Page 137 of Riot

Lionel Jones.

I didn’t feel bad about killing him. Not even a little.

The man was a threat to everything my family built. Dangerous. Calculated. Ruthless in a way that didn’t play by old-school codes. He’d tried to snake us more than once, fuckin' with shipments, bribing suppliers, threatening my mother. The lasttime, he got too close. I heard he was plotting to assassinate my father. This was before I knew that my father was a creep. When he had gone missing, I figured he had to do something with it.

So I kidnapped him to show my brother that I was serious about finding our father. A bullet to his head like it was nothing.

It was business.

But now?

Now that I knew he had a daughter, and that the daughter was Allure?

That part hit different.

I didn’t know. I swear to God I didn’t.

If I had, I might’ve paused. But it happened well before I ever laid eyes on her.

So I couldn’t regret it. Lionel made his choices. And so did I.

And yet… her face.

The betrayal. The pain. The fucking shock of it when she realized who I was and what I’d done. That haunted me more than anything I’d done to him.

I raked a hand down my face and sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on my knees.

The night before replayed behind my eyes like a reel on loop.

Her breathy little gasps when I pinned her.

The way her body melted and rebelled at the same time.

The fight in her eyes even as she begged for me.

The moment she whisperedplease, Daddylike it meant something.

Goddamn.

I wasn’t built for soft love. But what we had? That was something else. Messy. Brutal. Real.

She pointed a gun at me.

And I still wanted her more than I’d ever wanted peace.

I stood and paced the floor. Every creak in the old hardwood dragged me back to the bigger problem: King’s Vine.

Blood still stained the gravel.

The press was on a feeding frenzy. The senator had issued a statement. Creed was trying to keep the investors calm. Abra was calling in PR company in the five boroughs. And me? I was supposed to be the face of it all. The legacy bearer.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about Allure. About her father. About my mother.

Tessa.

What if she knew?

What if all that shit she said about Allure—her attitude, her eyes, her energy—wasn’t just bitterness or illness? What if her lead-poisoned brain was trying to warn me the whole time, and none of us could translate the language?

---