Page 99 of Devil's Riches

I let out a heavy sigh of irritation. I knew Edward was lying, but I couldn’t force him to tell me the truth.

He got up and checked my IV bag. “Hm. I’ll need to replace this soon,” he muttered to himself.

I stared at him, and my pulse began to race again as something occurred to me. “You didn’t answer my question earlier,” I said.

“Which one?”

“I asked you why I’m here if you had no idea about my investigation. It doesn’t make sense.”

He returned to his chair and scooted it a little closer to my bed. “That’s actually why I came to see you,” he said. “I wanted to tell you, but you distracted me with all of this Golden Circle chatter.”

“So why am I here?”

His shoulders drooped slightly, and he looked at the wall above my head. “Your grandmother doesn’t have a cold, Alexis. She’s dying.”

My brows shot up. “What?”

“She has hepatic cirrhosis. I never saw it coming. She’s never been a heavy drinker, and she doesn’t have any conditions that could predispose her to it. She didn’t show any of the early symptoms, either.” He hesitated and looked back at me. “She seemed fine until three weeks ago. But then she got sick all of a sudden, and she declined very rapidly. She’s probably got six months left, at best.”

Horror seized me. “She needs a transplant, doesn’t she?”

“Yes. That’s why you’re here. You’re a perfect match.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I asked, heart hammering hard enough to make my chest ache.

Edward smiled thinly. “It was like a miracle, really. I saw you at the Mayfair last week, and it occurred to me that people of your age and status usually have to undergo a certain process in order to join. I’m friendly with the Ellesmere family, who own the Mayfair, so I called them to see if they still happened to have a sample of your blood. Fortunately, they hadn’t destroyed it yet, and I was able to get it from them. I tested it and crossmatched it with Deborah’s blood, and… well, you already know the rest. You’re a match.”

I tugged at the cuffs again. “You can’t take my liver!”

“Yes, I can,” he said. “You’re in a private, secure wing of the hospital—the same wing I let the Golden Circle surgeons use back in the day for all of the transplants. You’ll be prepped and taken into surgery later on today, and no one will ever know you were here, apart from me, Dr. Redstone, and a few surgical nurses who are paid enough to keep quiet.”

Panic flooded me. “Did you saytoday?”

He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost one o’clock in the morning, Alexis. We can hardly expect Dr. Redstone and her assistants to perform a delicate surgery at such an ungodly hour. They’ll begin at ten o’clock. Then your liver will be placed in cold storage, and we’ll bring Deborah in for the transplant in the afternoon.”

“Edward, please,” I said, limbs trembling and eyes bulging. “I’m your granddaughter. You can’t do this to me.”

“I thought we established this at our first meeting,” he said calmly, looking me right in the eye. “We aren’t family. Not really.”

Tears splashed down my cheeks. “You’re sick,” I muttered. “So fucking sick.”

“Calm down, Alexis. You’re actually very fortunate. You get a nice, quiet hospital room to lie in, and in nine hours you’ll be put under anesthetic. After that, you’ll drift away. There’ll be no pain. No suffering.”

“You call that fortunate?”

“Yes, compared to the others we took organs from in the past. They didn’t get a private room in a hospital. That was reserved for the organ recipients,” he said. “The donors were kept underground, and sometimes, depending on the surgeon, they were carved up while they were still awake. Gregory Lockwood particularly enjoyed doing that. He was a very strange, sadistic man. Wonderful transplant surgeon, though. Very steady hands.”

I bit my lip to stop myself from telling him that I already knew that part, because unbeknownst to him, Greg was still alive.

“You won’t get away with this,” I said. “People will notice that I’m missing.”

“Of course they will. But they won’t know my house was the last place you were seen,” he replied. “I’ve taken care of that.”

“How?”

“I have a driver who’s willing to testify that he dropped you off at Blackthorne after you left the dinner party.” He lay a hand over his heart. “Tragically, you never made it back to your dorm. But that’s not his fault, nor is it mine. The police will think someone snatched you while you were walking across the parking lot. There’s precedent for it, too. After all, you wouldn’t be the first student to go missing at that college, would you?”

My nostrils flared. “You’ll slip up somewhere,” I said, chest heaving with rage and terror. “Someone will figure out the truth.”

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