6
Elias
“Pull!”
A black clay target shot out of the elevated trap thrower several yards to my left. My father narrowed his eyes and aimed his shotgun before pulling the trigger. The target exploded in midair, a thousand dark shards raining to the earth.
“Still got it,” he said smugly, looking over at me. “Your turn.”
We were out at Barnaby Grove, an exclusive sporting association for wealthy gun-lovers like my father. Everyone knew the rich had clubs for things like golfing and yachting, but not many people were aware of the existence of places like this. Barnaby was set on 2000 acres with facilities for plain old target shooting, sporting clays, and a trap field. There was also a fortified gun vault in the main building which held over 500 guns, many of which were worth over six figures.
The club boasted several billionaires and business titans as members, and it only accepted fifty members at a time. Of course, my father and I were shoo-ins. The King name would open any door in this country.
We had shooting ranges set up at several of our own private properties, naturally, but my father enjoyed the exclusive Barnaby membership anyway. It was yet another way he could slyly brag to business associates and lord it over them, given that ninety-nine percent of them would never be offered a membership here no matter how hard they tried.
I lifted my shotgun and waited for the target to fly out. Pressing my finger down on the trigger a second later, I swore softly as the bullet veered off to the side, missing the clay plate entirely.
“You’re rusty,” Dad said.
I shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“Hold it a little lower. Also, be sure to keep the fifth of October free,” he said, changing the subject at random as he so often did. “The second-level initiation ceremony is that night. All Crown and Dagger members who can make it are expected to be there.”
I scoffed. “You really think I’d miss it?”
He grinned broadly. “Oh, of course. You wouldn’t dream of it, considering what we have planned for you. How could I forget?”
“Maybe your memory is failing in your old age.”
“At least I can still hit a target,” he said with a superior, thin-lipped smile. “You’re twenty-three. What’s your excuse?”
“Like you said, I’m rusty. But speaking of my age, I’ll be twenty-four in less than six months. Am I going to make it to third?”
Instead of happening once a year like the first and second-level initiation ceremonies, the third-level ceremonies were conducted individually once a member reached a certain point of trust in the organization. I knew very little about the third level, other than that the minimum age for acceptance was twenty-four. Before that, members wouldn’t even be considered.
My father gave me an incredulous look. “Just because I’m the society president doesn’t mean I can tell you anything about that. No favoritism allowed.”
“I’m sure you could give me a hint,” I said, my upper lip curling slightly. “I happen to know very well that favoritism does exist within the council ranks, because Henry Davenport is still alive.”
“That’s none of your concern.” He narrowed his eyes coldly. “You might not even progress to the third level, Elias. Just being my son brings no guarantee, and sometimes I doubt you have what it takes.”
I stiffened. “Why?”
He was silent for a moment, staring out at the gray sky as a dark flock of birds flew past. “You often remind me of your mother.”
“How so?” I asked, my frown deepening.
I never met my mother. Sylvie King died giving birth to me, so I never knew her or grieved over her. She bled to death, my father told me. Sometimes it happened, even in the best hospitals in the world, and there was nothing any doctor could do to stop the hemorrhaging, no matter how qualified he or she was.
Some nights as a child, I would dream of my own birth: little me, red-faced and howling, entering the world in a sea of blood. My mother, fading away to a pale, motionless husk, giving her life so that I might live and grow and thrive. Or maybe it was more that I took her life rather than had it given to me.
By the time I was old enough to realize what it meant to be raised without a mother, I wasn’t grief-stricken, because I had no memories of the woman. I was curious, however, especially as my father very rarely spoke of her. When I was about ten or eleven, I used to spend hours hunting through our main house, looking for any small pieces of information I could get on her—old photos, clothes, bits of paper with her handwriting on it. Just to see what she was like beyond the posed, somber photos that hung around the place.
One summer, I came across the motherlode, no pun intended. There was a small room on the fourth floor of the house which I’d never gone in before (it was shockingly easy to live in a mansion that size and never enter half the rooms) and I discovered what was essentially a shrine dedicated to her in my father’s no-nonsense, all-business manner. The room was filled with filing cabinets and carefully-organized boxes with her old things, any paperwork she’d ever required or filled out, college, employment and financial records from before she met my father, medical records, and even her birth certificate.
Even though I’d never met her, I felt like I almost did when I came out of that room after an entire day spent in its depths. I knew her history, I knew the sort of grades she got in college, and I knew how well she performed at the fashion house she worked at before her wedding. I even knew her damn blood type and contact lens prescription details.
“She was stubborn. Brash. Argumentative. Overly-curious,” Dad said before shooting another clay target out of the sky. Then he wiped his brow and continued. “She asked a lot of questions about a lot of things, and she never quite knew when to give up a fight. Same as you. The council might not be able to put their full trust in a person with that personality.”