Page 105 of Striker

How many times has Zane invited me to my father’s lodge? How many times has Clyde kept me from going? How much money have I hid over the years, as membership fees, enormous sums of money being handed over to my father out of nowhere for no reason?

“Rune liked the idea of a hunt,” Reaper says. “He wanted the excitement. So he decided to change the rules.”

Another picture lands before me, but I turn away.

“He didn’t want to sit back and watch us in the wilderness. Rune wanted to be out there, in the heat and mud himself. He wanted to be the one tracking for his food. Surviving off the land and his skills.”

My father always got excited in the fall. When it was time to go to his lodge and meet his friends. They’d spend a week there every year and when he’d come back, he’d be different. Changed in a way I didn’t understand. Somehow more excitable, but calm too. Like something within him was placated.

Reaper places another image, but I bolt up from the chair, bending over, trying to control my breathing and the swirling in my head. Is tumble away, bracing my hands on the wall, bile churning, threatening to come up.

“Others loved the idea too. Going out to the wilderness, tapping into their baser instincts. Feeling the excitement, feeling the adrenaline. But he didn’t want to send multimillionaires out in the wilderness to snare rabbits and shoot squirrels.”

“What do you mean?” I hear myself saying, but it’s like I’m not even in the room anymore.

“What’s the best way to make the wilderness feel a tad more brutal?” Reaper asks.

My stomach sinks.

“Rune decided to add prey to the hunt.”

Chapter 41

Delilah

Idon’t know whata nervous breakdown is supposed to feel like, but I think I’m having one.

The thought that my father was doing all this, is too much to absorb. He’s been using his company—my future company—to funnel money, what I can only assume arepaymentsfor what he’s doing at the lodge. He is granted so much money every year, but then he pays out so much too. And He’s been using Cora and me to help him hide his sick, evil games.

The last few hours spin in my head and I can’t seem to focus on anything. All I can see are the images of bodies. Blood and gore that would make horror movie directors grimace.

And it was all my father’s doing.

And me too.

I hid the money he was collecting.

Cora too.

What will she do if she ever finds out? She can’t know.

Reaper spent the last few hours showing me the information they acquired, but refused to tell me the source.Files upon files with my signature, my numbers, my fucking contracts hiding his action in membership fees, or fake sales. I knew he was doing bad things, but not this.

Never this.

Glancing around the room, my eyes land on the box and head falls to the table. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to focus my whirling thoughts.

I didn’t know.

Any of it.

There’s a part of me that’s so angry at them. Instead of kidnapping me, scaring Cora and me, they could have just told me. Shown me the files. But even as the thought springs to my mind, I know it’s not true. I never would have believed them. I was so blinded by my father’s drive to make me like him, by my craving to have his approval, I would have thought all this evidence was fabricated to take my father down.

Who would believe their parent was capable of the level of depravity I saw in those pictures?

No one.

Certainly not from a loving father who protected me to the point of imprisoning me. Reaper and the others needed me to see that they were more than just mean men hired to kidnap me. I needed to see them be kind to Cora. I needed Cora to tell me about my father andthenand only then would I be ready to believe them when they showed me.

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