Finally, she said, “You’re here because of the girl.”
It was a statement and the correct one. I was here because of London. I’d never willingly see Mother unless I had to and she knew it.
I’d still be the numb, unemotional killer the farm made me if I hadn’t met London. Mother thought we were more dangerous if we had no attachments, no feelings toward anything or anyone.
She was wrong. I was a lot more dangerous now because I had something to lose.
“Yes. It’s time we get this out in the open, Mother.” Because it may be our last opportunity. “I clearly remember telling you a few years ago that I’d look after the situation and I did. She wasn’t going to the police. But you had to go behind my back and make it your situation. I gave her father two months.”
“He knew the deadline and he was delaying. And Kai, that was years ago. It no longer matters.”
Oh, it fuckin’ mattered. “We needed the drug. He needed two more months. You agreed to give him that.” She didn’t say anything. “Then after a week, you took his daughter and shipped her off to Raul. In fuckin’ Mexico. Dr. Westbrook was under control.”
The corners of her lips curved upward and despite the urge to smack her across the face, I met her with a smile of my own.
“I didn’t realize you knew where we sent her. Interesting.” She full-out smiled, flashing her pearl-white teeth that matched her choker necklace. “Did you go see her, Kai? Fuck her as a slave?”
I did go to Mexico and try to get her out, but shit went wrong and I lost her then spent the next two fuckin’ years searching for her again. Of course, Vault didn’t know that. “We don’t deal with men like Raul. And you don’t interfere with my work.”
“You fucked her, Kai.”
“I fuck lots of women. I’m a man,” I said.
“For a week.”
I shrugged. “She was good.” I suspected it had been my frequent flights from Toronto to New York that had tipped her off. Even though I’d been assigned to watch London’s father, Dr. Westbrook, I’d gone more often than necessary.
“And better now, I imagine. Or at least obedient.”
Fuckin’ bitch. I resisted taking my knife and gutting her. Instead, I chuckled, but it was harsher than I wanted and I suspected she knew she’d gotten to me. “Why did you do it?”
But I guessed the answer. Because I’d been with London. I hadn’t just fucked her. I’d been with her for a week and Mother had found out and didn’t like it. So, she wanted to destroy London, and she had succeeded. She’d stripped her dignity and left her broken, a shell of a girl with nothing remaining of the woman I’d been with.
Mother would’ve thought that was the end of it. Another girl lost in the sickening world of sex trafficking. Vault was rarely involved in that type of criminal activity, except to take out the individuals who became problematic. I volunteered for those jobs.
I’d never fuck a girl who was trained to please me and I certainly didn’t get off on forcing one to suck my cock. I got off on a girl begging for it with desire smoldering in her eyes.
Mother tapped her finger on the top of the pile of papers. “You’re a lot like your father. Intelligent and arrogant. Women are drawn to you… like this girl.”
“London.” She really had an issue with London.
She shrugged her slender shoulders draped in a black suit jacket. “Her name is no longer significant.”
Fuck. They were going to kill her. I kept my face impassive, the way I’d practiced in the mirror a million times before when I was a kid.
A branch scratched against the stained-glass window to the right, and then I felt the slight breeze as the air leaked through the seams of the window. Still leaning against the desk, I crossed my ankles and lowered my head, appearing not to care about what she just revealed, but inside I was a crackling fire. The building rage played with my control, but if I reacted I would destroy my chances of getting what I needed from her.
“She must have been good in bed for you to come here and beg for her life.”
I scoffed, shaking my head with a half-smile. “I don’t beg.”
I knew her all too well. The way her spine stiffened, indiscernible to most, but it was there all the same. Fuck, I’d been studying her gestures at every opportunity since the day she brutally killed my father in front of the Vault board members, my sister and me. It was that day I realized the core of her was far worse than an unloving mother. She was pure evil.
She’d shoved her knife up between his ribs and watched him die. And the entire time, her face remained the same—expressionless. But there was one thing that gave her away… the twitch of her right leg. She did it when she was upset. Not sad. My mother was incapable of sorrow; no, it had been disappointment in my father.