Page 106 of Rise of the King (Checkmate 5)

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Final Plans

Jay

For the first time in a long time, I sit in the kitchen of the home I shared with my brother while working an undercover operation inside Infernos club. The kitchen is packed with bodies, with the army Kane now controls, and all eyes are trained on the dining table.

Kane sits across from me. Jess sits beside him.

I sit on the opposite side, and with a heavy-duty laptop in her face, Soph sits beside me.

Ang stands beside his girl, and Riley beside his. Spence and Eric lean against the counter, and a tiny pig in a pink tutu roams around the floor beneath our feet and claims the crumbs that Soph drops from her plate.

“Colum. Anthony. Bishop.” Riley says it like it’s not what it actually is. He says that name like they’re just words, and not the name of my father. “What the fuck are we supposed to do about that?”

“We find him,” Kane declares quietly. “Then we take him out.”

“Your father?” Jess asks in disbelief. “You’re prepared to take your own father out?”

“Yeah, Blondie.” Blowing out a long breath and tugging her closer, he buries his face in her hair and nods. “I am. He’s nobody to me.”

“He’s your father!” she snaps.

“He shares our name,” he clarifies. “But he has claim to nothing else.”

“But…” Brows knitted, she looks around the room, then stops on me. “He’s your father.”

“He had me executed.” I take a curly fry from the pile in the center of the table and take a slow bite. “He beat us every damn day of our lives. Starved us. Waged mental wars just to fuck with us. He had me taken out, then he put a hit on Kane’s head.His own son’s head.I think we’ve established we’re not discussing a dearly beloved daddy, but an unfeeling fucking prick.”

“I just…” She takes Kane’s hand in hers and threads their fingers together. “I don’t know how you’re going to deal with this without hurting yourselves. This will haunt you.” She turns and meets Kane’s eyes. “I don’t want you to hurt your own heart to take care of this.”

“No, what hurts my heart is knowing I’m someone’s target while you sit right beside me. We all know now that a bullet will pass straight through my body and pierce the next in line. You getting hurt, or even you being in someone’s scope is what hurts my heart. We need to eliminate this threat, then I’m taking your ass back to the beach. Because I miss vacation me; he was mellow as fuck.”

“What if you trap him?” Andi volunteers. She’s an innocent in this group; she doesn’t hurt people except with her sass. She doesn’t know what the rest of us know. “You could make it so he’s arrested and sent away to prison, right? That solves both your problems; he’s gone, and your hearts remain intact because you didn’t kill him.”

“Sure.” Not sure at all. Glancing up, I nod and give her a smile that everyone else in the room knows is bullshit. Even her man. “We’ll make it so he’s arrested, then he can be sent far away from here.”

“Good.” Impressed with herself, Andi steps forward and takes a curly fry from a growling Sophia.

“Soph.”

“I’m hungry,” she scowls.

“It’s just a fry, babe. We’ll get more.”

“How do we find him?” Riley asks. “You’ve been searching for eight years already; it’s not like he’s gonna just knock on your door for your birthday and say hey.”

“Actually.” Spinning her laptop, Soph shows us a satellite image of downtown. Zooming in on the Checkmate office, she enlarges the picture, enlarges, enlarges, and then stops.

“What the fuck?” Kane snaps. He pulls the laptop closer and narrows his eyes. Standing, since he pulled it from her reach, Soph leans across the table and works her tech until she pulls the image out a couple clicks, then she zooms in on the town lookout and a man lying in the tall grass with a CheyTac M200 sniper rifle tucked before his eye and a dark green ghillie suit moving with the breeze.

“Anyone wanna go back to work today?” Soph’s smile is heartless, unfeeling. And bordering on homicidal.

“That’s not Colum,” Kane says. “He’s not that stupid.”

“We’ll see.” Shrugging, she pulls the laptop back and sits down so our shoulders touch. She speaks of the time she found me, and the humanity she was drawn to when presented with Bishop brothers. She chose me because I was smiling even when in hell. I was laughing, even when it hurt.

I get it now, because all day, since the moment we found that asshole darting across the road toward Kane’s office, she’s been this machine. I understand why she’s done that to herself. I know why she needs to do it. But that knowledge doesn’t take the fear from my heart.

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