They’ll also be offered a guest sitting position at the next council meeting. Do you know what that means?”
His nostrils flared on the last question.
I could barely process everything he was telling me.
I shook my head. “No.”
“That means they’ll have a chance at tripling their financial assets. I am creating one entire hold over Canada and over half the Midwest in the States, and I will keep expanding, because that’s how my mind works. In seven years, I will eliminate three of those council members and replace them with my siblings, giving us almost an entire monopoly over the council. I know my enemies. I know my obstacles, and I am already making moves to take on or move with the families in Chicago, then Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York. Once I have a firm hold on the East Coast, I will begin looking to the West Coast. Are you understanding what I’m telling you?”
“Yes,” I grated out, feeling an inordinate amount of pressure building in my head and chest. My heartbeat was pounding. “You’re a calculating bastard. That’s nothing new to me.”
“My plan was always to seduce you.”
I—what?
He said those words so softly and suddenly. Then he waited, stepping back, watching for my reaction.
I…
A second.
Another.
Five more.
“What?” I choked out. He couldn’t have said those words.
But he had, and he repeated them, a wall over his face. “My plan was to seduce you. Make you fall in love with me. Use you to insert my position in your father’s company. And it worked perfectly.”
“What?!”
I couldn’t process that. He was saying— “This was all a lie?”
But no. It couldn’t have been.
Was it?
No, no, no. Panic rose up in me.
How he’d been kind to me. How he held me. How he touched me.
How he’d seduced me.
But…
I couldn’t breathe.
My chest constricted inside of me.
My heart squeezed. I was having a heart attack.
I crumbled, bending over and pressing my forehead to my knees. Breathe in. Breathe out. I kept trying to repeat to myself, but it wasn’t working. Everything swirled into a mess in my head. Pain laced through me, all the way to my fingertips and toes.
“You can’t do this. I—was it all a lie?!”
Fuck it. I shoved to my feet, advancing on him.
He watched me come, not moving, not saying a word.
“Tell me!”
His jaw clenched. “You should hate me.”
“That’s for me to decide. And anyway, I can change my mind. I can go back. I can hide, you fucking asshole!”
“You can’t, actually.”
“What?”
“I’ve already sent paperwork and proof of life to the courts. In two hours, you will be declared alive. If you leave and try to hide again, I’ll declare an international manhunt for you. I will find you, no matter where you go.”
He would. He could. He was the only one.
A new feeling of helplessness and powerlessness flooded in, making the room spin around me.
“I have to be there. I have to go to court for that…” Right?
“You don’t. I have your double going to court in your place—the one we used when Blade tried to get you back. She’ll have an imprint of your prints on her fingers, and I’ve already had blood tests done.” A small hesitation. “I’m sorry for that. If you’d like, I can have her attend the Bello emergency board meeting, if you decide to fight me on this.”
“Why?” I shook my head. “Why are you doing this? Saying this? Being like this?”
He was so fucking cold. A stranger. He was the Kai he’d been when I first met him.
He didn’t answer. I saw a flicker in his eyes, but it was gone. He hardened again. “Because it’s time this charade ends.”
God.
“I don’t want you anymore,” he added, finishing me.
I couldn’t breathe.
Sliding to the ground, I gasped for air. My lungs had closed in on themselves, like my whole world.
“You are free to leave here, but you cannot leave Milwaukee,” Kai said, his voice coming from farther away. “A car will be downstairs for you. It’ll take you to your father’s estate. There’s staff there waiting for you, a Claude, if memory serves me correctly.”
The door opened. “If you try to defy me and disappear or return to the 411 Network, I will kill your previous two roommates. If you wish to speak to your father before he dies, you have the next hour to do that. The guards will show you the way.”
And with that, the door shut, and I was left alone. Destroyed.