Page 122 of Cruel Games

Which she had.

“Surprise, Ma, I’m home.” My laugh was hollow and brittle, icy, with just a hint of the desperation I clung tightly to. “Bet you didn’t expect to see me again.”

My mother looked every day of her fifty-six years of age as she stepped forward beside the man with the gun, putting her hand on his arm to force the barrel pointed at me to the floor. “It’s okay, Roscoe. It’s my daughter. She’s come home.”

She sounded . . .surprised.And maybe a little pleased? It was hard to tell. I didn’t remember my mother ever being pleased growing up. She always looked so sour, so pissed, so . . . hopeless.

Until my father died. Then, the bitch in her emerged. She was suddenly more outspoken, ruthless, and hateful. It was like everything that reminded her of my father had to go.

Now, knowing what I knew, if she’d had any inkling of his illicit businesses, I couldn’t blame her. But I had to know.

“Got time for a little chat?”

We sat in the parlor,me with a bat propped against my boots, Mom with a cup of tea in her hand, provided by the ever-dutiful Roscoe.

I knew where I’d seen his face before. He had been my mother’s driver for years when I was growing up. And now, as he hovered beside my mother, I could see what I’d never noticed before today: the attention he paid her was more than just a devoted driver. He was in love.

And judging from the way her eyes always flitted to him when she wasn’t focused on something else, he wasn’t the only one.

Ew.

My mother’s head tilted as she set her teacup on the stand beside her, her long legs crossed, elegant and poised as she’d always been, even at her worst. “What brings you back to a place you swore you’d never return?”

I cringed as I realized I wasn’t the only one here who could hold a grudge. There was so much malice, so much anger, lacing the words that fell from her mouth; it was like I was a child again, trying desperately to come up with a good enough reason why I failed at something she considered beneath me.

My fingers found the handle of Jackal’s bat, and I caressed it, the warm wood like an anchor. “I have questions. And you’re the only one I know who can answer them.”

Her eyes flashed with—fear.“I’m not sure I can give you what you’re looking for.”

I shook my head, remembering how saddened she’d been when I screamed in her face the day she tried to clear my father’s presence out of the house.

You can’t takehim away from me! He’s my father! I love him, and Ialways will!

Oh,how naïve I’d been.

“I know, Mom,” I said quietly, the words steady and yet somehow still hesitant. “Enough to know I was wrong.”

I felt like a fucking worm on a hook as she stared at me, her eyes widening, the gaze within them softening to something akin to pity.

I didn’t want her pity.

I wanted the truth.

I lifted the backpack from the floor and pulled out the notebook, slapping it noisily on the coffee table between us. “I’ve had this for a long time, and until now, I stupidly believed it was an order tracker for his flower garden.” My hands shook as I pulled out the flash drive and plugged it into an adapter, sliding that into the port on my phone as I placed it on the table and waited for the data to load.

“Your father was your hero,” she started slowly, but I held up a hand to cut her off.

“He shouldn’t have been.” I set the pin on the table next. “Do you remember the day he gave this to me?”

Her eyes drifted shut as she nodded, a hitch in her next breath. “I begged him not to, but he wouldn’t listen. He was so convinced he could raise you to be his successor.”

“He gave it to me and said I could be the next leader of our family.” I casually lifted the marble statue on the table, twisting it as I tested its weight. “Now that I know what the leader of our house was up to, I want nothing to do with it.”

I brought the marble figurine down on the damned thing, shattering the bejeweled pin into a dozen pieces. Shards of metal and gemstone scattered as Roscoe flinched away from my blatant display of aggression, his eyes drifting to the gun my mother had set on the table in the entryway to her parlor.

“I found a page of this notebook, a single page that someone ripped from it a long, long time ago.” I pulled the folder out next from the backpack of secrets, setting it down facing my mother. “Someone took notes on it, explaining what it all meant.” I quickly flipped through the photos, watching as she spotted them and looked away. When I came to the page with the actual hit request on it, I shoved it at her, leaning back to cross my arms over my chest.

“I want to know who put the hit on him.”

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