Beneath This Ink (Beneath #2)(72)

The sound of raised voices cut off his words, and I ran toward them.

“Vanessa!” Lucas yelled.

I slammed to a stop when I hit the threshold of Archer’s office. He was on his knees, and Con was standing over him. The barrel of the shiny, black revolver in Con’s hand was pressed against Archer’s temple.

If you’d expected Archer to be begging for mercy, you would’ve bet wrong.

He was irate.

And every insult that came out of his mouth was pushing Con closer to the edge. For a brief moment I wondered if this was the equivalent of suicide by cop. I wondered if Archer wanted Con to kill him.

If that was true, it was the coward’s way out.

“Don’t. Don’t do it. Please, Con. Don’t.” I was the only one in the room begging, it seemed.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Con’s words were calm and even—completely at odds with the fact that he was holding a gun to a man’s head.

He was someone else entirely right now. Con the soldier. Con the avenger. And I didn’t know him at all.

I had to try to talk him down; no one else was attempting to. “You shouldn’t be here either. But you are. So I am. Let’s both leave now, and we’ll figure this out. We’ll call your buddy Hennessy, and we’ll let him handle it.”

“And you’ll kiss this foundation goodbye if you get the cops involved.” Archer laughed maniacally. “You’re not as smart as I thought you were, Vanessa.”

Con dug the barrel into his temple. “Don’t talk to her. You’ll just piss me off.”

“Figures that trash like you would be reaching for something so far above yourself. You’ll never be good enough for her.”

“Shut up,” Con bit out, and a measure of his calm slid away.

“Leahy, drop the gun,” Lucas said from behind me. “It’s over. I called Hennessy. He’s coming to take Archer in.”

I was surprised by Lucas’s statement, but Con didn’t seem to care. “Then I guess I better hurry this up.”

The blood froze in my veins, and my knees gave way as Con’s finger squeezed the trigger.

I screamed as I dropped to the floor.

But there was no explosion of gunpowder and lead from the barrel. Just a single, metallic click.

Con tossed the gun to the ground next to Archer, where a puddle of acrid smelling liquid was soaking into the carpet.

Urine.

Con didn’t even look at me as he stalked out of the room.





I should’ve killed him. Should’ve left the chambers loaded. But I knew I couldn’t do it.

I sat in an Adirondack chair under the pavilion at the lake house, listening to the waves lap against the dock.

Any time now I expected Hennessy to show up with handcuffs. I didn’t come here to hide. I came here to mourn.

Regardless of what happened to me, I believed that Joy and Andre would now get their justice. Rich pricks like Archer Bennett might get away with murder on a regular basis, but from what Lucas Titan had told me, Joy and Andre weren’t the only ones he’d put a hit out on. There was no way he’d continue to walk the streets a free man once his crimes became known.

Titan had also said he would let Vanessa choose how they told the police what they’d found, but at the end of the day, he’d make sure it happened.

So as much as I wanted to hate that son of a bitch, Titan—the one I presumed was Vanessa’s Chief Fuckwit—I had to respect him.

What I did hate, though, besides knowing that Joy and Andre had lost their lives for f*cking money, was knowing that Vanessa was losing her chance at her dream. There was no way the Bennett Foundation would survive this. And that wasn’t fair to her.

The dock creaked with the weight of a person. I leaned back in my chair and swigged my whiskey. I wouldn’t resist. I would cooperate.

But the person who sat down beside me wasn’t Hennessy. It was Lord. My brother. The one I never told anyone about because he didn’t want people to know unless they figured it out themselves. He was a weird motherf*cker, but considering the shit he’d been through after we’d been separated as kids, I didn’t push him on it. That was his story to tell. Once I’d finally opened up to Joy and Andre about Lord, they’d started trying to track him down. He’d been a runaway, so finding him wasn’t easy. Andre’s private eye didn’t get a lock on him until just before I graduated from high school. Lord had popped up in the system because he’d enlisted in the Army. So I did the same.

“I was expecting the cops,” I said.

“I figured. You got me instead. Thought you’d want to know that your girl’s at the hospital.”

My hold on the whiskey bottle slipped, and I grabbed it just before it hit the wood. “What the f*ck? Is she okay?” I demanded, fighting the urge to bolt out of my seat and go to her.

“The old man collapsed after you walked out the door. I called an ER nurse I’ve been f*cking, and she filled me in. EMTs worked on him all the way to the hospital, but he didn’t make it. Probably a heart attack.”

My tensed muscles didn’t relax at his explanation. Fuck.

“So I killed him anyway.” My grip on the glass tightened, and I made myself lift my arm and take another drink. “Now I’m even more surprised the cops aren’t out here to take me in.”