Page 53 of To Claim A King
“I must take the thing you’re truly terrified to lose, hijo. It is the only way.”
The hot slice into the soft skin below my wrist was the brand that sealed my fate. My eyes squeezed shut and my teeth held onto the insides of my cheeks with every strike, but I refused to utter a sound. This man would not get the satisfaction of my screams, even if it was my last action on earth.
Likely, it was.
It wasn’t the first time I’d sat in a jail cell like a street kid, but it was the first time the stakes were more than a priceless heirloom and a bit of prison time. I’d been lying in the stagnant cell for a few hours, and each minute ticked by like a timed bomb was about to destroy every part of my life.
“Oy,” I called to the guard at the end of the hall. “I want to speak to your boss. Please,” I amended as an afterthought. Now wasn’t the time to panic. I was a charming fellow and needed to use it, even if the agents in question were daft, brainlesslumps of coal.
I’d been thrown into the cell with the American Miranda Rights sing-song, but only because I was the only living fuck at the scene of the crime. They had eyes—they could see Hillary Lane, super billionaire businesswoman who’d just done a press conference about people targeting her, had actually been kidnapped—and yet I was the one in jail, and no one had come to speak to me yet to get my side of the story.
“I have a right to counsel,” I called out to the feckwit, who had ignored every single attempt at getting anywhere. “I want my phone call.”
Crickets. Fucking crickets, while the biggest baddie on this side of the world held captive the most important people in the world to me. If I had access to my phone, I could at least track their whereabouts. I’d placed skin tracers on everyone before they’d left this morning as a failsafe. I couldn’t track them if I didn’t have my phone, because I’d expected the bad guys getting to us, not the most incompetent law enforcement agency in the country.
Not that they knew that. I could have gone the cell phone tracking route, but that had too many possibilities of failure. The trackers I’d gotten from a mate in Ireland would take two or three showers to come off, and I doubted the cartel was focused on cleanliness in the midst of a torture-fest.
That terrifying thought was enough for me to call the guard again. “If I don’t get my phone call in the next hour, when I finally do, it’ll be to the embassy.” I gripped the bars of the cell and stared so hard at the lazy, leaning feck, he could feel me burn holes through his useless FBI jacket. “You want any information from me, you’d better get me a little ring-a-ding-ding.”
The young guard rolled his eyes, but he moved his arse, disappearing around the corner to the desk where he could make a phone call.
I sat down on the bench and folded my arms, running through as many scenarios as my puny human brain could process. I didn’t know Antonio, but he’d issued a kill order on Aaron, and Kellan betrayed him, so he was now kicking Kellan out of the family—which I assumed in cartel terms meant death by the most torture possible.
I had no idea why Kellan was even there after he’d thrown all our hearts in a blender the week before, or how Hillary had gotten caught up in a shootout with the apparently unkillable supermodel assassin from hell. I really knew fuck-all, other than Carmen worked for Antonio, so that was likely where she brought the three of them. It had been four hours since they’d thrown me into lock-up, which meant the people I loved could be out of state by now.
Feck, feck, feck.
“Lauchlan O’Donnell?”
I perked up from my perch to see a tall, bald, Black and beautiful man striding down the hall like he owned the place, stopping directly in front of my cell. The guard sluggishly trailed behind him, glaring eyes and pursed lips doing nothing to stop the interruption.
“Yeh?” I shot up from the hard seat to face the man I only knew from the photos in the paper—Weston Williams—criminal lawyer to the rich and famous.
“I’m your legal representation today.” He turned his considerable form to the puny guard with a stare that could melt sand. “Open up, please. We’re late for his interview.”
Interview. Like I was here for a jolly little job title.
The guard reluctantly unlocked the metal door and slid it across the floor. I waved a snarky salute to him, then followed Weston’s wide steps down the hall to another hall, and then up a set of stairs. He led us to a stereotypical interrogation room straight out of the nineties. Weston dipped his head toward the metal chair on one side of the rectangular table in the center of the space.
“Have a seat, please. I’d like to talk to you freely, and agents will be here any moment.”
I promptly sat, my curiosity getting the better of me as I settled into the cold, brittle chair. “I’m glad to see you, mate, really I am, but why are you here?”
He sat down beside me, a bit of an intimidating presence, but I liked a confident man—obviously. Dark eyes scrutinized my relaxed form before speaking.
“Ms. Lane was convinced that her life was in danger from several sources, and I was left with instructions if she went missing. She never checked in after the announcement like we’d planned, and you were one name on her list to seek out. When I found out you were being held here, I came to represent you, as promised.”
My Blondie, always thinking several steps ahead. I’d tracked them all with highly illegal, almost-immovable tracers, and she’d set up a lawyer in case one of us got caught. What a team we made.
“Great,” I said cheerily. “Then let’s do this as quickly as possible, because if these fuckers don’t get a move on, Hillary Lane’s gonna be dead. And I don’t think any of yeh want that kind of headline when the American Billionaire Sweetheart shows up headless because the FBI is an incompetent bunch of peckerheads.”
“I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘pussyheads’.”
A silver-haired woman entered the room with impeccable timing, and I stared into the fierce eyes of Patricia Stanhope, Kellan’s old boss. When I’d found out he was FBI, I’d looked into his entire team—and she was at the top of the top, at least on this side of the country. The woman who’d hung Kellan out to dry like a pair of old, holey socks. Cunt.
She took a seat opposite mine, along with another younger female agent with lips so pursed, she looked like she had a lemon permanently stuck to the roof of hermouth. I knew right away I wouldn’t be able to traditionally charm these women, but I had other tricks up my sleeve.
“Pussyheads it is, then.” Winking, I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back in my chair as nonchalantly as a guy brought in for a wee bit of card counting. Child’s play.
