Kings of Anarchy (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #3) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,192

father held by more than double. He wasn't just rich. He was fucking platinum made. It was insane and kind of sickening. I didn’t even realise one man could own so damn much.

And the more I looked into his records, the more confused I got. Because as well as his most profitable investments, Saint had also been slowly but surely accumulating shares in all of his father's companies under a host of different pseudonyms until he was in fact secretly holding a controlling portion of the shares in all of them. Every single one.

If it hadn't seemed totally crazy, I would have thought that Saint was actually working against his father, building up his control over his assets and his supporters and getting himself into a position to take everything from him in one fell swoop.

But that was unthinkable, wasn't it? The amount of work that had gone into this was hard to even fathom and I'd only sorted through a handful of the files he had here. If this really was a takedown plan then it was multi-faceted and entirely convoluted, completely overworked and containing so many details that it was insane to think that one man could have done it alone. Let alone him doing all of that while maintaining perfect grades, working out day and night, attending football practice, haunting the piano room with a skill that was scarily good, obsessing over Tatum and ruling the entire school with an iron fist.

Although now that I thought about it, I had to admit that if anyone was capable of such insane work, then it would have to be Saint Memphis.

"I want you to follow me," Saint's voice came from the balcony and I froze as I looked over at the stairs with my heart leaping at the thought of getting caught.

"Why are we going downstairs?" Tatum asked loudly and I knew that she was giving me a warning.

I quickly shut down the files I'd opened up and slammed the laptop closed, cringing at the sound it made as I ran for the door.

"I'm going to watch while you transfer a kilo of rice from one bowl to another using tweezers," Saint said just as I pulled the door open and I couldn't help but wonder why the fuck he would want her to do that just as I slipped outside and pulled the door closed.

I hesitated there for a long moment, listening to Tatum complaining that that hadn't been the kind of punishment she was imagining while Saint laughed cruelly and told her that she would do as she was told if she didn't want a worse punishment.

It fucked me off to think of her in there sorting grains of rice for the next however long, but I forced myself to walk away. It might have been a tedious task but it wasn't like it would cause her any actual harm and she'd done it to give me the chance to get this information so now all I had to do was figure out how I was going to use it.

I walked up the path while I turned it over in my mind again and again and to my utter frustration, one thought kept coming back to me which was like a damn infection in my brain that wouldn't go away.

If Saint really was working to take down his father, then he must have hated him just as truly as I did. And after the story he'd told me about that toy car, I couldn't exactly blame him for that. But if I was going to accept that Saint had every reason to want to take his father down then I had to consider the option of joining forces with him.

Because the enemy of my enemy could just be my friend.

I could sense that Blake's mood was low today as I sat beside him in classes and he barely said a word to me, even when he claimed a spot at my side. His dark aura was seeping into me too and I drank it in like a Dementor sucking on his soul. But instead of thriving on his pain, I just wanted to take it away and soothe that lasting ache inside him over the loss of a parent. A pain I knew too well myself these days.

"If we don't catch the Justice Ninja soon, I'm gonna lose it," Blake murmured to Saint on his other side, his grip tight around the edge of his iPad. Miss