Page 19 of When Kings Fall

“And simply walked away with not one of them making you?” He scoffed. “Impossible.”

“You don’t know what I’m capable of anymore.”

“I’m well aware. That’s why I’m not simply putting you in the back of my Lexus and driving you back home to put you under close watch.”

I frowned. “Wait, that’s not what you’re here to do?”

He leaned forward. “I’m here to make you a deal.”

I cocked a highly skeptical eyebrow. “A deal?”

“Relocate to Boreas and continue your search for Lynch through his associate, using him as a buffer, but create one of your favored smokescreens and take it further, making it appear as though Royce Humphrey is coming for him, rather than you. I’ll feed reports that you’ve been hospitalized following a failed battle with several of his mercenaries, so that you can’t possibly be responsible for tracking Lynch, nor even seen as a threat to him and his organization. I’ll have my people draw Kyle Trass into the situation too, to be seen as working alongside Royce Humphrey. Their reasoning? That Osiris has become too powerful and Humphrey is concerned Malcolm Lynch will run right over him and try to command him again. Of course, Trass will always follow Humphrey like a lost puppy, so his motivations are clear.”

“You’d do all of that for me?”

He held up a finger. “I said a deal, not a handout. Besides, we both know you never liked being handed anything, always insisting on working for it yourself. You even bought that mansion in Stonewell from your own funds that you’d acquired from hiring out your ingenious technological skills over the last few years. Commendable, of course. Although, given your obsessions, also oftentimes dangerous.”

“Dad, I get it. What’s my side of the bargain? Aside from running to a safehouse like a fucking pussy, anyway.”

“You mean a responsible young adult who understands what it would do to his father if something awful befell his son?”

I slumped back in my chair. “All right, I’m sorry. Go on.”

“In exchange for me allowing this, assisting quietly, and not interfering in your relationship with Brianna Walker, in addition to going to the safehouse until the heat on you dies down, when you locate Malcolm Lynch, you will not launch a strike.”

“What? No. No fucking way. No deal.” I went to rise to my feet.

“Sit. Down,” he ground out in that no-nonsense tone. The one that had his employees and business partners alike pissing themselves.

“There is no way in hell—”

“I didn’t say you can’t be there when a strike is underway. I merely said you can’t launch it. You can’t head it, you can’t devise it. Myself and Curt Walker will see to that.”

I sat back down, taken with his words. “You’ll do what?”

He gestured around the diner. “Why do you think I need this gift to approach him with? It’s not just this, there is an entire lucrative chain of these roadside diners. All his now. This is sore subject matter for him, as it is for me. I need something positive to open with. Suffice to say, once I am able to smooth things over—especially the part where your slipup with going in hot at Kyle Trass caused you to put yourself, your friends, and his daughter in the crosshairs of Royce Humphrey—he’ll recognize what I have. That this is our chance to finish what we started before Lynch disappeared off the map and was actually believed to have perished.”

“If I agree to this, swear to me that you won’t go in without me.”

“Son, I know how much you need this… closure. There’s so much rage and pain that the trauma of those weeks in their captivity caused you. But the truth is that it’s rooted in shame. Shame that you couldn’t escape on your own, that you couldn’t spare Brianna. No matter how many times I tell you, or your many therapists told you, that it wasn’t your fault, that you didn’t possess the power to play the hero, that you were just a child, you won’t accept it. So, I believe the way to solve that is to overpower the man himself—to put him down.”

I stared at him in absolute incredulity. “You’re really going to allow this to happen? Allow me to do this?”

He sighed and slumped back in his chair also. “I’ve tried everything else to help you to move past this. Nothing has worked. You’ve been pursuing this non-stop since you discovered that Lynch and his two cohorts didn’t die that night as we’d all believed. Your instincts are drawing you in this direction. So this is what we’ll try.” He smiled sadly. “Perhaps it will finally give you and your girlfriend some peace.”

“She’s not just mine. Mason and Colt are involved with her too now.”

“Interesting. I doubt very much that Curt will be pleased about that, so let’s keep that aspect quiet until we’re well underway with this mission.”

“I’m all for not further complicating matters.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Since when? You usually barrel through everything.”

“Since it’s not just me who stands to take the brunt of things now.”

“You don’t just mean the boys, you mean her.”

I nodded. “Whatever it takes to protect her.” I could feel him staring at me intently. “Although, that would be made easier if she was actually communicating with me right about now.”

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