Dark Favors

When I had invited her to stay with me, I had completely expected her to turn down the offer, but she’d thought about it for all of two seconds, and then she’d grinned, and she’d nodded.

“Fuck yeah! When can I move in?”

The rest had been history.

I went into my office and sat down at the computer. Reaching for the flash drive I kept in my pocket, I slid it into the USB port and loaded up the information I had. This wasn’t the only copy of this information. I had a second flash drive that was safely at the bank, as it should be. You could never be too careful, especially when you were dealing with wild men.

That was the problem, really.

I was dealing with a wild man.

The folders that popped up on my computer were filled with documents. I had news articles and copies of emails and I had text messages sent from my sister’s phone. I had everything.

But I still didn’t have the answers I was looking for.

Until now.

Paige was the key to everything. She was the missing link I’d been searching for. She was the reason I was going to be able to take down Josiah Reagan once and for all, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he owned a competing company. It didn’t matter that he was trying to take over the real estate businesses that existed in Ruby City. I didn’t give a shit if he made more money than me.

The only thing I cared about was my sister.

The only thing I cared about was the fact that he was the reason she was dead.

Leaning back in my chair, I looked through the news reports. They were so vague, even at the time. Usually, the first news reports that come out are raw. They have blanket data that’s later cultivated and refined. Over time, stories change. Sometimes information is added; sometimes, it’s taken away.

In the case of my sister, the story was buried.

It shouldn’t have been.

Rebecca was the daughter of a real estate tycoon. My father, Adam Locke, might have already been dead when she passed away, but he’d built an incredible company. The two of us, together, had been able to do what no other father-son duo in the city had been able to accomplish.

We’d made something great, and Josiah Reagan had tried to take it all away.

And he’d tried to do it by killing my sister.

Rebecca had always been nosey. I was of the firm belief that every little sister in the world was nosey. It was part of their code of conduct, I thought. She’d made the mistake of extending her nosiness to other places, though.

She’d started writing a paper in college about powerful men in the city, and since the most influential person after our father was Josiah Reagan, she’d set her sights on him.

At first, the paper had been harmless. She’d written a brief biography, talked about his work history, and even had a paragraph or two about Annabelle herself. Then Rebecca had started noticing little discrepancies in the articles she’d read about him. She’d discovered that there had never been any books published about Josiah Reagan, despite the fact that two different authors had started writing them.

Both of those writers had died, committing suicide before finishing their manuscripts.

Rebecca thought that was more than a little bit odd, and she’d started digging. The problem with digging was that most of the time, the dirt you found just crumbled away. Sometimes, though, sometimes your shovel hit something that you couldn’t wish away. Sometimes you discovered something that would change everything.

That had been Rebecca’s downfall.

She’d learned something about Josiah Reagan: something bad. She’d discovered, through all of her nosiness and her type-A personality that was driving her to get the top grade in the class, that Josiah Reagan had not always been the most faithful person. He hadn’t been the most loyal. He certainly hadn’t been the most moral.

Josiah Reagan, in fact, had a dirty little secret, and despite nearly three decades of keeping it quiet, a college senior working on her undergraduate degree had managed to learn all about it, and she’d threatened to expose everything.

Josiah Reagan, king of Ruby City, had an illegitimate daughter: one he wanted to keep a secret.

One he was willing to kill for.

Chapter 13

Paige