Finch (Kindred #6)

by Scarlett Finn

  This was a decent hotel, but it wasn’t a fancy five-star chain that would boast elite clientele. The furniture was subtly bolted down beneath the carpet. Management wanted people to enjoy their pricey stay, but they didn’t trust their clientele to be of good enough breeding not to try and swipe the nightstand if given half the chance.

  Devon took being put in Caine’s bedroom as a subtle threat. Of all the men out there, he was the most dangerous by far. Thad disgusted her because of what he’d done to the Kindred, but she couldn’t believe he’d take any pleasure in hurting her. Maybe he would if necessity arose, but he wouldn’t do it for the thrill. Caine might.

  Mitchell’s tanned skin was clear, his nails were neatly trimmed, and there wasn’t a hair out of place on his head. She couldn’t see him as the type to get his hands dirty if he had an animal like Caine around to do the grunt work.

  They’d said she would be their guest for a while. She didn’t want to bunk in with Caine while she was here. Except, there was nothing she could do about it.

  Devon elected to sit in the chair next to the door as opposed to on the bed. This was more reminiscent of her initial days on the island than of her time in the cartel’s shackles. But that didn’t make the unknown any easier to accept.

  Sitting, waiting, she counted the hours that passed by monitoring the noise level in the street. It grew when people began to get together to socialize, at restaurants and clubs, then dwindled once the restaurants and bars began to close.

  She thought about trying to bang on the window to draw attention to herself, except after discovering that the windows didn’t open and that her view consisted of a brick wall ten feet away from the glass, she gave up hope of rousing anyone. Devon could kick and scream, but that meant risking a confrontation with Mitchell or Caine.

  When she was nearly asleep in the chair, more voices joined the ones on the other side of the door. Although she couldn’t make out exactly what was being said, there were definitely more people in there than there had been before.

  Devon wanted the rest of Synonymous to arrive because then she would learn what she was dealing with. There was always a chance, as Thad had said, they’d called in some entertainment for the night. Maybe some women to dance or screw with. As much as she didn’t want to listen to those men partying, getting drunk or high, she would rather they got their kicks with willing women they paid than use her to satisfy their depravity.

  The bedroom door unlocked, and she leaped from her chair to dart over to the opposite wall. Cowering behind the edge of the drape, she waited to see who would come to join her. Caine had been drinking beer earlier and may have been drinking all day. He’d be drunk by now for sure.

  But it wasn’t him who entered, it was Mitchell. He came in alone, turned on the light, and scanned the room to land his gaze on her.

  “After Grant Senior died,” he said without any greeting. “The media frenzy was insane. Law enforcement had everyone under a magnifying glass, and I lost my nerve.” He clasped his hands behind his back and came a few paces closer. “I buried myself in business and caring for the boy, Grant Junior, his son, who wanted it all to go away. It took me years to realize that sometimes murder is necessary.”

  Well, this was quite an opening. “Necessary? How can murder ever be necessary?” she asked.

  The point of the story was lost on her, though it could simply be a prelude to his explanation of why he was about to kill her.

  “Because eleven years later, I was confronted by Owen Knight, Xavier’s father. He and Grant Senior had been close, in a professional sense. They leaned on each other for advice, respected each other. What I didn’t know was he’d been snooping around in old CI R&D files.”

  “Why would he be doing that?” she asked.

  “Who knows? Inventors often take inspiration from each other… or maybe he just needed some piece of tech to complement something KC was working on and he thought he might find it in CI inventory. The point is, he started asking questions about a device that was created under the title of Game Time, file number zero-zero-seven-nine-three. The reminder of it scared me, because that’s what Grant Senior died for. I shut Owen down and scared him away.

  “But then I started to think… I started to remember the potential I’d seen in that device that Grant Senior had been too small-minded to see. I thought about all the things I could do with it and devices like it. One thought led to another, as it so often does, and Synonymous was born.”

  “Thirteen years ago?” she asked after doing the math.

  “I didn’t call it that then, of course, but the concept was planted by Owen Knight’s questioning. I wasn’t content with living my days in a boardroom crunching numbers, reading forecasts, worrying about the bottom line. It was all so… boring.”

  Releasing the curtain, she was agape that entertainment was his dominant thought at that time. “Boring?”

  “It didn’t help that I had Arthur Poole in my ear, raving about how proud he was of Brodie and how they were changing the world. The Kindred was around then, in the earliest stages of its newest form.”

  The detached business style might be a good way to convey information, but she couldn’t understand how a privileged man could make a decision to play with people’s lives without being more passionate about it.

  “So you wanted to be like Art and Brodie? You thought it was going to be fun?”

  Finally some emotion came when his lip curled in loathing. “It sickened me that they thought so small. Maybe my days in the boardroom had made me arrogant. But I wasn’t happy with nickel and dime. I wanted to deal in platinum bars and diamonds.”

  The metaphor made sense coming from a man exuding wealth, as Mitchell did. “And it’s taken you thirteen years to get here?”

  “I faced obstacles,” he said, like it was some sort of excuse for dragging his ass. “I tried to get Owen Knight on board, and for a while I think he was tempted. He understood my vision… until his wife, Philippa, the damn woman, stubborn and righteous like her siblings, Melinda, Art, and Bess. The four of them were all the same. Philippa put her foot down, told him no, and demanded that they focused on their great Xavier and shelter him. It was funny because she was the one who foresaw the fracture in the family.”

  “A fracture?”

  “The brothers, Brodie and Grant Junior, cemented that fracture with a falling out when they were teenagers, and the family never recovered.” He ran a hand down the seam of the drapes. “The Kindred was there, and I didn’t want to be subordinate to them. I had grand ideas and wasn’t interested in their miniscule ones.”

  “But Philippa, Zave’s mom, she knew that if you tried to take on your own causes, you wouldn’t be able to do it alone.”

  He nodded. “And by recruiting Owen,” he said, rubbing his thumb over the tips of his first two fingers as if he was checking for dust. “Then I would be recruiting her son and all that Knight Corp was capable of. Yes, in a lot of ways, she had more vision than her husband did, I have to give her credit for that.

  “Owen Knight was brilliant in business. Thorough. Single-minded. Focused. All excellent attributes in the boardroom. But what I needed was a doer, someone who would take risks and get things done. A big thinker. A problem solver.”

  “Zave,” she said. “You wanted to recruit Zave.”

  “When Philippa said it wouldn’t happen, I tried to circumvent her. I spent a year trying everything I knew from flattery to bribery to blackmail. I tried to break the couple up, too, but that didn’t work. I tried to ruin the company after I’d tried everything I could to get them onside, and when that didn’t happen, I spent the rest of the year trying to shut them up, trying to make sure that Owen and his banshee of a wife wouldn’t go to authorities to tell them my plans.”

  Something told her it wasn’t just the law he was worried about. “Wouldn’t go to Art,” she said. “Or Brodie.”

  “It is true the Kindred were stronger in combat than I was.”

 
That was an understatement. If Art or Brodie had heard of his plans back then, they would have shut him down. “Weren’t you lucky when Owen and Philippa died,” she said. As soon as the words came out, suspicion sprang up.

  The pleasure in his eyes and the twist of his lips betrayed his complicity. “I leave nothing to luck, Mrs. Knight.”

  After believing he wasn’t a man who would get his hands dirty, she was shocked and questioned her own ability to judge character. “You killed them,” she whispered.

  “I’d seen how easy it was when Grant Senior and Melinda had gone down twelve years before. The media and the police busied themselves trying to make a show of solving the crime, but they had no clue. Their interest faded, and everyone forgot about the tragic accident. The Knights were easier because they visited the island so regularly, and Philippa loved to sail despite the loss of her sister at sea. I thought there was something poetic about losing the Knights in the same way.”

  This man was capable of anything if it served his own ends. He’d killed two innocent people to silence them and set in motion a chain of events that had brought them to this moment. The man Devon loved had suffered every second since that day, and whether it had been Mitchell’s intention or not, he changed the essence of who Zave was by snatching his parents away in that cruel way.

  “Why are you telling me this story?” she asked.

  “It took another three years for the frenzy to die down enough for me to think about taking action. I wanted to make sure there was never a hint of suspicion. It had to be seen as one of those sad coincidences, like the Kennedy Curse. People speculated with conspiracies but quickly dismissed them when they found no evidence. What Grant Junior didn’t know, was how I was grooming him to be at my side, not in CI, but in Synonymous. See, we had to work hard in CI to split up ventures over as many bases as possible. I taught him the value of spreading out operations and limiting information, of divvying up finances and resources in a way that made them easy to siphon from.”

  “Siphon?” This hotel was not the type of place a dead man could afford unless he had funds at his back. “You stole from CI?”

  “I spent the five years after their deaths gathering what I needed, money and supplies. I had to stash different things in different places, we would need a base, but nothing could link back to me. We couldn’t have paperwork with our names on it because if it did, Synonymous would lose our edge, and we needed to be unknown. If the world thought we were dead, we could do whatever we wanted without ever worrying about suspicion falling on us.

  “See, Brodie McCormack never died. He disappeared. Everyone speculated on who he was, where he was. Now he’s married, CEO of CI, and that damn cowbell can’t be silenced. He can hide in his manor and sign everything over to Zave and never set foot in the CI building again. But all it takes is a bullet from a gun, registered to his name…”

  This had to be the same speech that Mitchell had given Thad, because Thad had made that threat already. “But you’re dead,” she said. “So you can commit any crime, and who would ever look for a dead man?”

  “Now you understand. I brought Grant around to the idea gradually. In the end, he was the only one who knew, and as my next of kin, he was called upon to identify my body.”

  Except he hadn’t, Devon thought, he’d identified a stranger as Frank Mitchell, his mentor, because the real one stood in front of her now. “And you went into hiding,” she said. “What kind of an existence is that?”

  “Look around you,” he said. “It’s luxurious. It’s freeing. I’ve never been so exhilarated in my life. I can do anything I want. Be anyone I want to be. I answer to no one and have no responsibilities. I make my own rules.”

  He spoke like a God and opened his arms to breathe in deep, like he savored every word he uttered.

  Witnessing a man so swept up in his own majesty, she wondered if he had any grip on reality at all. “I can’t believe this,” she whispered.

  But he didn’t hear her astonishment. “I had to go ahead,” he said. “To set up the next stage of our plan.”

  “What was the next stage?”

  “After I was dead, Grant put resources into developing Game Time. Selling it gave us the opportunity to do reconnaissance on possible allies… or possible marks. We identified Albert Sutcliffe. He’d amassed a stockpile of weaponry and land, resources that would be useful to us. And he had little protection, with no organized crime group backing him. It was our plan to take from him what he had. The Kindred got in the way. Your brother got in the way.”

  So Rig hadn’t just allied himself with the Kindred, he’d made an enemy of a group he hadn’t known existed. “And that’s why I was taken,” she said. “Because my brother upset your plan?”

  “One thing I will make sure Synonymous become known for is getting even. Your brother had no place there. He lives in a house now that doesn’t belong to him, and the only reason we let him live is because he has men and that place was only of use to us when it came with Sutcliffe’s arsenal. But the Kindred cleared that out making it useless.”

  Mitchell had already voiced dislike for the Kindred, by ruining Mitchell’s plans, they only intensified that hatred. “No wonder you’re bitter.”

  He didn’t grace her comment with a response. “By that time I had built us a temporary base and had started gathering supplies that I believed we would transfer to the compound we would take from Sutcliffe.”

  “You couldn’t get involved,” she said. “You were dead. Too many people there would’ve recognized you. Brodie knew who you were.”

  “Yes, he did. As did his now wife, Zara Bandini, who Grant believed would be loyal to him and join us in our venture. I tried to get him to be subtle in his persuasion and to do it over time, but he didn’t listen and Brodie got to her first.”

  “But Caine said he saw Grant die in the same compound you lost. So all of your plans went to shit that day, didn’t they? Because you were alone with nowhere to go and no weapons.”

  He smiled again. “Failures make us stronger,” he said. “Thad wasn’t difficult to turn. He’d been marginalized by his cousins for too long and made to feel insignificant. I’m his father. I promised him that we would avenge the death of the woman he loved, not by sneaking in and stealing the occasional woman away from these people or hacking their bank accounts. We will declare war and take all of these guys out without tiptoeing or apologizing.”

  That could lead to the death of the captive women, too, and she worried that a high-handed approach like that would have repercussions beyond one ambush. “How are you going to do that?”

  “We’ve been waiting for my people to come back from a mission that will disrupt the cartel operations and will bring us the Game Time devices that were stolen from us. We needed those devices intact.”

  “What mission?” she asked. “Is this something to do with the meet?”

  “We paid a man in that room to start a fight. Not long after you left, the guns would’ve started firing, and of the twenty men there, only three came out alive. The Kindred were too busy trying to track you to care. They didn’t even notice my people going in to remove the devices that Thad directed us to. But my men are back now, and we have everything we need. So it’s time,” he said, reversing in short, quick strides. “For you to get to know everyone.”

  He opened the door, and Thad came in first. “I don’t want to know everyone,” she said, glaring at Thad. “I don’t think there is one redeemable man amongst you.”

  “You know my son.”

  Her doctor. Mitchell moved behind him and put his hands on his shoulders. The new Synonymous doctor, who’d been the Kindred doctor, who was so angry about Bronwyn’s death, he didn’t seem to have a shred of integrity left.

  Caine came in next, but he didn’t line up neatly beside the doctor in the way Mitchell probably wanted him to. He went over and flopped onto the bed on his back.

  Kicking off his boots, he linked his hands behind his head. “If you
want to send a message to the Kindred, send me,” Caine said, continuing a conversation he’d been having before he came in here or one he’d been having in his own head. “What’s our little sister gonna do when Raven kicks off? No. Nothing. Nothing. She’s not gonna do nothing.” He winked at her. “You can come over here and do something if you want.”

  “What a team,” she said. “The Kindred will take you apart.”

  “He’s not finished,” Thad said.

  But if she was supposed to know the next man who wandered in, she failed, because she didn’t recognize him. Yet, she was surprised by him because with brown hair, blue eyes, and dimples, he didn’t look like the type who would fit in with this trio. He was tall, attractive, and his smile was warm.

  “Benedict Leatt,” he said. Coming over to hold out a hand, she lifted hers and let him shake it. “How is Zara doing?”

  Exasperated, it seemed that everyone and their brother knew who Zara Bandini was. But his gentle handshake and affable demeanor suggested he was referring to a common acquaintance rather than someone he had a vested interest in checking up on or threatening.

  “How are you connected?” she asked.

  His brows went up as he backed away to lean against the end of the bed behind where Thad stood. But it wasn’t Leatt who answered the question, it was Caine. “He’s the guy who killed Grant McCormack Junior,” Caine said. “I was standing right there when it happened.”

  “Killing Grant was a one-time job,” Mitchell said. “He didn’t get my attention until I saw how he got himself involved with Kahlil Samara and Nykiel Sikorski. I called and made him a better offer.”

  “On the morning of the Game Time exchange,” Leatt said. “In hindsight, I’m glad I missed that meeting.”