Page 78 of Devil's Riches

She nodded. “Greg didn’t tell you the whole story about the Golden Circle last week. He barely told you anything.”

I crouched down and pulled a granola bar out of my pocket. “Keep talking, and you can have this.”

She nodded and kept going. “The thirteenth family were the original founders of the Golden Circle. They didn’t want any of the other families to know who they were.”

“Why?” I broke off a piece of the bar and handed it to her.

She chewed it and swallowed it before speaking up again. “They knew from the start that they wanted the organization to be involved in…” She trailed off and waved her hand. “Not-so-legal money-making ventures. Because of that, they wanted to hide their identities from everyone—even the rest of the organization once it was formed. That way we could never turn them in if things went bust.”

“Why would the other twelve families agree to that?”

“Because they figured it was worth it in the end. The founding family assumed most of the risk.”

“How so?”

“They put in the initial startup money. They also organized everything.”

I frowned. “What do you mean by everything?” I asked.

“The buyers for the organs, and everything related to that,” she said. “The whole financial side of the operation, really.”

“So they were in charge of the scheme.”

She nodded. “Yes. The rest of us only had one real job—to find a donor in each three-month cycle,” she said. “Because the founding family did the rest of the work, they didn’t do that part.”

“But there were still thirteen victims each time, weren’t there?”

“Yes. In each cycle, one family from the other twelve would find an extra donor to make it thirteen each time. Then they’d all be harvested and sold, and the money from their organs would be split thirteen ways.”

As Annalise’s words sank in, a snort of amusement bubbled up my throat and burst free.

“What the fuck is so funny about that?” Greg said, cutting his eyes at me. “What happened to all that righteous indignation from last week?”

“I’m not laughing about the victims. I’m laughing about how fucking stupid you are,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t you see? You got played.”

“How?”

“I think there were only ever twelve families in the Golden Circle. One of them just pretended to be the secret thirteenth one that started everything.”

Nate finally caught on to my train of thought. “They double-dipped in the pot,” he said, nodding slowly. “In every cycle, you and the other families each got one-thirteenth of the money. But those guys took two thirteenths for themselves.”

Greg stared at us coldly. “I can see how you’d think that, but you’re wrong. There are definitely thirteen families in the organization.”

“How can you possibly know that?” I asked, arching a brow. “You have no idea who they are.”

“True. But I’ve met their leader before, and I know he wasn’t from any of the other families,” he replied, sitting up straighter. He nodded toward the granola bar. “Give me some of that.”

I threw him a tiny piece. “How did you meet him if you weren’t allowed to know anything about his identity?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

“He always attended the board meetings. Mask and full security with him so the rest of us couldn’t overpower him and figure out who he was,” he replied. He popped the granola in his mouth and chewed for a second. “His voice didn’t sound like anyone we knew from the twelve families, so it was definitely someone else. Sounded old. Went by the initials J.R.”

I frowned and mulled over those initials. Nothing sprang to mind immediately. Nate and I would need to go back to our list of Avalon’s richest families and circle all the last names that started with the letter R. Somewhere in that narrowed-down list, we’d find our thirteenth family.

“How did you communicate with this J.R. guy outside of the meetings?” Nate asked.

“I don’t know how things were back in the early days,” Annalise said. “But when we took over from our father and got onto the board as the Lockwood representatives, J.R. used a phone. No one could trace it, though.”

“Do you still have the number?”

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