Page 81 of Heart of Stone (Dark Billionaires)

Then Kate’s heart skipped a beat.

She was an idiot.

She was a fucking idiot.

The night before Warren fell ill, they’d had shots of some fancy liqueur. With the ridiculous shot glasses.

And Saffron had fetched them both. Meaning she’d had plenty of time to slip the abrin into Warren’s glass. And what had he said at the time?

His favourite shot glass. A cat… Or a kitten.

Saffron had known it too.

“The abrin,” Kate hissed, her face scrunching into hatred.

“He had my sister,” Saffron replied softly, fingering the little cylinder attached to the satchel. “It’s not like I had achoice, Kate.”

“You nearly fucking killed him.” Rage roared through her like wildfire. Kate advanced, intending to claw Saffron’s eyes out, but Saffron aimed the black cylinder in her direction and pressed the top down with her thumb. A thin stream of liquid shot out—

Directly into Kate’s eyes.

An overwhelming, inescapable agony forced her eyes shut. Kate cried out at the wet flames licking at her eyeballs. Her hands scrambled about in the carpet, but she had no idea when she’d hit the floor. Her entire body locked up, her eyelids sealed shut by the pain, until it was as solid and palpable as those black moods she experienced, dragging her down to an inescapable pit of torment, and somewhere within it, a door slammed.

14

Warren

Warrensprawledlazilyinthe chair. He’d had fantastic ideas before—particularly when it came to his business dealings—but this really was his finest hour. Graves’s agonised groans were music to his ears.

Given that he was still recovering from his liver transplant and Brax’s arm was broken in two places, he hadn’t been able to deal with Graves with brute strength. Admittedly, he could have asked one of his remaining security guards to mete out Graves’s punishment. Most of them had grievances with Graves—it had been how he’d recruited them in the first place.

Ultimately, though, Warren was of the opinion that if he wanted to do a job properly, he needed to do it himself.

Sulphuric acid was doing the rest.

Graves was strung up by his wrists from either side of the room, his muscles stretched too far to allow him any purchase, but low enough that his feet dangled in a bath of acid.

Or what was left of them.

Every so often—or whenever Warren felt boredom creeping over him—he’d add a teensy bit more hydrogen peroxide. The result was, if he was being honest, a little unnerving. Whatever chemical reaction was at play would heat the combined liquids until they were boiling, eating away at Graves’s feet until there was nothing left. The acid even dissolved Graves’s bones.

The only thing that remained was the watery brown soup in the bathtub.

So Graves didn’t bleed out, he’d then cauterise the wounds. That was good fun too, although the bastard eventually fainted each time.

As he had done so often over the past few hours, Warren topped up Graves’s bath. “You know,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the furiously bubbling liquid, “I’m surprised you can feel anything at all at this point.”

He screwed the cap back on, conscious of the fact that if he wanted to draw this out—which he absolutely did—then he couldn’t add too much at a time.

Graves didn’t even fight it. Perhaps his strength had been depleted after being strung up for so long, or perhaps he’d merely accepted his fate. Or was he delirious?

Warren knew how to fix that.

His laptop sat on the table on the other side of the room. The same table at which he’d once tried to interrogate Kate, before mistakenly presuming her to be innocent of her father’s crimes. The first mistake of many.

He swivelled the laptop round. “Shall we have another look at this? It might cheer you up.”

Graves’s pain-filled gaze was low, his eyes barely opening.

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