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To Paul. Because everything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Major thanks go to my awesome agent, Helen Breitwieser, for believing in the Nine Circles and for all her work in getting them where they needed to go.
Also to my amazing editor, Monique Patterson, for loving this book, for her fantastic editorial help in making this book the best it could be, and for her patience as I tried to get cell phone reception in the middle of a farm on the Welsh coast.
To Maisey Yates, best CP in the world, for kicking my butt and telling me I had to write the ’misfit billionaires club idea RIGHT NOW’. Without you this series wouldn’t exist.
To my family—my husband and my girls, for putting up with my crazy writer obsessional tendencies.
To the friends who were up at Pataua the summer I was writing the proposal for this series—sorry for not being there guys, but look what happened?
To my cell phone for being indispensable while talking to agents and editors at various different points in England as this book was in the process of being sold.
And lastly, to Paris. Best city in the world to get the news you’ve waited your whole life for: the sale of your first print book.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedications
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Teaser
E-Novellas Also by Jackie Ashenden
About the Author
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
Gabriel Woolf walked into the quiet of St. Sebastian’s, his mother’s favorite church, and stopped, stamping the snow from his motorcycle boots. He hadn’t been inside the church for over twenty years but he still remembered the smell, of old stone and incense. Candle wax and piety. And guilt. Lots and lots of guilt.
Yet it wasn’t guilt that brought him here. It was a promise of the worst kind. The kind you make to someone on their deathbed. His mother’s deathbed to be exact. And there was no getting out of a promise like that. No fucking way.
So here he was, the day after her funeral, ready to confess his sins like the good Catholic boy he’d never been.
Luckily it wasn’t going to take long. Not because he didn’t have any sins to confess, because he did. Hundreds of sins all swimming around inside him, tainting his blood. Tainting him right down to his bones. No, it was because there was only one sin that mattered to his mother. Only one sin that had ever been important to her.
Gabriel stared around the interior of the church, trying to spot the confessionals. There wasn’t anything special about the place, not even when he’d been a kid coming to Mass with his mother. St. Sebastian’s had been a run-down city church trying to do the best for its dirt-poor parishioners and it looked like nothing had changed. It wore neglect like an old suit, frayed at the cuffs, missing some buttons, hems dirty. Just like the rest of his shitty old neighborhood.
Thank God he was long gone out of it.
Eventually he spotted the confessionals down to the side of the altar, near the sacristy. An elderly woman came out, which clearly meant a priest was there doing his duty.
She gave him a glance as she passed, her expression fearful—no prizes for guessing why. He didn’t exactly look like a typical believer. And even though his tattoos and scars were hidden by his leather jacket and jeans, his clothes wouldn’t hide his identity.
To the world at large he was Gabriel Woolf, construction magnate, but to the people of this neighborhood, he was “Church,” president of the Avenging Angels motorcycle club who owned this little patch of New York. He hadn’t been president for a good many years, but that didn’t matter. People still remembered. People were still afraid. And shit, they had every right to be.
Gabriel ignored the woman. So Church was finally in an actual church. What a fucking joke. The Reverend, his mentor at the motorcycle club and a man fond of biblical aphorisms, though not a believer either, would have laughed himself hoarse.
He made his way down to one of the enclosed confessional boxes and pushed open the door. Man, he remembered waiting outside one of these things for his mom, tracing patterns on the dusty floor with his toes. He’d never managed to work out as a kid why she’d taken so long because she’d been the purest person he knew.
It was only as a teenager he’d understood. Corrine Woolf had always felt dirty.
The space inside the confessional was tiny and as the door shut, a sudden claustrophobic feeling gripped him. Christ, why was he here again? He didn’t believe, not when he’d been a child and not now. His sins were his own, not for God. Not for anyone.
“Promise me, Gabriel,” Corrine had begged him in the hospice, thin and wasted from the cancer that was killing her. “You have to promise.”
They hadn’t gotten on for years, not since he became a club prospect at sixteen and she’d turned to her faith, but she was still his mother, so of course he’d promised. And he was a man who kept his word.
He knelt and tried to remember the right phrase. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been…” How long had it been? Better round down. “Twenty years since my last confession.”
A silence from behind the grille. Then the priest’s voice. “Twenty years? That’s a long time, my son. What brings you back to us?” He sounded young. A boy.
Gabriel shut his eyes. Why the hell was he thinking about the priest’s age? What did it matter? All that mattered was the promise he’d made to his mother. The only promise to her he’d ever been able to keep.
“I’m not back. I wasn’t ever here in the first place. I’m fulfilling a vow. That’s all.”
“A vow?”
“I have a sin to confess, priest. You wanna hear it or not?”
Another silence, this time an offended one. But something in Gabriel’s tone must have alerted the guy to the fact that Gabriel was not to be screwed with because the priest only said, “Tell me then, my son.”
I am not your son. I am the son of a beast.
“I want to kill my father,” Gabriel said.
The priest perhaps had heard this kind of thing before because he didn’t sound the least bit surprised. “And will you act on these thoughts?”
“No. I’ve decided on another plan of action.”
“Forgiveness perhaps?”
Forgiveness. Such a weak, paltry thing. His mother had tried that method and look what had happened. Her death at the age of fifty-one. The doctors had said cancer but he knew the truth. It hadn’t been cancer that killed her. It had been shame. Guilt. And loss.
The loss of a future she should have had. A future his father had taken from her.
A future that you took from her.
Gabriel bared his teeth in a smile that had nothing to do with amusement.
Yeah, he was as bad as the asshole who’d fathered him.
Rotten to the core …
“Not forgiveness,” Gabr
iel said, still smiling. “I’ve decided on vengeance.”
* * *
The others were late. Either that or he was early.
Gabriel shifted in the high-backed wing chair he was sitting in, fingers of one hand firmly wrapped around a glass of rare, sixty-year-old Scotch whisky, the fingers of the other jammed in the pocket of his jeans. Just touching the beads of his mother’s antique rosary.
After his confession, the priest had given him some crap about Hail Marys and Our Fathers and looking to his conscience, but it wasn’t like he’d ever do that shit. His mother had her beliefs and they’d given her comfort but they weren’t for him. So why the hell he was still carrying the thing, he didn’t know.
You know.
Gabriel took a sip of the scotch. One glass alone cost hundreds but he wasn’t aware of the taste.
Yeah, he knew why he was carrying the rosary. It was a reminder.
Like the check for a million bucks in his wallet was a reminder.
Like the handgun he’d kept from his MC days in the drawer beside his bed was a reminder.
Shit, his whole life was a reminder.
He put his head back on the chair, took another sip of the scotch. Tried to calm his mind before the others turned up, staring around the room belligerently.
Christ, he hated this place. The Second Circle, New York’s most exclusive private members’ club, was his friend Alex’s baby and one of nine other “Circles” scattered throughout the world. Alex had named them after the club he’d begun with Gabriel and seven other friends one night after too many shots. The Nine Circles, from Dante’s Inferno, a favorite of Alex’s. Appropriate for a group of damaged people who just happened to have a ton of money. People who’d committed so many sins between them, even the devil wouldn’t know where to put them.
Over the years the nine had become four and since then, Gabriel had preferred Alex’s more informal name for them—the “fucked-up billionaires.” Since that’s what they all were.
He scowled. Alex had given them their usual private room, the one with its echoes of an English gentlemen’s club. It had a high, vaulted ceiling, exposed brick walls, library bookshelves, and high-backed wing chairs. A fire burned in a huge fireplace, warming the room against New York’s icy February chill.
But all the fires, library bookshelves, and expensive scotch weren’t going to change Gabriel’s opinion. He still hated it.
The atmosphere reminded him of everything he despised. The world of the uber-rich, the famous, the entitled. The world of money where anything could be bought, anything sold. Yeah, it could be said that he was part of that world, especially considering that Woolf Construction, the business he owned, was one of the most successful in the States.
But Gabriel didn’t consider himself part of it. Like the rest of them in Alex’s club, he didn’t fit into that particular world, no matter the size of his own personal fortune. A fact he was glad of. Money corrupted and he was living proof.
Losing patience, Gabriel downed the rest of the hideously expensive scotch like it was cheap bourbon and put the glass down on the table beside the chair with a click.
He didn’t have time to wait around here for the rest of them. He had things to do. Things such as planning a bit of personal justice.
He was half out of the chair as the door opened and Alex came striding in, a tall, icy-looking blond woman in a black suit trailing behind him. Gabriel eyed the woman. Lovers weren’t allowed at club gatherings and Alex knew that. Except the woman didn’t look like one of his lovers. Although Alex was partial to blondes, they usually wore a hell of a lot less than the one standing behind him now.
“What’s she doing here?” Gabriel demanded. He didn’t bother with the, “Hi, how are yous,” despite not having seen his closest friend since the last gathering a couple of months ago.
He wasn’t one for small talk. That was for people who had nothing of importance to say.
Alex stopped in the middle of the room, one eyebrow raised.
A gambler who’d made every cent of his money from wins at the table and a bit of astute investment, he looked like the kind of rich playboy who’d had one too many shots and done one too many lines of coke. Exactly what he was, in other words. He wore a tuxedo with the jacket slung over one shoulder, white shirt open at the neck, his black hair ruffled as if some woman had run her fingers through it. But his eyes were blue as a gas flame and sharper than a shard of glass. “She is my new bodyguard, dammit. Show some respect.”
Gabriel didn’t bother looking at her. Whatever point Alex was trying to prove—and he was always trying to prove some point—Gabriel couldn’t be bothered with it now. Not so soon after his mother’s funeral and finally finding out the name of his bastard father. For twenty years his mother had refused to tell him because she hadn’t wanted him to go after the prick, so he’d never pressed her.
But now she was dead and everything had changed.
“She has to wait outside,” Gabriel said, meeting his friend’s gaze. “You know the drill. No lovers. No strangers.”
Alex shrugged and tossed his tuxedo jacket over the back of the sofa in front of the fire. “What’s up, Gabe? You sound a little pissed about something.”
Alex always knew when he had a problem. And he always called Gabriel on it. The bastard.
“Yeah, you could say that.” Gabriel pulled the decanter toward him and tipped some more scotch into his tumbler. “My mother died a few days ago.”
Silence.
“Shit,” Alex murmured. He waited a beat then turned to his bodyguard. “Katya mine, I think the time has come for you to wait outside. Private, fucked-up billionaire business.”
“Of course, sir,” his bodyguard said expressionlessly, a trace of a Russian accent tingeing her words.
As the door closed behind her, Alex went over to a long, low coffee table that had been set before the fireplace. On the table was a tray of whisky tumblers, along with cigars and some canapés. Alex ignored the food and the cigars, picking up a tumbler instead and coming over to where Gabriel sat. He said nothing, lifting the decanter and pouring himself some scotch. Then he took a sip, stared at Gabriel. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because you didn’t need to know.” His mother’s life was private and so was her death. She’d hated fuss so he’d made sure to keep her funeral short, simple, and sweet.
One of Alex’s brows rose. “Is that so? Funny, I thought we were friends. And usually friends tell each other that kind of thing.”
Gabriel wasn’t going to defend his reasoning. He hadn’t before the priest that morning, and he wasn’t going to now. “Yeah, well, I fucking didn’t.”
Alex’s sharp blue gaze flickered. “You’re pissed off with me?”
“Not with you.” It wasn’t Alex’s fault that the name on that million-dollar check in his wallet would be familiar to his friend. Very familiar. But that didn’t make him any less angry about it. A rage that had been eating away at him for all the years since his mother had told him what his father had done. A rage that had no outlet.
Until now.
“So why are you looking at me like I’ve personally offended you?”
“How’s your stepfather these days?”
The other brow rose this time. “My stepfather? What the hell has he got to do with anything? And, more importantly, why do you think I would know?”
A fair point. Alex had no contact with his family, not since he’d left home at sixteen.
For the past nineteen years all his time had been spent flying from one casino to another, chasing the big poker games and the big money.
But the man who’d married his mother had come along after Alex had left.
Still, the anger that burned inside Gabriel’s veins demanded release in some form. “You don’t have any contact with him you’re not telling me about?”
The other man didn’t respond immediately, just took a long sip of his scotch, blue eyes unwavering. “No,” he s
aid after a moment, “and you know it, too. What the hell is this about?”
The door opened again before Gabriel could answer, admitting a small, fine-boned woman in black jeans, a black Led Zep T-shirt, and cherry-red Doc Marten boots, hair the color of new-fallen snow peeking out from underneath her black beanie.
Eva King, ex-hacker, now owner of one of the largest software companies in the world, in her “incognito gear.” Another founding member of Alex’s Nine Circles club.
She pulled her beanie off as the door closed behind her, ponytail uncurling down her back in a silvery waterfall, and eyed Gabriel and Alex. “You two look like you’re having a special moment. Shall I go out and come back in again?”
“Yeah, do,” Alex said. “Gabe was on the verge of telling me something important and you just interrupted.”
“It can wait.” Gabriel didn’t want to talk about it with the others. It only concerned Alex at this point. Besides, he’d waited years for this, another hour or two wouldn’t matter.
“Uh-huh.” Eva threw the beanie onto the sofa near the fire and went around the side of it to stand in front of the blaze. “Jesus, the weather in New York doesn’t get any better, does it? I think I preferred Zac’s island.”
The last meeting of the club had been a couple of months ago, on the private Caribbean island owned by the fourth member of the group, Zac Rutherford. Certainly there had been sun, and sure, that had been great, but Gabriel wasn’t one for lying around on beaches. He preferred doing things. The venue for the next meeting would be his choice and he’d been thinking about getting everyone up to his Colorado lodge for a couple of days skiing or hiking.
Then again, that had been before his mother had died. Before he’d found the check and seen the name on it. The check that had been dated exactly nine months before he was born.
He’d found it in amongst his mother’s things. There had been no note with it, nothing to suggest why she’d been sent such a huge amount of money or why she’d never cashed it. Puzzling, considering she’d spent many years as a teenaged solo parent, struggling just to survive.
But Gabriel knew. Despite the lack of any hard evidence, his gut was certain of the truth.
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