Bennett Mafia(113)
I moved in a flash, going to him.
He flinched, moving away.
“Kai.” Pain wracked through me. I reached for him again.
“No!” He moved farther away, glaring at me. “Stop it. Stop acting like you’re okay with all this. I am yanking you into this prison I live in. You’re letting me! Stop accepting everything I’m doing to you.”
He paused, bit out a curse, and in a second was in front of me. His hands cupped my head, his fingers sliding through my hair, and he tilted me back to look at him as he gazed down. He closed his eyes for a moment, seeming to gather strength, and then he began to speak.
“As soon as Brooke went to you, I started planning. I knew I would kill your father. I knew I would replace him with you. I knew I would wipe out half the council. I knew I would kill Barnes. I have moved on his family. This morning, the FBI will arrest half of his family. My men will kill the other half. In the chaos and sudden absence of the Barnes family, my men will move in and take hold of their assets. There is another mafia family in Milwaukee, and they will receive a bribe from the Bennett family. Tanner is here, heading everything up. Tanner will inform this other family that we’ve moved in, that we have holdings in the Bello Company—a company they have wanted to push in on for the last thirty years. They’ll also be offered a guest sitting position at the next council meeting. Do you know what that means?”
His nostrils flared on the last question.
I could barely process everything he was telling me.
I shook my head. “No.”
“That means they’ll have a chance at tripling their financial assets. I am creating one entire hold over Canada and over half the Midwest in the States, and I will keep expanding, because that’s how my mind works. In seven years, I will eliminate three of those council members and replace them with my siblings, giving us almost an entire monopoly over the council. I know my enemies. I know my obstacles, and I am already making moves to take on or move with the families in Chicago, then Pittsburgh, Boston, and New York. Once I have a firm hold on the East Coast, I will begin looking to the West Coast. Are you understanding what I’m telling you?”
“Yes,” I grated out, feeling an inordinate amount of pressure building in my head and chest. My heartbeat was pounding. “You’re a calculating bastard. That’s nothing new to me.”
“My plan was always to seduce you.”
I—what?
He said those words so softly and suddenly. Then he waited, stepping back, watching for my reaction.
I…
A second.
Another.
Five more.
“What?” I choked out. He couldn’t have said those words.
But he had, and he repeated them, a wall over his face. “My plan was to seduce you. Make you fall in love with me. Use you to insert my position in your father’s company. And it worked perfectly.”
“What?!”
I couldn’t process that. He was saying— “This was all a lie?”
But no. It couldn’t have been.
Was it?
No, no, no. Panic rose up in me.
How he’d been kind to me. How he held me. How he touched me.
How he’d seduced me.
But…
I couldn’t breathe.
My chest constricted inside of me.
My heart squeezed. I was having a heart attack.
I crumbled, bending over and pressing my forehead to my knees. Breathe in. Breathe out. I kept trying to repeat to myself, but it wasn’t working. Everything swirled into a mess in my head. Pain laced through me, all the way to my fingertips and toes.
“You can’t do this. I—was it all a lie?!”
Fuck it. I shoved to my feet, advancing on him.
He watched me come, not moving, not saying a word.
“Tell me!”
His jaw clenched. “You should hate me.”
“That’s for me to decide. And anyway, I can change my mind. I can go back. I can hide, you fucking asshole!”
“You can’t, actually.”
“What?”
“I’ve already sent paperwork and proof of life to the courts. In two hours, you will be declared alive. If you leave and try to hide again, I’ll declare an international manhunt for you. I will find you, no matter where you go.”
He would. He could. He was the only one.
A new feeling of helplessness and powerlessness flooded in, making the room spin around me.
“I have to be there. I have to go to court for that…” Right?
“You don’t. I have your double going to court in your place—the one we used when Blade tried to get you back. She’ll have an imprint of your prints on her fingers, and I’ve already had blood tests done.” A small hesitation. “I’m sorry for that. If you’d like, I can have her attend the Bello emergency board meeting, if you decide to fight me on this.”
“Why?” I shook my head. “Why are you doing this? Saying this? Being like this?”
He was so fucking cold. A stranger. He was the Kai he’d been when I first met him.
He didn’t answer. I saw a flicker in his eyes, but it was gone. He hardened again. “Because it’s time this charade ends.”
God.
“I don’t want you anymore,” he added, finishing me.