Celt. (Den of Mercenaries #2)(17)

“Who is the Kingmaker to you?” Kyrnon asked, his voice low and controlled. When Calavera looked to him in surprise, he shrugged. “When people talk in circles, they’re avoiding. The question is, what about him are you avoiding?”

“Are you f*cking him?” Red asked. There was no accusation to his words, no disgust despite how much he hated the man—he was genuinely curious.

She cringed. “Of course not. He’s my brother-in-law.”

Kyrnon dropped his feet to the ground as he looked to Calavera in surprise. Unbidden, his gaze dropped to the hand she had wrapped around the bottle she held. There was no ring, he knew—he would have remembered a detail like that—but there was a tattoo on her ring finger.

A sugar skull.

Was that how she got her name?

“When the hell did you get married?”

“The Kingmaker has a brother?”

Both questions were asked simultaneously, the latter coming from Red. He looked more bothered by the possibility that the Kingmaker had siblings than what she had just revealed.

“The answer to the first is not important. To the second, their family is vast.”

Something was wrong … he could see it in the way she looked just beyond them as she spoke. She was being too careful with her words.

The question was, who was she trying to protect?

The mystery brother, or the Kingmaker?

“Is that why you’re not saying anything?” Kyrnon asked. “Protecting their secrets?”

“I only ever promised to keep my mouth shut about one of them … the other I owe a debt.”

And Kyrnon could guess to whom each belonged. He understood her loyalty, even if it frustrated him.

“But,” she added, “I can tell you that he owns us.”

“What?” Red asked, taking a black zippo lighter from his pocket, flipping the top open and shut with a flick of his thumb. “What do you mean he owns us?”

“The Den, he started it.”

“Impossible,” Kyrnon cut in. “Z has been doing this for over a decade. You want me to believe that the Kingmaker started this when he was what? Nineteen?”

Calavera shrugged. “You’ve seen what he’s capable of, what he has us do. If you think we have enemies, imagine people just as powerful as him wanting to see him dead. We’re his protection.”

That was a lot to process. Power and currency usually went hand in hand—their organization alone was worth a cool billion considering how much they were getting paid for jobs—but the idea that the Kingmaker had financed it from the start … well that set off warning bells.

In Kyrnon’s experience, those in power often didn’t know what to do with it, and would ultimately pay a heavy price for their lack of knowledge — and sometimes that price was set onto those that followed behind.

The last thing Kyrnon wanted was to answer for someone else’s shite—he had already done that once before and didn’t want to repeat the experience.

“You’re here for a meeting then, no?” Red asked, his expression curious.

Something flashed across her face, distress maybe, before it was gone entirely. “Why else?”

“Who is Elias?” Kyrnon asked.

He thought, because she had a relationship with the Kingmaker, she might have an idea as to who they were going up against, but he saw nothing in her expression that spoke to the name being familiar to her.

“I don’t know. Who is he?”

Kyrnon filled her in, with some input from Red, as to the lone occasion in which they had crossed paths with the man and all he had said—or lack thereof. With his assignment related to Elias as well, Kyrnon had to wonder whether the Kingmaker was bringing Calavera in for an assignment that had something to do with the man as well.

By the time he finished, she was nodding. “All of this for one man? I wonder why.”

“Hoping you can find out.”

Her smile was hard. “You overestimate my relationship with the man. I owe him a debt, not the other way around.”

His phone distracting him from Red’s answer to her, he quickly scanned the text, one from Amber. Earlier, he had asked what time she was getting off work, if she was free, and she was just now getting back to him with a time.

And now that he had one, he had something to look forward to.

“I should get going,” Calavera said finishing her drink, tossing the bottle in a nearby trashcan. “Let me know how the job goes, Celt.”

As quickly as they had all gathered, Calavera was out the door, with Celt following behind, but he was headed for Amber, and she was headed for someone else entirely.





Chapter Five





Behind the wheel of a rented Porsche, Luna ‘Calavera’ Santiago left the pub Red owned, heading back for her hotel on the other side of the city. Under the waning rays of sunlight, she whipped through traffic, wishing she had her Ducati instead. But because of the last minute phone call that had brought her to New York in the first place, she had chosen to take a flight, renting a car once she arrived.

Then again, she had always hated driving her bike through Manhattan—or maybe it was just that she hated this place altogether.

There was just something cold and unforgiving about the city—not to mention the memories it held.