Page 40 of Devil's Riches

He turned his attention to his uncle again. “What happened to my father?” he asked.

Greg tilted his head slightly to one side. “Don’t worry, I’m getting there,” he replied. “After we blamed the Blackthorne murders on Peter and got rid of him, we obviously still had to deal with Francis. He knew too much. He hadn’t said anything to anyone at that stage, because he knew we were onto him, but it was only a matter of time before he tried to turn us in and run away. So someone from the syndicate gave him a warning: Talk or leave the island, and your son will be the next one hanging from a tree with his eyes and guts missing.”

“You would’ve done it, too,” Nate said. “You would’ve killed me.”

“Of course. I didn’t care about you,” Greg replied with a shrug. “Anyway, that shut him up long enough for the rest of the Golden Circle to decide what to do with him. I don’t know why they took so long to decide, though. Death was the clear answer.”

“Sick fucks,” I said under my breath.

Greg fixed me with a cold stare. “You know, you’re actually right. Those bastards were sick fucks. Wanna know why?”

“Why?”

“Because after everything I’d done for them, they were still using me to do their dirty work. They got me to kill Peter, and they were going to get me to kill Francis as well. But then I found out they were going to have me killed too. Apparently I’d become too much of a liability to them.”

I sneered at him. “I can see how they’d think that after what you did.”

Nate cut in again. “How did you find out they were planning to betray you?”

“Annalise told me. She was at the board meeting about the issue, as the Lockwood representative,” Greg replied. “Everyone else thought we had a terrible relationship because of the way we’d hidden our affair, so they had no problem talking about killing me in front of her. She went along with it, agreed that I had to die, and offered to do it herself. She said she’d set up a terrible car accident that would kill both Francis and me at the same time. That way they’d kill two birds with one stone.”

Nate and I exchanged glances. He was right last night. His mother was neck-deep in the Golden Circle, and she was also the reason his father was dead.

It was probably her fault that Emilie was murdered, too. It was her decision to stop the car at that rest stop ten years ago, and while she’d always told Nate it was because he was a problem child who wouldn’t stop kicking her seat, I was willing to bet that the whole thing was actually planned out in advance. She probably had someone waiting at that rest stop, ready to snatch Emilie as soon as she got out of the car, and she’d distracted Nate by chasing after him and making him run into the woods before later telling him that he’d chosen to run off like that.

My chest ached at the thought. Despite all the shocking evilness the Golden Circle had pulled off over the decades, this particular incident seemed like the worst one to me. Annalise had convinced her own ten-year-old son that it was his fault his beloved babysitter was horribly murdered.

No wonder he was so fucked up.

“So the others in the Golden Circle went for it?” I asked, turning my attention back to Greg.

Greg smiled. “Yes. They had no reason to believe that she’d be particularly bothered by my demise after the way I’d supposedly treated her over the years. They told her she had a week to make it happen.”

“How’d you pull it off?”

“I went to the estate and knocked Francis out with a rock. Then I put him in his car and drove it all the way up to Pickersgill. Annalise followed me in her own car. We moved Francis to the driver’s seat and pushed the car off the cliff together. We made sure it landed on the rocks, right next to the water where all the sharks hang out. That way everyone would believe I was in the car because Annalise said so, and they’d assume my body was taken in a feeding frenzy once the sharks smelled the blood in the water.”

“You put your blood in the car too, right?” I asked, tilting my chin. “To convince the cops.”

He nodded and lifted his left arm to show us an old white scar just below his wrist. “Annalise collected some of my blood to put on the passenger seat. She put some on a few scraps of an old shirt as well, and when the police found it later, she told them it was the shirt I was wearing that day.”

“What happened after the car went off the cliff?”

“We went back to the estate with me hidden in the trunk. Annalise told the house staff that she was worried about Francis. She said she thought he’d been drinking before he went out with me. Then she called in an anonymous tip with the police up at Pickersgill. She told them she was a local who’d driven past a certain cliffside area a few miles out of town and spotted suspicious skid marks on the road. They found the car a few hours later.”

“And then you went to hide in the bunker.”

Greg nodded. “I’ve been here ever since.” He lifted his uninjured leg to rattle the chains again. “Like I told you when you first found me, the restraints are really for my own safety. Annalise knew I’d be tempted to leave the bunker without them, and she didn’t want that to happen because we’d both be killed if anyone from the Golden Circle saw me and realized what we’d done. She was also aware of the fact that I enjoyed killing all those people, and she knew I’d be tempted to hunt for more if I ever got out, which would obviously arouse suspicion as well.”

“She wasn’t wrong about that last part, was she?” I said with a scowl.

He flashed me a wicked grin. “No.”

Nate lifted his palms. “Let me see if I’ve got this story straight. You and Mom—along with a bunch of other Lockwoods—were part of a multigenerational organ trafficking scheme with some other rich Avalon families. Then you pissed them all off by losing your shit and going rogue, and Mom double-crossed them to save you. Now everyone thinks you’re dead.”

“That’s right.”

“So you aren’t in contact with the Golden Circle anymore.”

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