Page 4 of Prodigal

Over dinner, they went over their next moves, choreographing how they wanted everything to play out. Gideon wasn’t under the illusion that it would all happen exactly how they laid it out over beers and burgers, but he wanted it to be as close and as clean as possible.

He didn’t doubt there would be casualties, but he didn’t mind that.

The Council shot first all those years ago; he’d just be returning fire.

Gideon satin the back of the SUV parked a short distance away from The Council’s meeting spot, waiting for said meeting to commence. The Council didn’t have a set location whenever they met up, but they were creatures of habit. There were only a few places they could possibly use because of security concerns, so Gideon and his team had scouted all five until they’d found the one.

Then they’d prepared.

Now, the time had come. In a few minutes, Gideon would make his way into that meeting and set in motion a plan that’d been in the making for years. It was all coming together, and he salivated at the thought.

He and the others in the SUV watched the meeting on an iPad, thanks to the cameras and microphones they’d installed after The Council had done their own sweep. Before a meeting was held, security always swept the location to ensure it was free of cameras or listening devices. But Gideon had people on the inside who did what needed to be done.

He watched now as members of The Council filed into the room, each one taking their seat at a horseshoe-shaped raised dais.

Gideon fisted his hands as he stared at the screen. He knew every member of The Council by name and was privy to their darkest secrets. That was the thing—they all knew each other’s secrets. They just couldn’t use them. Gideon didn’t have that problem. He would stand before them with no weaknesses they could exploit, no secret to hold over him.

He was about to be a whole fucking nightmare for them.

“They’re all in place,” Samir murmured.

Gideon’s lips curled. And so they were. All Council members had taken their seats. Only the podium remained empty. “Our people?” he asked.

“Ready on your command.”

Gideon kept his gaze locked on the screen. The members didn’t take their bodyguards into the actual meetings. No, the bodyguards got to wait nearby in an overflow room, all of them armed and sitting around idle. “Show me the bodyguards," he told Samir, and with one tap of a button, the screen split into two, showing both the meeting and the waiting bodyguards. Some of the guards were talking to each other, others were silent, on alert, waiting. But they didn’t move from that room, because to do so would mean death.

Only the seven members of The Council were aware of what occurred in those meetings. For anyone else to try and listen in, it would mean a death sentence. So, like good soldiers, the bodyguards all sat around and waited until they were needed.

They couldn’t leave because the safety of their bosses was still tantamount.

All of that worked in Gideon’s favor. “Begin.”

Samir relayed his one-word order to the others out of sight. Sleeping gas would be pumped through the air vents, knocking out every single bodyguard. Gideon watched as it began to take effect. As bodies began dropping, one of them crawled toward the closed door on his belly, but he found that act useless. The door had been barricaded from the outside. He was the last one to go unconscious.

On the iPad screen, one of the members—Ennis Canto—was speaking. “And so, even as we mourn our fallen, I would like to introduce you to our newest member, Heath Lyndhurst.”

Gideon squeezed his eyes shut briefly, then opened them to meet Samir’s gaze.

“Marco’s team is doing their research now,” his friend told him.

Since they didn’t have a clue beforehand who the new member would be, they’d had no way to investigate. But they had a name now, and Marco’s team was the best at what they did.

In the meantime, Gideon opened the vehicle door and hopped out. “Let's go.”

With no one to stop them, and members of The Council otherwise occupied, they walked through the building. His fingers twitched as he stood in front of the massive closed doors. Everyone on the other side of it was in some way responsible for his mother’s death, for his exile, for his father’s broken heart. He could taste revenge on his tongue, so delicious it made him salivate, gave him goose bumps and shivers.

Beside him, Samir nudged his shoulders. “Ready?”

Gideon smirked. He’d been ready since the first time they’d come for him. “Ready.” He waited, biting down on his patience, as Samir shot at the doors, riddling them with bullets before kicking them in and stepping back.

Gideon entered the room first.

All the members were on their feet. But helpless, because Gideon’s men were already on them, having emerged from their hiding places in the back. Each member had a gun pointed to their head and they all stared down at him with sneers filled with contempt and the promise of retribution.

“Whoever you are, you’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life.” That was Ennis Canto speaking. Guess he’d appointed himself the official spokesperson.

At the podium, the new guy—Heath Lyndhurst—stood, shaking, but trying to hide it. Afraid but doing his best to mask it. Gideon strode over to him. He was older than Gideon, by the looks of it, but not by much. Tall and skinny, red hair and browneyes. Freckles, too, Gideon saw when he was close enough to touch.

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