Page 3 of The Devil's Torment

There’s no convincing Victoria of my innocence, despite the fact I told her what had happened, and she basically called me a liar.

A fucking liar.

I have a lot of faults, too many to count, but I am not a liar.

You know what? I’m done wasting my breath pleading my case. I have zero shits to give about what the irascible Victoria Montague thinks of me.

My attention is, and should be, on figuring out why Elizabeth left the club alone and got into a strange cab. No matter how many times I run through the events of that night, it makes no sense.

All I care about is finding the culprits and making them pay, show them that no one takes on my family and lives to tell the tale. In our position, it’s critical for us to maintain a show of strength in the face of adversity. There’s always someone waiting in the wings to steal our seat on The Consortium.

My phone buzzes. I break my stare-off with Victoria and dip inside my coat pocket to take a look. Xan nudges me, no doubt in an attempt to draw attention to the inappropriateness of my action, but I ignore him. And when I read the text, I’m glad I did.

“Gotta go,” I mutter, already turning away as Elizabeth’s mother steps forward to throw a white rose on the coffin.

“Jesus, now?” Xan hisses out of the corner of his mouth. “Can’t it wait until the ceremony is over?”

“No.”

That’s a lie. I could go after the wake, but truthfully, I’m glad of an excuse to get away, to feel like I’mdoingsomething to progress the investigation.

Besides, if I stay here much longer, Victoria’s fiery stare might just take a few layers of skin off my face.

Spinning on my heel, I stride through the graveyard, sidling between the gravestones of hundreds of my ancestors. It’s confusing to me that Dad insisted on burying Elizabeth here, especially as we hadn’t actually gone through with the wedding. Dad’s a traditionalist, though. He’ll always see Elizabeth as family even though we never got as far as saying, “I do”.

Barron, my bodyguard, is waiting outside the front entrance to the chapel, with the rear door to my armored car open. Sol, my driver, is ready with the engine running.

“Let’s go,” I order Sol as Barron climbs in beside me and shuts the door. Snapping my seatbelt into place, I re-read the text from the lead investigator I’d hired to track down and question every single witness who was either inside the club that night and might have seen Elizabeth leave, or was outside and witnessed the explosion.

With the help of state-of-the-art technology, along with good old-fashioned investigative work, his team has done an exemplary job. Only one man had eluded them, and finally, he’s turned up. Seems he left England for a holiday the day after Elizabeth died and was the kind of eccentric who left his phone at home to go off-grid. Because of that, he wasn’t aware we were looking for him until he arrived back in the country yesterday and listened to the multiple voicemails left on his phone.

Even if I wanted to go off-grid like that, I couldn’t. Given my position in the world, and the dangers that surrounded a family as powerful as ours, contact at all times is part of the deal. The ever-present danger for our safety is the main reason my brother injected a tracker into his wife—without her knowledge, I might add. Although Xan has always occupied the extreme end of the security pendulum.

Would I have insisted on a tracker for Elizabeth if we’d gotten as far as the wedding? Perhaps. It’s a question I’ll never know the answer to, therefore it’s pointless to dwell on it.

My phone buzzes again. I glance at the screen. Dad. The preview reads:What on earth do…with the rest cut off. I’ll have to click into it to get the full message, although it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what it says.

I open it. Yep. My assumption was correct.What on earth do you think you’re doing? You’d better have a good reason for leaving the graveside before the poor girl was laid to rest.

Sighing, I reply.I do. Trust me. I’ll be back soon.

He must have been waiting for my response because his reply comes immediately.You’d better be. You have a wake to attend.

Lucky me. Maybe I should apply some sunscreen before coming face to face with Victoria again. Factor one million ought to do it.

I tap Sol on the shoulder. “Step on it, would you?”

“Sure thing, Mr. DV.”

A smirk tugs at my lips. Sol has been my driver for years, and from our initial introduction, he’d called me Mr. DV. I’d often joke with him that if he ever swapped those letters around, we’d have a problem, to which he’d grin and say nothing.

Twenty minutes later, the car stops outside a house on a new-build estate, where each dwelling looks exactly the same as the one next to it. How anyone finds their way home without stumbling into someone else’s living room is a mystery to me. Even the garage doors are painted the same color—white—and the front doors have identical frosted glass.

Once Sol brings the car to a complete stop, I climb out. Barron has beaten me to it and is already scanning the estate for any threats, as he’s trained to do. I appreciate his diligence… and the gun he carries beneath his suit jacket.

It’s illegal for civilians to carry weapons in the UK, but we don’t pay attention to such rules. Even if he were stopped by the police, nothing would happen. We’re in charge, just as the other Consortium members are in charge in their respective countries. Governments rule, but we are above them, above the law, and above any kind of retribution, other than that which might come from the Consortium council, or pretenders to our crown.

Hence the need for armed bodyguards.

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