In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(58)
“Oh, how selective your memory.” Asad smiled like a shark, all teeth and no feeling. “Wasn’t it you who begged me for a job that would pay enough for you to retire from this nasty business?”
In learning to live between his parents’ two worlds, Asad had perfected the ability to live in both. He took the wealth he’d inherited from having been born a Grafton and invested it into deals with the contacts he made from being his mother’s son. Asad’s public business ventures were simply fronts for his private enterprises. Namely drugs, guns, the slave trade, and, most recently, piracy.
“I never thought you’d put me in the direct line of fire,” Sharif informed his father coldly. For a long minute, Asad simply stared at him. It was somewhat like being a wounded gazelle, watched by a lazy, satiated lion. You knew there was the potential for quick, painful death, but there was the eternal hope the big cat wouldn’t deign to expend the energy.
Finally, Asad spread his arms, indicating the luxury of the room around him. “Do you think I got all this from staying safely behind the line? From never taking my chances and facing the Reaper?”
“I only meant that—”
“Enough!” Asad bellowed, and Sharif briefly closed his eyes as the sound echoed like a dropped anvil behind his fevered brow. “None of this matters now. The operation was a failure, so the only course is to move forward. But first you must leave here. You can’t be seen with me.”
“And why would anyone ever think to look for me here, father,” he snarled the word. “No one knows of our relationship.”
Like his father before him, Asad Grafton had made a voyage to Africa, and there met a beautiful, exotic woman. But unlike his father before him, Asad had refused to publically acknowledge the child that resulted from the brief, tumultuous affair. Sharif didn’t even known he had a father until he was old enough to attend school. Then his mother shipped him to England where, with the benefaction of Asad Grafton’s money, he received an education—and nothing more.
“Nor will they ever know of our relationship,” Asad said with infuriating unconcern. “Especially now that your face is in the system. And speaking of that, you need to leave England. Immediately. Go to a non-extradition country and have surgery to change your appearance. We’ll get you a new identity, that’s easy enough.” He waved his hand like the forging of passports, personal histories, birth certificates, and any other such legal documents was inconsequential. Which, for a man of his resources and power, was probably true.
“I will,” Sharif agreed easily, because that’d been part of his plan all along. “But first I need all the information you can give me on Rebecca Reichert.”
“What?” Asad frowned. “Why would you need that?”
Again he lifted his hand, ignoring its protest at the movement. “Because she must pay for this.”
“Ah. But revenge for such an insignificant wound seems a bit self-indulgent, don’t you think?”
“Insignificant!” he raged. “I’m permanently disfigured! This isn’t something a plastic surgeon can fix!”
“Yes, but you can hardly blame the woman. From the reports I’ve received, you had a weapon to her head, threatening to throw her over the side of the tanker. Did you expect her to go willingly?”
How Asad came by his information, Sharif would dearly love to know. The man was like a God, endowed with omnipotence.
“She insulted me at every turn. Surely, you of all people understand that I cannot let that stand.”
“She’s American,” Asad declared, as if that excused her behavior.
“She’s a mouthy bitch, and I want her silenced, permanently.”
“Mmm.” Again with that indulgent, knowing smile. It’d always made Sharif’s skin crawl. Now was no exception. “And in what way will you make her suffer before you silence her permanently?”
“I don’t know, father,” he sneered. “Perhaps I’ll make her suffer the same way you made my mother suffer.”
Sharif had been finishing his sixth year at boarding school when his mother made her first trip to England to visit him. She’d been weak and haggard, a mere shadow of the beautiful woman he’d left behind.
The civil war in Somalia had decimated the country and left its population starving and destitute. He hadn’t known it at the time, but his mother had been desperate. And that desperation had led to her death, because she badly misjudged Asad Grafton. When she tried to blackmail Asad, promising to go public with the story of his illegitimate son, Asad simply responded as he responded to any obstacle in his path, decisively and permanently.
Coming back to the dormitory where his mother promised to await him following his last class, Sharif had arrived to find his father waiting instead. On the drive to the hotel, he’d been deliriously happy, thinking his parents were going to get married, thinking his father would save his mother and make everything all right.
As it turned out, the salvation of Nadifa Garane was the very last thing on Asad’s mind.
To teach his son the lesson that no one crossed Asad Grafton and lived to tell about it, his father tied him to a chair in an opulent room at the Savoy in London and made Sharif watch as he first raped and then strangled his mother.
It was a lesson Sharif learned well, but even with the fear of his father’s vicious disapproval, he could think of nothing save making Rebecca Reichert pay for what she’d done to him.