as Riley's, and his eyes were such a dark gray they almost looked black. The urge to cower under his hooded stare was strong, and it wasn't until Dylan got between us with a snap of "Enough, Beck," that I was able to breathe freely again.
Riley sat in Dylan's chair, so she was right across from me. As soon as she settled, the other two relaxed, like Riley was their sun, and they orbited around her. I wondered what it would be like to have that sort of relationship with anybody.
"Hi," she said, examining me, her eyes no doubt picking up all the ways I looked like shit as her gaze ran across my face. "I'm Riley Deboise."
She didn't hold out her hand, and I didn't offer mine. "I'm Brooklyn Lawson."
"I know. I have an entire file on you."
Of course she fucking did. "Nice," I said, keeping my voice casual. "And I have an entire Times Youngest Billionaire article on you. I'm assuming both are correct and accurate."
Her lips twitched, and she seemed to relax forward a little. "Hmmm, not exactly the mouse that Dylan described you as."
Ouch, that fucking hurt.
I felt his eyes on my face, no doubt taking in my reaction to that, so I forced the pain not to show and didn’t look his way once. I just stared at Riley, unblinking. My stare did nothing to intimidate her as she relaxed into her chair, fingers steepling in front of her. "Let me break it down for you, Brooklyn. Delta dabbles in a lot of shit, so much that I don't even know half of it. But we have a very strong interest in weapons—namely the manufacture and distribution of them."
This didn't sound good, and it cemented my terrible feeling about what Blake had done.
"Now, when our parents ran the company, they were more interested in the illegal distribution of said weapons. But we've been cleaning that shit up, and we're mostly above board now."
Mostly. That almost made me smile. Riley would have been more than a little likeable in, you know, different circumstances.
"Your brother stole a prototype weapon of mass destruction." There was a beat of silence after this as she let the horror of that sink in. "We’d just stolen it ourselves from the creator, deep in Mexico, with the aim of getting it out of the public marketplace. But then it went missing during one of his transports."
I blinked because the previous black-suited assholes had been harping on about files, not a weapon of mass destruction. But seriously… The world was so seriously fucked. Blake had absolutely no morals when it came to murdering people and would let the world burn for more money and power.
Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward. "I don't have any weapons."
She nodded. "Oh, we know. The weapon has been recovered, but Blake gave us intel that you were the one who set the entire venture up and downloaded the blueprint from our servers. These blueprints will allow more of these weapons to be manufactured."
She crossed her arms, staring me down, and I mimicked her pose because I was about fucking done today.
"My brother is a lying asshole. I'm eighteen years old; what the fuck would I want with a weapon of mass destruction?"
Riley tilted her head like that was the stupidest thing she'd ever heard. "It could be worth billions on the open market."
I mimicked her again because we were playing some stupid game at this point. "If you have a file on me, you should see that I leave my house to go to school and nothing else."
Except those few times I’d snuck out to fuck Dylan, and if that came back to bite me in the ass again, then... maybe, for the first time, I might wish I'd never met him.
Riley just stared at me, her face totally impassive. And she didn't blink once... not one damn time. It took everything in my power not to squirm under her gaze.
"I call bullshit," Beck muttered in a deep rumble. "Never leaving your house only makes you more suspicious, not less."
Riley's eyes were still locked on mine, but her nostrils flared slightly as she inhaled. "I'm inclined to agree."
"Cut it the fuck out, you two," Dylan snapped, his voice like a crack of thunder that allowed me to jerk free of Riley's gaze. "You're both being assholes, and it's not cute. Brooklyn didn't mastermind this theft, and you damn well know it."