Page 22 of Corrupted Queen

He chuckles and salutes in Gabriel’s direction before taking off down the hall, leaving me staring through the open doorway at an unimpressed-looking Gabriel. He is still seated behind his desk, and lifts his hand, beckoning me into his office with the smooth flick of one of his fingers.

I swallow and enter, closing the door behind me.

Gabriel’s laptop is open on the desk in front of him and he swings it around to face me. The screen is divided into several squares, each of them showing security footage of a different part of the house. One of the squares, of course, shows the hallway outside his office door.

“I would say that snooping isn’t very ladylike, but that’s never stopped you before,” he remarks coolly.

I slap the lid of his laptop closed and sink into the chair across from him. “For that same reason, I guess I won’t remind you that kidnapping isn’t very gentlemanly.”

He settles back in his chair, lip ticking ever-so-slightly, and for a second I think he’s going to make a comment about our midnight rendezvous, but when he speaks, his words are razor edged. “You took my son.”

“You killed my father.”

His eyes settle on mine. They are like bottomless black pits. I can hardly tell where the iris ends and the pupil begins.

“I told you, it’s more complicated than you think.”

My pulse throbs angrily. I try to remind myself why I’m here—to ask about my father, to listen to what he says and let him think that he has appeased me. Once upon a time, Gabriel falsely accused me of manipulating him. Now I am here for that express purpose, to hear his lies and let him think that I am gobbling them up. Only then will he lower his defenses.

So I try not to snap at him. I really do. It’s just that I’ve never been good at controlling myself where Gabriel is concerned.

“You’re disgusting,” I spit, sharpening my glare. “You really think anything you say is going to make it okay that you made me an orphan? I lost both of my parents in one year. At least I can’t blame the cancer that took my mom; it was doing the only thing it knew how to do. Then again, maybe you were too.”

Gabriel swallows, staring at me, and I wonder if my words have actually cut him. For a second, I don’t see the murderous mob boss across from me. Instead I see Gabriel, forced to his knees in front of me, a gun pressed to his head, ready to die for my freedom. I feel a pang of guilt deep in my gut.

When Gabriel speaks, his voice is gravelly and low. “It wasn’t the cancer.”

Silence ripples through the air. I blink. Then I blink again.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

I think of my mother’s frail body, propped up in bed, machines whirring and beeping beside her. My father’s hunched form, her tiny hand in his. The weight of her hollow stare as she slipped further and further away from the land of the living.

Gabriel scrubs a hand through his hair and gets to his feet. “Come with me.”

I stay put. “Where?”

“Where we won’t be overheard,” he states impatiently, propping his laptop under his arm and walking around the desk to haul me to my feet.

He starts to guide me out of his office and I know exactly where we’re going. The room next door is soundproof and bugproof and lined with lockers filled to the brim with weapons of every kind and all the documentation I would need to bring Gabriel’s whole enterprise down. As he unlocks the door and leads me inside, I wonder if there is anything in here that would incriminate him in the purple heroin trade.

Last time I was in here, Gabriel stripped me naked to check me for bugs. This time he just sets his laptop up on the metal bench, then unlocks a safe at the far end and produces a disc from it.

“Gabriel,” I bark, hands clenching at my side. “What the fuck is going on?”

Gabriel slots the disc in his laptop and clicks open the file.

He angles the screen toward me. “Your father was not the man you thought he was.”

I narrow my eyes, scrutinizing the image on the screen. It looks like a still from security footage of a dimly lit room. A basement, maybe? There is only one man on screen, tied to a chair in the center of the image, and he’s not my father.

“I don’t—”

Gabriel taps on the space bar and the video starts to play. There is no sound, but if I had to guess what the man in the chair was doing, I would say it was begging. He’s young, probably in his early twenties. He looks scared.

“Who is that?” I ask.

“His name was Damien Walsh,” Gabriel answers.

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