Page 196 of Heir

He looked down at me, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from showing too much on my face. In his hands, I noticed a white dress.

He threw it at me through the bars. I looked down at it in disgust.

“I can see why he’s so obsessed with you,” he said. “Why he keeps you around.”

I shook my head. He was talking about Kai like he… like he hated him.

But why?

“Why are you doing this?”

He laughed, loud and mean. Some of the women jumped, which told me he had visited them often enough to scare them.

I swallowed.

“Why does anyone do shit like this?” he said. “For money. For power.”

“You feel powerful selling people?”

His lips turned up into a vicious smile. “Hmm, let’s see. I’m standing here while you’re in a cage. Why don’t you tell me who’s more powerful?”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make you powerful. It just makes you vile.”

He pounded on the cage roughly, and I screamed, flinching back.

He laughed. “Does it? Am I supposed to feel guilty about that?”

“Why do you hate Kai so much? He—” I blinked away the moisture that had gathered in my eyes. “He mourned you.”

“No, he felt fucking guilty. That’s all it was.”

“He did feel guilty about you. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t mourn you. Why are you doing this to him? To your mom?”

He sneered. “The bitch who took pity on me isn’t my mom.”

“Then who’s your mom?” I asked. Poor Jenny. If she could hear the way Jude was talking about her, her heart would break. I didn’t know her, but if she stopped talking to Dominic because of what happened to Jude, then there was no doubt she truly loved him like her own.

“The Savkin Bratva princess,” Jude said, looking proud. His eyes roam over me, making my skin crawl with disgust.

His smile widened.

I had never been more creeped out over a smile in my life.

“Same as your mom, little sister.”

It took me a moment to realize what he had said.

No…

He didn’t say that.

“What?”

He laughed. “Don’t you know, Gemma? You were an affair baby, like me. The woman you’ve been calling Mom for twenty-nine years was only a woman who resented you for being born.”

Was?

Did he saywas?