Page 75 of Steal a King (Five Kings 2)

Ella

It doesn’t seem fair that I can feel so happy when Adam is in hell. Just looking into his haunted eyes makes my heart shatter and thinking of how his wife met her end is a nightmare that will probably never go away. He has retreated into his own dark thoughts and thrown himself into business, and Lucas is keen to do anything he can to help him through the darkest period of his life.

So, where Lucas once lived here in his cavernous apartment alone, he now has two extra guests that appear to be here for some time and I am not arguing with that.

Through all this madness has come happiness, and I am fiercely protective of that.

* * *

One weeklater to the day, I sit nervously beside Lucas in his office, facing the men who still make me question my own sanity.

Ryder King is sitting opposite Lucas, who sits beside me holding my hand. I don’t think I’ve spent one minute alone since the party because he can’t bear to let me out of his sight.

Beside Ryder is the man who will forever feature in my nightmares; the man who hauled Penelope off me and abducted me from the airport what feels like light years ago. The tattoo of the cobra that snakes up his arm reminds me what a killer looks like, although he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, apparently.

Today’s meeting is an important one judging by the looks on their faces and I can tell that Lucas is on edge, which makes me on edge.

Ryder sighs heavily and fixes us both with a dark look.

“Luckily for us all the operation has been a success. It didn’t take long to uncover the person responsible, and once we discovered her intention, we set up surveillance on her. Tapped her phone and discovered her plan to finish the job at the brunch she arranged. We watched covertly and put a marker on her. Luckily, we have a recruit, a former sniper from the US military who apparently never misses his mark, and he was also the man responsible for taking out the woman who tried to kill us. We intercepted the text she sent you from Ella’s phone and I knocked on the door as instructed and then stood to the side while I opened it and as she took aim and fired, Sawyer fired soon after.”

He looks at me almost apologetically and shakes his head. “I’m sorry for what happened, but it had to be that way. We had our information, and she needed taking out. The clean-up crew has restored everything to what it was and disposed of the body. She will be explained as another suicide and the report will be buried and no questions ever asked. The operation now turns to the person responsible for setting the whole thing up which, as it happens, it turns out Penelope was working for someone in New York. She appears to have been recruited in Boston, probably up to twelve months ago. When we started looking into your employees and friends, the trail led us to her door.”

“So, she targeted Adam to get close to me.” Lucas says angrily and Ryder nods.

I say sadly. “She told me it was always Lucas she was after. To get close to him in order to kill him. I asked her why, but she told me she was just being paid to do a job.”

Ryder nods. “She was paid well. Penelope was not just a pretty face. She was a contract killer, and this wasn’t her first rodeo. She was at the top of her game, and the person who recruited her obviously wanted a Trojan horse to roll in undetected. There were several transactions in an off shore account credited to her name. It was easy to trace, but that’s where the trail ended. The funds came from an unnamed account that we are still working on, but the phone records gave us our only clue. The person sending them originated from a building in New York.”

Ryder’s expression is grim and there’s a tense atmosphere in the room that feels ominous and Lucas snarls, “So, is it who we think it is?”

Ryder nods and for a moment they look at one another with devastation. I think I hold my breath as Lucas sighs. “So, what’s the plan?”

“We go to New York.”

Ryder’s voice is blunt and unemotional, and Lucas shakes his head.

“Do you think he’s involved?”

“What do you think?”

Lucas sighs and shakes his head. “No. I don’t.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Ryder leans forward and Snake looks interested as Lucas says roughly. “When you came here, you thought I was the man responsible for your own situation. I wasn’t. I have a feeling Hunter is the next in line for whoever who is trying to bring the organization down. It all adds up. Whoever wants us gone, is trying to blow us up from the inside. Set us against one another and let us finish the job they have started.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“So, the business, the fact the stock exchange is throwing heat on my project, it must come from inside his office, but not necessarily from the man who sits at the head of it.”

Ryder’s expression is grim. “We need to discover what he knows. Tread carefully and not alert the person responsible that we’re on his tail.”

“Or her.”

They look at me in surprise and I shrug, feeling a little bad that I have spoken up at all.

Lucas says softly, “What makes you think it’s a woman?”

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