Page 97 of Craved

“What trap? You’re planning to stake my father? Your own primus?”

“Not stake him. Save him.”

“Save him?What the hell are you talking about?”

Tomas had the little smile on his face that was his camouflage. Beneath that smile, he was a cold-hearted S.O.B. But he was supposed to beourcold-hearted S.O.B.

My stomach muscles tightened. I felt like I’d taken a gut punch. “You’re the mole. The man who’s been working with Victorine.”

“Yes.”

I gaped at him. I’d expected him to deny he was the spy, to tell me I had it wrong. What kind of sick fuck admits to being a traitor? But he seemed proud of it.

“But why?” I asked.

“You make him weak.”

“My father? What the hell are you talking about? He’s not weak.”

“You don’t know him like I do. Before you boys, before your mother, Karoly was strong. Ruthless. Now he worries about his family. He makes poor decisions. He makes the syndicate—oursyndicate—accept his dhampir sons as his heirs.”

I stared at him. It was true. My father had named us the Kral heirs despite grumbling from the syndicate’s old guard. But that was his right as Kral Primus—which made Tomas a back-stabbing sonofabitch.

He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “He will learn that one by one, you have betrayed him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He will turn against Gabriel soon. I’ve planted information that Karoly will have to believe. And you will disappear after giving the key intel to Prima Victorine.”

I glanced at Victorine. “What kind of intel?”

“The location of every Kral coven,” she said.

I shook my head. “It won’t work. He won’t believe I did it.”

“No?” said Tomas. “He knows you. That you have the weakness for Princess Zoe. And the women, they are your downfall. He will believe that you were convinced that you had to do it. Perhaps to protect the princess from her mother’s anger.”

I swallowed, because yeah, my father might believe that I’d done it to protect Zoe, and Tomas was crafty enough to know that and use it against me.

I lifted my chin. “And Zaq?”

“He will set the trap and try to stake your father. He will fail, of course, but Karoly will have to stake him in return. He is Primus. He can’t let his own son get away with such an attack.”

“That’s insane. Why the hell would Zaq stake Father?”

“That is the—how do you say it?—the genius part. Zaquiel believes Karoly has sicked the slayers on him—and not just him, but you and Gabriel. That’s how they broke him. They told him that Karoly has embedded a slayer in Gabriel’s staff who will send him soon to his final grave, and that you are next if he doesn’t stop your father first. He thinks that slaying Karoly is the only way to save you all.”

My stomach lurched. Tomas knew me and my brothers too well. The plan was clever—and convincing. The bastard was using our bond against us.

It felt like the ground I’d trusted, the bedrock that was Tomas, had crumbled beneath my feet and I was in an endless, gut-churning freefall.

“So that was you who texted me in Montreal.”

“Yes.”

Something occurred to me. “Did you even pass on my message to Father?”

A smirk. “No. And calling him yourself wouldn’t have helped. All his calls are being routed to me. He doesn’t even know that you’re in Paris. I intercepted the photo Philippe’s man sent to him.”

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