Page 65 of Ricochet
“Can you get me the list of all the people involved in this? And I mean, all of them.”
“What are you going to do?” He knew what I was going to do. I was going to question every single one of them until I found which one of them betrayed us to the enemy.
I already assumed that the men sent for this shipment were long dead. Sons of Hades never left anybody alive. I never met any of them, but the stories I’ve heard about their president sent fear crawling all over my skin, and that’s saying a lot, considering I grew up the way I did with Nikolai as my godfather.
“I am going to find out which one of them thought it would be a good idea to play double agent.”
I fucking hoped it was just a mere coincidence, and that Sons of Hades just ended up being in the right place at a right time, but if there was one thing this unholy life taught me, it was that nothing was coincidental.
Loyalty was everything to me, and I couldn’t even grasp the fact that somebody would do such a thing and go behind our back. We fed them, we sent their kids to school, we gave them everything they ever wanted to have, and this was how they repaid us.
“How fast can you get everything I need?”
“Give me—”
“Guys.” Cillian opened the door without knocking, halting Tristan mid-sentence. “I need you to come to the foyer.”
He wore an angry expression on his face, his hand gripping the door with such intensity, his knuckles were turning white.
“What’s going on?” I asked, but I wasn’t too sure that I wanted an answer.
“I just need you to get your asses up, and get yourself to the foyer. Damien is back.”
“He’s alive?” The surprise in Tristan’s voice mirrored my own feelings. They didn’t kill him?
“Just fucking get up, and get going. It isn’t pretty.”
The urgency with which he spoke, the perspiration on his forehead, those were all the signs I needed to know that I wasn’t going to like whatever it was that waited for us outside of this room.
“Fuck.” I got up from my seat, with Tristan following my lead and walked after Cillian who didn’t bother waiting for either one of us.
Walking down the stairs, I could see the grim faces of our guards. The younger ones looked ready to puke, the older ones ready to murder somebody, and I dreaded seeing what Cillian was about to show us. I couldn’t see Damien once we reached the bottom of the stairs, but the impending doom I felt in the air was getting stronger and stronger with each step I took.
“Where is he?” I asked Cillian, who stood in the middle, his back facing me. “Kill?”
My brother turned to me, a fury I had never seen before dancing in his eyes. Tristan’s footsteps echoed through the foyer as he joined us in the middle.
“Where is Damien, Kill?”
The energy in the room was suffocating, rotten, sending the sick feeling into my stomach. Cillian kept quiet, staring at me, then at Tristan, both of us in the dark about what was going on.
“Kill?” Tristan asked quietly. “Do you mind telling us what is going on here? You said Damien is back. Where is he?”
Without a word, my twin brother stepped aside, and my eyes zeroed in on the box perched on the top of the small table in the middle of the foyer. I didn’t have to be a genius to know what the dark, red color decorating the bottom of it was. I took a step forward, but I wasn’t really there.
I often heard about out-of-body experiences, and this whole moment felt like one. I could feel my body moving, but my mind was solely focused on the box in front of us. The room echoed with each of my steps, the soles of my shoes hitting the white marble. The deafening silence of the room felt suffocating, as if everybody held their breath to what was about to come.
And I knew… I fucking knew what was inside, but it was as if my mind had a hard time catching up with the situation at hand.
“What’s inside?” I asked, my eyes focused on the brown lid with a red X colored on the top.
“Open it.”
“But what’s—”
“Just fucking open it, Kieran!” Cillian yelled out and came to stand on the opposite side of the table. Tristan kept his distance, but I could feel his eyes on us, the nervous energy buzzing around us.
“Okay.” I took ahold of the lid, my hands almost trembling from the anticipation. Cillian gripped the edge of the table, his eyebrows scrunched together. He already knew what was inside, hell, half of this room already knew.
