Page 128 of Cruel Riches

“No. Just listen, Nate. They were coming after me. They were going to kill me!” the man said, eyes bulging. “Annalise took me in and kept me hidden here. It’s been ten years now and she’s still keeping me safe. I’m only chained up so I don’t get any ideas about trying to leave. It’s too dangerous, but I don’t think I could escape the temptation.”

Fragments of old conversations floated back to the forefront of my brain, each one jolting clarity into me.

“Holy fuck,” I muttered, taking a step back. “Alexis was right.”

“Who the hell is Alexis?”

I swallowed thickly. “You know her as Alexandra. Your daughter. She changed her name to escape the public shame after you were charged with all those murders.” I paused and tilted my head to the side. “That is who you are, right? Peter Covington?”

The man went silent, and his whole body seemed to deflate. He placed his hands over his face, and for several uncomfortable minutes, I thought he’d given up speaking again. Then he finally dropped his hands and looked up at me.

“You’ve been in contact with my daughter?” he asked.

“So I’m right,” I replied, ignoring his question. “You’re Peter.”

He nodded stiffly. “Yes.”

My scalp prickled as shock coursed through my veins like electricity. “How the hell is this possible?” I said in a hollow voice, shaking my head. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“I know. Your mother planned it that way, because they weren’t going to stop coming for me unless they thought I was gone.”

I shook my head slowly. None of this made sense.

“The police found some of your teeth in a national park a week after you went missing, along with a ton of your blood,” I said. “No one could ever survive losing that much blood. So how the fuck did you do it?”

Peter opened his mouth and pointed into it. “Your mother yanked two of my molars out with plyers and dumped them up in that park so she could make it look like my body was there at some point.”

It was too dark in his mouth for me to see the missing teeth, but I nodded anyway, wanting to hurry his explanation along. “And the blood?”

He grimaced and rubbed his right arm. “When she paid off the guards and broke me out of that prison, she started taking blood from me right away. She did that for a whole week, taking more and more every day. I almost died by the end of it. It was too much to handle. Had to be done, though, to make it look like I really died up there.”

“So she saved up several pints and then dumped it in the national park to make it look like it all came out of you at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.” I rubbed my temples, unable to believe what I was hearing.

“I know it sounds crazy.”

“No shit. Why was my mother involved in any of this?”

Peter looked down at the floor. “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” he said. “It would take hours.”

“Just give me the shortest possible version,” I said through gritted teeth. If I didn’t find out what the fuck was going on soon, I was going to lose my shit.

His brows furrowed. “You know what I used to do, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes. You were a journalist, and you taught classes at Blackthorne.”

“That’s right.” He nodded slowly. “I started working on an investigative piece ten years ago. I was looking into something that was happening here on Avalon. Something that the police didn’t seem to care about, even though I brought it to their attention multiple times.”

“What was it?”

He let out a short sigh. “It’s a long story, so I can’t tell you every detail, but the short version is that there was an underground criminal organization operating here on the island. They were doing some very sick and twisted things, and I wanted to expose them to the world.”

“How did you find out about them?”

He waved a hand. “It’ll take too long to explain that part,” he said. “Just let me tell it my way.”

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