Dark Heir by Faye Pierce
Chapter Seven
Leo
The absolute only thing keeping me from going back up into Midnight’s room is the box on the table in front of me. It arrived shortly after breakfast. I fully intended to skip down to the kitchens for some coffee, perhaps something to bring back to eat and clothes. Maybe. I had been waffling on the clothing bit.
I can’t deny that I’ve dreamt about her. Midnight is a force of a woman, and when she sets her mind to something it’s almost impossible to get her to change gears. Knowing that even my kidnapping her didn’t change her mind on me is intoxicating. Knowing that she wants me more than she wants her freedom even more so.
I didn’t lock her bedroom door last night.
Call it a fail-proof test. It’s not like she can get out of the house. It’s not like she could have even made it down the stairs, though I don’t think I would have minded chasing her if she had tried. When I asked her to get on the bed...I saw her thinking about it. I saw her deliberating as to whether or not she should listen. The desire to defend herself, to return to her family is strong, as is how much her brother means to her. She will do anything for him. Last night makes me think that perhaps I might rank that high as well.
I kept expecting her to push back, or to attempt to sneak out from underneath me while I lay next to her, but she passed out. She looked so happy next to me I never wanted to leave her. I felt bad. I wanted to be there when she wakes up, but my work is far from over.
I saw Angelo bring the package inside the moment I hit the foot of the stairs. I don’t have to open it to know what’s inside. I know because I watched Caspian send so many little ‘gifts’ like that in the last handful of years. I would recognize that seal anywhere. I learned so much about Caspian, and what’s inside of that box will be tokens stolen from my men, those brave men that were taken in the first half of the raid from yesterday.
I motion to Angelo with my head to bring the box into my office. It’s a quaint little study, but I like how close the walls feel to me. The desk is small, and the chairs around it almost feel cramped with the bookcases on the walls. It’s not the evil villain’s lair that my father once occupied upstairs. Not that I ever got to see him in it. I’ve gleaned quite a lot from his personal notes since inheriting this place. I tried to keep his office for myself, as if sitting at the chair behind his desk might make me feel like less of the bastard son whose mother hid him from his true father for so long. I thought that if I could sit where he sat, that his shoes, his legacy might be easier to step into.
It wasn’t.
I learned quickly on my revenge journey that I needed to find a way to honor him, not imitate him.
Angelo sets the package in front of me with steady hands. I can tell he’s upset, but I don’t comment on it. It’s an unspoken rule between us. We don’t ask for too many personal details, and I’m not going to ask him about his feelings. This transition is difficult for many, but I know what I’m doing.
I scrub my hand down my face, deliberating for only a moment before picking up a knife from my desk, flipping the blade in my hand with practiced ease as I loosen the seal. The smell hits me first, and Angelo takes a half step back.
“He’s a persistent bastard, I’ll give him that.” I mutter, looking at the ‘gift’ that Caspian has sent to me. It’s a gruesome little reminder that he’s not afraid to play dirty to get back what he feels is his. Well, jokes on him. Midnight is mine now. She swore. The vision of her lithe little body in my arms, falling to pieces all over again flashes before my eyes, and I shift in my chair. Midnight belongs to me, just like all the rest of this town soon will. “Where was this package delivered?”
“It was left in the warehouse sir.”
Good. Then he’s not any closer to finding out where Midnight and I are. I bet it’s eating him alive.
Caspian and his new money aren’t going to win this battle. My family is old. Bastard or not I’m going to claim my throne, and I’m going to do it with Midnight at my side. I’m not sure exactly when I decided this last night. Sometime as I watched her open defiance and self-restraint crumble. It might have been the way she shuddered around my cock as she came. Or the adorable little way she panted my name.
Though, if I’m fully honest, I’ve wanted her to be mine since I met her.
Now I have her, and I’m never letting her go.
I glance down at the box full of severed fingers so artfully packaged for me, wax sealed from Caspian himself. A brutal little signature move I’ve seen him do countless times. He knows that anybody who sees this message will know it came directly from him. That is something he and I have in common. We don’t like to let other people speak for us. Using the knife, I push aside the severed fingers for the blood-soaked letter at the bottom, ‘Soon’ it reads.
How can Caspian not have seen this coming? How did he not know that two men as strong as we are can never work together? Certainly not long-term. I thought maybe he was just arrogant, but perhaps it’s just that he’s never been betrayed before. It’s a painful lesson I’m only too happy to teach him.
“Curious, though, that his little gift isn’t addressed to me specifically.” I flip the thing over in my hand to be sure. “If he knew it was me, there’s no way the contents in this package wouldn’t be doubled. There’s no way that he wouldn’t be tearing the city apart looking for me.”
Not that I’m in the city, but that’s beside the point.
“He knows the DePonte family is making moves against him,” I speak aloud to myself; it helps me think. “He knows that I’ve betrayed him, but he thinks I’m working for somebody. He hasn’t put two and two together yet, and that can work in my favor. In all of our favors.”
Planning this has taken me years. It’s been countless small things leading up to this, and now that it’s happening, I almost wish it would slow down, just a little. I have to move quickly here. There are only small windows of opportunity in which I can take Caspian out, topple his whole family and the network of employees and people underneath him that he’s built.
I cannot come at him directly. The reveal of who I am, and why this is happening to him will be the biggest blow. Well, the second biggest blow. The first will be when he finds out about Midnight and himself.
She won’t return home so easily now. She swore. She can’t possibly return to Caspian, brother or no brother.
There’s a small sliver of doubt that flickers in my mind. I can’t leave it up to her. I will not risk having her leave me.
“Angelo,” I call, beckoning him in from the other room.
“Sir?” He knew some of the owners of these fingers. He’s itching to get back at the Knight family. That’s another thing that Angelo and I have in common, we don’t let anything go. We have a shared bloodlust paired with fragile tempers. He’s not going to let this stand, and I can trust him to take care of what I’m asking him. I almost feel bad for those poor souls at the casino.
“Fancy a game of chance, Angelo?”
“I’m not sure that I follow…”
Smart as he is, he’s enraged. We all know there are risks involved in our line of work. Our lives are not for the meek. Still, it doesn’t lessen the sting any. Angelo didn’t handle the news well. He didn’t say anything to me, but I can see the depth of his pain clearly written in his red-rimmed eyes. As my cousin, Angelo is a DePonte himself, and the closest to an actual family I have. We might not have grown up together, but he understands my responsibility. His father, my uncle, was my sire’s right-hand man, and I intend to honor the tradition. But Angelo will have to learn to accept my decisions. Even if he doesn’t always understand them.
“I would like you to head down to the Maple Root Casino on Elder and Vine.” I lower myself into my chair. “Caspian has used that facility as a money-laundering operation for years. It’s connected to three smaller venues in the city that they exchange bills into and out of. It’s a major hub of operation and as you know, the second phase of our plan. I need you to give the signal to the boys to head down there and have a little bit of fun. Gamble, indulge in the show and the booze...and then I want them to level it to the ground and bring me each and every one of Caspian’s men that they find inside there. Am I understood?”
Angelo smiles slowly, the knuckles in his fist cracking as he nods. “With pleasure, Sir.”
Angelo turns and nearly leaves the room, but I stop him before he turns the corner. “One more thing, Angelo.”
“Yes, Sir?”
Losing an establishment of this size is going to be a big blow to Caspian. I want to do more than just cripple him. I want to pull his feet out from beneath him and leave him in the dirt. I want to ruin him. I want to break his heart and ruin any chance of happiness that he will ever have.
“I need you to send for a pastor, justice of the peace—and have an official marriage license drawn up. I’ve decided to make my dear Midnight an honest woman, of sorts.”
“What? Excuse me for speaking out of turn, Sir, but that’s a terrible idea! She’s a Knight, she’s just as bad as her brother is!”
“Watch your tongue.” My tone is lethal, and Angelo stops in his tracks. “That’s my bride you’re talking about.”
“We are supposed to—you, the DePonte legacy, are supposed to be making a grand return, not forming alliances with the Knights.”
I cut him off. “Make no mistake, there will be no alliance to be had. I said that I’m marrying her; she is mine to do with as I please. It’s just another blow to the soon to be fallen Knight family. I’m going to eradicate his entire line. Can you think of a better way to do that, than by stealing his precious sister from him?”
“I’m going to offer you my opinion, Leo, and I know that you didn’t ask for it, and you probably don’t want it, but this is a really fucking bad idea,” Angelo says.
“You’re right. I don’t want your opinion, cousin; I know what I’m doing.”
Angelo looks like he wants to say something else but then thinks better of it.
In the time that I lived with Caspian and the Knights, I had no choice but to delegate a good amount of tasks to Angelo. He’s never second-guessed me; he greeted me like a brother from the moment he learned who I was. I’ve made countless connections, proven myself over and over again. I’ve earned this spot and even successfully played a double agent in the only other family that could risk being a threat to my future legacy. There is no reason for my cousin to doubt me now, and I think he connects the same dots that I am in his mind as he looks at me and nods. He will get this done.
Angelo leaves and I use the blade of the knife to close the box on my desk. I’ll have somebody take it to be burned, write letters to their families. Their deaths will not be in vain. This is war, and I am going to win, a large, swift, sweeping victory. That father-murdering bastard will pay; it’s so close that I can taste it.
I don’t have much left of my mother. She wasn’t a good woman to me. Of course, never was cruel to me either. She simply was indifferent in all of the worst ways. She didn’t guide me into a better life; she just attempted to keep me from the life my father was in. Why? I never got the chance to ask her. I suppose she told herself she was only doing what was best for me, or her version of what was best for me. My mother was happy enough to accept the money when she told my father that I exist. The mafia found me anyway, well before I knew my place in this dark underbelly of a world.
Though, I do have the ring that I think was intended to be my mother’s, another gem I found nestled among my father’s things when I was settling his estate and getting the lay of this massive house. I can easily fit every house my mother ever moved us to into this house that is now my giant, spacious home. I wonder why my father bought my mother a ring. Did he love her? Did she love him? More questions to keep me awake at night, endlessly pondering the hypotheticals. Answers I will never get because of Caspian.
I pull the diamond ring from the inside of my desk. I wonder if Midnight will like it? I flip open the ring box. The diamond is huge, and the small blue sapphires set into the band will suit her perfectly. She does need a ring after all.
I’m going to put this ring on Midnight’s finger, and she’s going to make good on her promise to me. I don’t know how she feels this morning; I don’t know if she’s going to do something stupid like an attempt to fight me on this.
I snap the ring box shut, tapping the velvet-covered box against my chin, and shake my head. I never thought about having a wife, but now that I’ve suggested it out loud, I can’t think of anything more perfect. Everything is going according to plan.