Page 21 of Midnight Revelations

Xavier and I moved across to the computer Jordan was working on. He had one of Dad’s pages beside him that contained a list of web addresses. The address opened a cloud storage which contained images of unavailableassets. Bile burned up my throat and made my stomach clench.

What the fuck was he involved in?

Xavier bent down to study the images over Jordan’s shoulder.

“Can you put them on a bigger screen?” I asked and the huge monitor on the wall flared to life. I stepped closer, terrified that I was right. My eyes closed for a brief moment at some of the images in the bottom left.

“What’s up?” Xavier asked.

Words eluded me, so I pointed instead. The guys walked forward to study what I was highlighting.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Xavier asked, his voice cold and angry. “I am going to kill them.”

“You’ll need to get in a queue,” Jordan ground out. “I’m gonna download all these to one of our remote servers and then remove any trace that these ever existed.”

Jordan stomped back to his desk. There was a crash a few seconds later when he flung a chair across the room.

Xavier sighed and finally looked at me. “He must have known you would have seen these pictures,” he said.

I nodded my head. Amber was one of the subs in the Twilight Rooms, and she disappeared about eighteen months ago. There was nothing romantic between us, but we saw each other regularly and she was the closest I ever came to a relationship.

My eyes closed briefly. “How the fuck did he know about her?”

The same way he knew about Lucrezia. His spies were every-fucking-where.

Xavier’s hand grasped my shoulder. The images depicted Amber in some strange ritualistic sacrifice surrounded by men in capes. Jordan moved through the images and we watched what had happened to Amber. I thought she’d met someone and left the lifestyle. All these months and I had never thought to look for her.

“Stop!” Xavier commanded. His spine straightened and he leaned forward. “I know that watch.” He pointed to a gold watch peeking out from beneath a robe. It belonged to Malcolm and had been on his wrist when we brought him in.

“I’ll go through all the photographs and see if I can identify any of the rest of them,” Jordan said from behind us. “You must have really pissed Matteus off for this.”

“Or we stepped on someone’s shoes in the Council,” I slowly replied. “What was happening at the time Amber left the Twilight Rooms?”

Jordan stared at me for a moment before he started typing. The silence was ominous a few moments later. I turned to face him and watched his eyes skim whatever was on his screen.

“It coincides with us having to sort out that fuck up with those firearms that went missing.” Jordan’s brow furrowed as he kept reading. “There was a lot of finger pointing at the time and a deal fell through because of it.”

“Dad was furious,” I replied. “But what the fuck has that got to do with me?”

“You refused to vote,” Xavier said. “You abstained and Matteus didn’t get the result he wanted.”

“I abstain at nearly every fucking vote,” I snapped. A woman was dead because she was my lover. What the fuck would he do if he found out how I felt about Lucrezia?

There was nothing left to say, and I couldn’t blow his brains out because we were involved in an intricate game. I strode from the room and almost felt the concerned stares boring into my back. We had a range in a basement under this remote office location.

I didn’t even put a target up, just emptied magazine after magazine, firing into the wall until I locked all my emotions down one at a time.

She was the only woman I’d ever wanted, the one person I could let my defences down around. My finger kept pulling the trigger as I fought back the tears that threatened to choke me. The only way to win this war was to become the cold creature that felt nothing and looked down on the world in scorn. Every bullet I fired into the wall represented the tears that I refused to let fall down my face.

She was my ultimate weakness, the one person in the world who could be used against me. I would never let my father anywhere near her. The best way to ensure her safety was to make her hate me and run as far and as fast as she could until I couldn’t find her.

Hatred bubbled inside me in an incandescent fountain of rage.

Just when I thought I could be normal and have something real in my life, my father had polluted my life with his evil. I placed the gun back on the wall and slowly left the room.

“Feel better?” Xavier asked.

I allowed the coldness to build a wall around me, impenetrable and desolate. “Yeah. I need to go and get my head together.”

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