Answers.
Fucking finally.
My mind is reeling from all the new information Ryland just dropped on me, but there’s still so much I don’t know. And I’d rather risk brain overload than go another minute without getting my questions answered.
Marcus and Theo are standing near the entryway in the small living room. Both men look up when we enter the sparse room, and I have a sudden vivid memory of their faces hovering above mine—Marcus’s cock still inside me and Theo’s taste on my lips.
A flush of heat moves up my chest, and I can’t tell if it’s embarrassment or lingering desire. Maybe a little of both.
That entire encounter feels like a dream, in a way, something that happened to someone else. In that moment, nothing seemed as important as keeping these three men with me, but now, with some of my shock fading and reality settling in, I wonder if it was a massive mistake. Another hit of the drug I can’t seem to resist.
In a party of addicts, does anyone ever say stop?
Marcus’s expression is serious, and his gaze drops to the proprietary way Ryland is holding my arm, something flickering in his eyes.
Then he gestures toward a worn couch in the middle of the room. Ryland directs me toward it, sinking onto the cushions next to me, and Theo and Marcus sit on the heavy-looking wooden coffee table in front of it, putting us all in a rough circle.
Marcus’s gaze travels up and down my body, and I get the sense that even though they’ve all had plenty of time to examine me while I slept, he’s still checking me for signs of injury. Not finding anything other than the red marks left by the bands of tape, he steeples his fingers together and rests his forearms on his thighs.
“What happened, angel? From the minute we left my house until the minute we found you. I need you to tell me everything that happened.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I thought I was about to get some goddamn answers here, and instead, I’m getting more questions.
But from the grave look in his eyes, I think the answers I’m so desperate for are coming soon. So I tell him what he wants to know, starting at the beginning.
“Nothing happened for a long time after you left. I watched movies. Cooked meals. Took a couple baths.”
A flash of something warm and possessive sparks in Marcus’s eyes, like he’s enjoying the image of me making myself at home in his house, but he doesn’t interrupt me as I continue.
“I’d actually just gotten out of the bath when Natalie texted me. She told me our building was on fire, and I thought she was just fucking with me at first, but then she showed me. It was burning.” My stomach clenches as I wonder if any part of the structure was saved. With everything that’s happened, I’ve barely even spared a thought for it until now, but I very well may be homeless. All my possessions may be gone.
“What the fuck?” Theo mutters.
I nod, trying to think about all of this as if it happened to someone else. It’s easier to think logically if I pretend it’s not my life we’re talking about.
“I…” My gaze catches Ryland’s as he leans forward a little on the couch, listening intently. “My whole life is in that apartment. Every possession I own. I don’t know what I thought I could do, but I wanted to be there. I wanted to help. So I drove over.”
Marcus nods. “And?”
“And when I got there, Natalie was there too. Of course she was. Her apartments were already burning, and she told me we were supposed to wait across the street.” I lick my lips, feeling an echo of the sharp zing of pain at my neck. “Someone injected me with something. Carson, I think. Natalie lured me right to him.”
All three men are focused entirely on me, and there’s so much fury in their features that I rush to continue, wanting to get everything out before one of them explodes.
“I woke up in the room you found me in. Carson was there, and a guy he called Dom.”
“Dominic Roth,” Marcus growls. “That slimy little fucker.”
I’m not surprised the men know him. The way he talked to Carson about them, it’s clear Dominic knows them too.
“I was taped to a chair,” I add. “They were talking about setting you up. About using me as bait, and how you’d come for me.”
Ryland makes a noise deep in his chest, like the angry warning a bull gives right before it gores someone. Given what he just said to me in the bedroom, I can only imagine how much rage he’s feeling—toward Carson and probably toward himself and his two friends. What happened to me today is exactly what he was trying to avoid by pressuring Marcus to stay away from me.
But none of them did.
And now we’re all facing the fallout of that.
I don’t know anymore whether to be angry at these men for bringing utter chaos into my life or grateful to them for all the times they’ve saved my life, so I push past the churning emotions in my chest and keep reporting the events as dispassionately as I can.
Except, as soon as I open my mouth, the next words catch in my throat. The picture Carson held up less than a foot in front of my face feels like it’s been scalded into my retinas. Like I could draw the photograph from memory and not miss a single detail.
The young man’s partially obscured face, half of it hidden by shadows.
The limbs bent at odd angles.
The gray shirt soaked in blood.
“He showed me a picture,” I say slowly, my voice hoarse. “Of a dead man. He told me you killed him. Devin Brooks.”
My gaze flashes up to meet Marcus’s as I speak.
I expect him to deny it. Whether it’s true or not, I’m sure he’ll tell me he’s innocent.
But he doesn’t.
He holds my gaze steadily for several long beats, and the silence has already given me my answer long before he finally speaks. “Yeah. I did.”
My chest tightens, my stomach clenching. Well, didn’t Carson tell me I was wrong? That I’d trusted the wrong people?
“He told me I saved a murderer,” I murmur roughly. “That you killed him in cold blood.”
“Fuck. Tell her, man.” Theo shakes his head, running a hand through his hair. “We have to tell her. Everything.”
Marcus is still staring at me. He hasn’t looked away since I first said the name Devin Brooks—hell, I don’t even think he’s blinked. I’m not even sure he’s really seeing me though. I can practically hear the gears grinding in his head, and after a long moment, he looks to Ryland with a question in his gaze.
“We have to,” Ryland says, and I can hear the regret in his voice. “It’s too late for anything else. It’s too late.”
I hold absolutely still, torn between leaning forward eagerly and pulling away. I know the three men have been keeping secrets from me, and a desperation to understand them burns hot and bright in my chest.
But I also know that this will change everything.
Right now, it might still be possible for Ryland to get his wish. For the three of them and me to tear our lives free from each other, to separate and go our own ways. To never see each other again.
To pretend none of this ever happened.
I can’t do that though. I may not bear the marks of the past several weeks as obviously as the scars from the bullet wounds in my chest, but that doesn’t make them any less real.
And these aren’t marks on my body.
They’re marks on my soul.
These men have infected me. Changed me. And I can’t ever go back to who I was before.
Maybe Ryland’s wish was always a fucking pipe dream. Maybe it was already too late the moment the three of them first brushed by me in Club 47 all those years ago.
“Tell me,” I say.
Marcus holds my gaze for another second, then nods. “Do you recognize the name Luca D’Addario?”
I furrow my brows as I sort through my memories. “No.”
“Yeah. That’s by design. You don’t know his name, and he probably doesn’t know yours, but he affects your life on a daily basis.” Marcus straightens, leaning back a little as he holds my gaze. “He’s the man who runs this city. He controls everything here; he’s got his hands in every fucking thing. The most powerful, wealthiest families, the mafia syndicates, the politicians—they all answer to him. His power and influence go back years, and he’s fair but brutal as fuck. No one’s ever been able to unseat him from power, and the last time someone even tried was over a decade ago.”
“He’s the fucking king of Halston,” Theo puts in. “What he says goes.”
“Okay.”
I draw the word out. The thought of someone wielding that much power is vaguely terrifying, but I still don’t understand what it has to do with the three men gathered around me—or with Carson Purcell.
“Luca was married once,” Marcus goes on. “Over twenty years ago now. None of us remember the woman who was his wife, but the way our parents talk about it, he fucking worshipped her. He adored her.”
Something shifts behind his mesmerizing eyes as he speaks, and I feel heat bloom inside my chest. For a moment, it seems more like he’s talking about himself rather than this man, Luca.
“You said was married. What happened to her?” I murmur.
“She died five years after they were married.” He catches the look on my face and shakes his head. “Not violently. I’m not sure the city would’ve survived his wrath if that was the case. She wasn’t murdered. She got an aggressive form of cancer, and not even all of his power and wealth could save her. She was gone within six months of the diagnosis.”
“Someone tried to unseat him right after that,” Ryland interjects, and I glance over at him. “It was the closest anyone ever got. Her loss just about wrecked him.”
“He never remarried.” Marcus shrugs. “She was it for him. All he ever wanted.”
My chest squeezes. I don’t know this man they’re talking about at all, and given how much power he’s consolidated, he has to be hardened and ruthless. But my heart aches for him a little anyway. That kind of devotion? The kind of unending loyalty that borders on obsession?
I think I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of those kinds of emotions, and although it’s slightly terrifying, there’s something exhilarating about it too.
“They never had children,” Theo says, picking up the thread of the conversation as if all three men are speaking from one shared brain. “And Luca has never taken a mistress that anyone knows of. He has no heir.”
“He plans to step down at some point.” Marcus meets my gaze, and I lean forward, hanging on to his words. “Since he has no children of his own, he has no one to succeed him. No one to leave his empire to.”
“So he handpicked twelve of the most powerful families in the city, and each of them volunteered one of their heirs as a possible successor for Luca,” Ryland says, bitterness coating his voice.
My eyebrows fly up as the dots finally begin to connect and I realize why they’re telling me this. “You? All three of you?”
Marcus nods. “And Carson and Dominic, among others.”
“So you’ve all been put forward as possible successors for the most powerful man in the city, and that’s why Carson doesn’t like you.”
“Not quite.” Theo pulls a face. “We weren’t just put forth for Luca’s consideration, and one day he’ll pick one of us and that’s that. He wanted to make sure whoever takes his place will actually be able to keep it, just like he has for so long. So he set up a game.”
“A game?” My stomach drops a little at the way he says the word. “What does that mean?”
“It means every one of the twelve heirs he chose was set in competition with the others.” Marcus’s voice is hard. “It ends when one person has either eliminated or gained the support of all the others.”
A chill rushes through me. “Eliminated, like… killed?”
“Yeah.” Theo lets out a humorless laugh. “But Luca knew it would just be a bloodbath if he left it at that. So he set rules. We’re only allowed to openly attack each other or use violence of any kind during a seventy-two-hour period once a year. During the game.”
I blanch. What the actual fuck? That’s insane.
But so many things make sense now that didn’t before. That tense standoff in the hall between the guys and Carson, and the way he taunted them about getting their chance to come after him soon. The strange desperation in Marcus’s touch when he dragged me into the bathroom at Duke’s before telling me he had to go away for the weekend.
For three days.
Seventy-two hours.
“That’s what’s happening right now, isn’t it?” I ask, my voice paper-thin. “The game. That’s why Carson was trying to lure you out, to use me as bait. Because he’s allowed to kill you now.”
“Yeah.” Theo pulls his phone out of his pocket and glances at the screen. “For the next… five hours and forty-two minutes.”
I don’t even know how to respond to that. I don’t know how to process any of this.
“Is that what this was?” My fingers absently reach up to brush against the scar tissue on my chest, remembering the feel of bullets tearing through my skin. “A game?”
Marcus swallows, his jaw clenching. “Yes.”
Goose bumps creep over my skin. “And the man you killed? Devin. He was part of the game too?”
“Yes.”
“So you did kill him in cold blood.”
He doesn’t answer, but his silence says enough.
Oh, fuck. I wrap my arm around myself, laying my damaged one over it as if that will somehow make a strong enough barrier to keep the horror out.
“None of this is in cold blood, Rose,” Theo says quietly. “For seventy-two hours, it’s kill or be killed, and that’s all there is to it. You hesitate, you die. You let your guard down, you die. Marcus may have killed Devin, but I guarantee you Devin would’ve killed him first if he’d gotten the chance.”
That hardly eases the heavy pounding of my heart. I don’t know what the hell I expected the men to say when they agreed to explain this all to me, but it sure as fuck wasn’t this.
“How long?” I glance around at their tense faces. “How many games have there been?”
“It started when we were eighteen,” Ryland says. “So, four years.”
“How many have died?”
“Three.” Marcus is watching me carefully, and when I turn to look at him, I feel like an abyss has opened up between us—a cavernous gap filled with all the things I didn’t know about him until today. “Devin Brooks, Xavier Holt, and Benjamin Windsor.”
Which leaves nine players left. How many more years will this go on? How many more people will die before one person consolidates power?
“None of us asked for this.” Theo speaks again, and I recognize the bitterness in his voice. It’s always tinged his tone when he talks about his family, and I never knew why. “None of us wanted it. Our parents volunteered us. Luca accepted. And that was that.”
“But I don’t…” I shake my head, trying to rattle my thoughts loose. They’re stuck in a logjam on my tongue, and I can’t get all my questions out at once. “I don’t get it. How can they make you do this? You said this seventy-two hour period is when you can try to kill people if you want. But you don’t have to. Can’t you just hide out? Refuse to play?”
Marcus stands up, striding across the living room. “Yes. We could.” He turns to look at me, his gaze hard. “But a show of weakness like that can be fucking deadly. That’s what Xavier did. For two years in a row. And on the third year, four other players teamed up and went after him. Found where he was hiding and killed him on the spot.”
“There is no refusing to play.” Theo shakes his head.
“There are only three ways out,” Ryland adds quietly. “You either die, hand over your life and allegiance to someone else… or you win.”
