’t I?” he said. A slow smile spread over his face again. “Of course, there’s a reason for that. One that I’m sure you’ve figured out by now.”
“What are you talking about?” Nate asked in a low voice, hands clenching into fists.
“Come on, Nate. Haven’t you ever wondered why we look so alike?”
Nate stood stock-still, face frozen in an expression of horror and revulsion. “No,” he muttered. “No fucking way.”
“Yes.” Greg’s smile widened. “I’m your real father. Not Francis.”
Sickness washed over me. I clamped a hand over my mouth and retched, legs almost buckling under me.
Greg laughed uproariously. “Christ, you two actually believe me, don’t you?” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t worry, I’m just kidding. I’m not your father, Nate. Like I said before, it was only a matter of time before one of Francis’s babies stuck inside Annalise.”
“That’s your idea of a joke?” I choked out, throat burning from the bile that had risen into it.
He snorted. “Yes. I never wanted children. I had a vasectomy when I was twenty.”
Nate’s eyes narrowed. “So everything you just said is bullshit?”
“Only the part about me being your father. The rest is true.”
I moved closer and smacked my hand across his face with a resounding crack. “You need to stop fucking around and start answering our questions,” I hissed. “One more sick joke like that and I’ll cut your precious Annalise’s fingers off when she gets here.”
The amusement vanished from his face. “I don’t even remember what your questions were,” he said icily.
“We want to know about the murders, and we want to know about the Golden Circle. Now.”
“Fine.” He let out a huff and rubbed his jaw. “The reason I killed all those people—the main reason, anyway—and the purpose of the Golden Circle are actually two sides of the same coin.”
“
What do you mean?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Well, luckily for you, we have all fucking day,” Nate said, crossing his arms over his chest.
Greg sighed and rubbed his face again. “I’m sure you both know enough about history to know that there have been a lot of disruptions to world economies over the years because of wars, political unrest, and natural disasters?” he said.
I wrinkled my forehead, wondering why the hell he was suddenly talking about the economy. “Yes.”
“Well, back in the 1950s—long before I was ever born—my family got together with some other families that lived here on Avalon. They formed a syndicate and called themselves the Golden Circle. Their goal was to find a way to maintain their vast fortunes despite all the economic ups and downs the world was going through in the post-war period. See, it wasn’t all booming back then, like some people will have you believe. A lot of wealthy families lost their fortunes in those years. Even dynasties that had money and property stretching back to the Gilded Age were ruined.” Greg paused and scratched the back of his head, brows knitted. “It wasn’t entirely their fault,” he went on. “The stock market has always been unstable, and crashes happen. The property market is just as bad. In fact, most industries are unstable in some way. It’s rare to find something that will always turn a profit and remain completely stable no matter what’s going on in the world.”
“Can you get to the fucking point?” Nate said, narrowing his eyes.
Greg lifted a hand. “I’m getting there. This is all relevant,” he replied. “Anyway, the families dabbled in a few things here and there, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that they found their true calling. It was in an industry that had been around for quite some time but hadn’t gone very far due to lack of medical advances, failed experiments, low survival rates, and so on. By the time the 60s rolled around, things were starting to take off, and the syndicate saw a gap in the market.”
“What market?” I asked, curiosity piqued.
“Organ transplants,” he said. “By the 60s, surgeons were capable of transplanting kidneys, livers, hearts, intestines, and lungs. Nowadays, they can do even more. They can even use certain parts of people’s eyes to restore vision in patients who need it. But there’s always been a major problem—lack of donor availability. So the waiting lists for people who need organs are far too long.”
The look on his face was so grim, so dark, that I felt my flesh crawl.
“You’re saying the Golden Circle were organ traffickers,” I said in a low voice.
He smiled thinly. “I suppose you could call it that,” he said. “Anyway, as I was trying to say before, the waiting lists for organs are far too long. But the well-heeled people of this world have something that others don’t. Something very obvious.”
“Money to pay for organs on the black market,” Nate said, shaking his head with disgust. “So they don’t have to wait.”
“Exactly. Like I said, the Golden Circle saw that gap in the market, and they swooped in and stuck their claws right into it. By the early 70s, things were running very smoothly for them.”
My guts twisted with revulsion. “What’s your idea of things running smoothly?” I said, folding my arms.
“They worked in three-month cycles. In each period, every family would find a donor to use. That way they were all equally culpable, so if one family ever felt guilty and decided to squeal to the authorities, they would go down right along with the rest of them.”
“What do you mean when you say they’d find a donor to use?” I asked, even though I already knew what he meant. I just wanted to hear him say it out loud.
“They’d find someone young and healthy who wouldn’t be missed,” he replied in a breezy tone, as if he were talking about the weather instead of abduction and murder. “Usually they’d find someone overseas in a poor country, and they’d bring them over here with a promise of steady work and free education. Sometimes they’d take homeless people from the mainland, too. Those ones were a little riskier because there was a chance they could be addicted to drugs or suffering from diseases that would make their organs weak or non-viable, but they were also a lot easier to grab. No one notices when someone like that disappears. No one who matters, anyway.”
“What happened then?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“They were kept in cells in the Blackthorne tunnels. No one could hear them screaming down there,” Greg said, tapping one finger on the concrete in a slow, steady rhythm. “Sometimes they’d be there for weeks while the Golden Circle lined up all the recipients, tested for matches, and finalized the payments. Then their time would come, and they’d be harvested.”
“Harvested?” I took a step back, hands trembling with rage. “These are human beings we’re talking about. Not fucking plants.”
Greg turned his gaze to me. The indifference in his deep blue eyes froze my blood. “Some people matter less than others, Alexis,” he said softly. “You might not like it, but it’s true. The world has always been that way.”
I eyed the chain that extended from the shackle around his ankle, wondering how easy it would be to wrap it around his throat and choke him to death. It would probably be too good of a death for him, considering what he deserved, but I wanted to do it anyway.
Nate saw the direction of my gaze and took a step closer to me, one hand moving to the small of my back. “Try to stay calm,” he muttered to me. “I want him dead too, but there’s still a lot we need to know from him.”
I nodded and took a deep breath, trying to ignore the way my fingers were itching to wrap around Greg’s neck.
“Keep talking,” Nate said, looking back over at him. “Tell us how it all worked.”
“Well, like I was saying before, some of the members were involved with the business side of things— finding people who needed organs, ensuring their silence after the operations, investing the money they received from them, and so on. The rates changed over time due to inflation, but when I was in the game, a body was worth $2.5 million altogether. Some parts were more valuable than others. For example, corneas were only worth fifty grand. But a pair of lungs… that would fetch over three hundred grand.”
“How much did the families make all up?”
Greg started tapping his finger on the floor again. “Hm. Let me think. There were probably around 2300 donors in the forty-three years that the operation ran for. That works out to almost six billion dollars altogether. That was split between the families, of course, but when you take into account the investments they were able to make with their share of the money…” He trailed off and slowly shook his head. “I’m not sure how much each family made in the end, because they all invested their profits differently. But our family’s fortune ended up increasing to the tune of fifteen billion dollars by 2009, from what I recall.”
Bile rose in my throat again. So much money from so much suffering.
“How did they keep things running for so long?” Nate asked. “Surely they had to bring in new blood once the older family members couldn’t participate anymore?”
“Yes, but it was surprisingly easy. The children of the families were let in on the secret at the age of fifteen or sixteen, depending on their individual maturity levels, and then they were trained in different areas in order for them to join the business later. Some of them were squeamish about it at first, but in the end, they all understood that sacrifices have to be made sometimes in order to keep the lights on.”
“It was about more than keeping the lights on,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “It was about making billions in profits off the torture and murder of innocent people.”
Greg arched a brow. “Tell me, sweetheart. If you were told you could be rich beyond your wildest dreams, and all you had to do was help out with the black market family business—or at least keep quiet about it—you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”
“No. Not for all the money in the world.”
He smiled beatifically. “People
love to think they’re above it all,” he said. “But it’s different when it actually happens to you. Trust me.”
I wanted to believe he was wrong, but I honestly couldn’t be sure. I’d met enough uber-wealthy people in my time to know that their worldviews were usually vastly different to those of regular people. They had enough money to do anything they wanted and buy their way out of any consequences, and that often turned them into sociopathic money hoarders who were completely detached from reality and the impact of their actions. The wealth seemed to strip them of their empathy and desensitize them to the suffering of others to the point where they simply saw people as numbers and investments. Not humans.
I liked to think that I wouldn’t turn out like that under any circumstances, but if I were actually raised in that sort of world with billions at my disposal and multiple family members molding me to be like them, I could’ve easily grown into an evil, coldhearted bitch who didn’t give a shit about murdering people for profit.
“How did you end up becoming the Golden Circle’s surgeon?” Nate asked, dragging my attention back into the room.
Greg’s forehead creased. “Well, there always had to be someone to do the dirty work of harvesting the organs, and the members didn’t want to outsource that work to any outsiders because it increased the chances of everyone getting caught. So, in every generation, several young people from the families were pushed into medicine. The most promising would become the next surgeon when the old one decided to retire.”
“So you were your generation’s surgeon.”
“Yes. I started in 1999 and worked for ten years. I was the best they ever had. I loved the work, too.”
“Because you’re a psychopath who loves torturing and killing people, and the job basically gave you free rein to do that?” I snapped.
A smirk tugged at his lips. “I don’t know why you’re acting so holier-than-thou about it. You clearly have your own vicious tendencies, judging by the scar on my nephew’s stomach,” he replied. “Besides, those people were nothing. Just worthless losers. Like your father.”
I stepped forward and spat in his face. “Fuck you.”
