Page 39 of Devil's Riches

“Why? You said you loved working for them.”

Greg went silent for a moment, eyes focusing dimly on the opposite wall. “I was one of the most important parts of their operation, and I loved the work,” he finally said. “But they didn’t appreciate me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the other members of the Golden Circle treated me very poorly despite their need for me,” he replied, brows furrowing. “See, they didn’t like to think about me slicing up the donors. They only liked to think of the money rolling into their bank accounts. So whenever I was around them, they treated me like some sort of… other. Like I wasn’t really a person to them, even though I was the main reason all that money was pouring in.”

“So you got sick of that,” Nate said.

“Who wouldn’t? They were ungrateful cunts,” Greg said, eyes narrowing. “But they messed up. They pushed me too far with their shitty attitudes, and at the same time, they made a huge mistake. Two separate things that ended up converging.”

“What was the mistake?”

Greg smiled thinly. “That year was a rough one for Avalon. Horrible winter that came very early,” he said, rubbing his chin. “The business side of the Golden Circle had potential clients lined up everywhere, desperate for organs, so they needed the next cycle to start. But because of the awful weather, they found it very difficult to obtain donors. No one could fly to the mainland or anywhere else at the time, and boats were out of the question as well.”

“So the families had to hunt on the island.”

“Yes. They tried to select people who wouldn’t be missed as much as others, like wayward teens or poor scholarship students from Blackthorne. They figured they would be far less likely to get media attention than missing rich kids. But it all blew up in their faces anyway.” His twisted smile widened. “That was really their undoing—thinking they could fish for subjects in their own backyard.”

“Stop saying subjects and donors,” I spat. “You mean victims. Like Emilie Santal.”

Greg waved a hand. “Whatever. Victims, then,” he said. “Anyway, by that stage, I was getting sick and tired of being treated like shit by the others. Like my work wasn’t important. So I decided to show off my talents to the rest of the world and let them appreciate it instead.”

My stomach lurched. “That’s why you gutted those people and strung them up all over Blackthorne? For fucking recognition?”

“Yes. Their eyes and organs still made it to the clients who’d paid for them, of course. But instead of burning the remains like I usually did, I put them out on display.” He cocked his head to one side. “Everyone noticed my talents then, didn’t they?”

His eyes were bright and wild as he spoke, like he’d been possessed by a demon.

“What happened after that?” I asked, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. “How did my father get involved?”

He let out a theatrical sigh. “After I left the bodies on the campus, the rest of the Golden Circle went into damage control mode,” he said. “They were terrified that I’d brought the whole operation down on their heads with what I’d done, and to be honest, when I woke up the next day, I did feel that I may have slightly overreacted with the whole thing. So for a while I was concerned that they might try to get rid of me as punishment.” He paused and tapped the side of his head. “I knew something, though. Something that could help me gain their favor again.”

“You knew about my father’s investigation?”

He smiled. “Yes. But it wasn’t just your father. It was Francis, too,” he said. “I had a feeling about him a few weeks before all of this happened. Like he might know something.”

Nate lifted a palm. “Wait, Dad wasn’t a part of the Golden Circle operation?”

Greg’s upper lip curled in a disdainful sneer. “Of course not. He wasn’t a true Lockwood,” he said. “The people who married into the families were never told the truth about the business. Only those who had the real blood running through their veins were let in on the secret.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, a while before all the shit went down, I started to worry that Francis knew something. He started coming to visit me in the city, acting like he wanted to strike up some sort of friendship with me. At first, I thought he suspected something about me and Annalise, but I realized later that he’d been going through the Lockwood finances, and he’d caught on to the not-so-legal income stream, even though precautions had always been taken to launder the organ profits. That’s the problem with corporate lawyers who deal with financial crimes all the time. They pick up on illicit activity like that.” He snapped his fingers. “When I realized what was going on, I went into his study and broke into his safe to see if he was hiding anything in there. The password was stupidly easy. Your birthday, Nate. Once I was in, I found some notes Francis had written. He’d actually figured out quite a lot, and he was working with Peter Covington to create some sort of exposé on the matter.”

“What did you do then?” I asked.

“Well, with the Golden Circle about to implode, I made a suggestion to them. My mea culpa,” he said. “I told them about Francis and Peter, and I suggested that we set Peter up for the bodies at Blackthorne. I said I’d kill him so he couldn’t squawk about his innocence for years afterwards, and the world would think he was just a crazy guy who snapped one day and committed a terrible mass murder. That way nothing would blow back on the organization.”

“Jesus,” Nate muttered.

“They accepted the idea,” Greg went on. “One of them slipped some money to a couple of dirty cops, and they planted fake evidence in Peter’s office and home for the other cops to find once someone called in an anonymous tip about him. Then we paid off some guards to let us break him out of prison a few weeks later. The rest is history.”

He grinned wickedly and drew a finger across his throat in a slicing gesture. I surged forward, wanting to cut it open for real.

Nate stuck an arm out to hold me at bay. “Remember what I said,” he whispered to me. “We can’t kill him. Not yet.”

“He’s seriously lucky you’re here,” I muttered in response, shrinking back.

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