Bennett Mafia(14)

There was nothing for me to climb onto if I wanted to make my way down. The fall could’ve fit a thirty-eight-floor hotel, and I could see rocky terrain at the bottom. It was a rock-climber’s dream, or challenge, but not mine.

“Gonna jump?”

I jerked, my hands clenching the railing as his smooth voice slid down my spine. It awakened all my nerve endings, and I gritted my teeth, hating how I reacted to him. Those were the first two words he’d spoken to me in fourteen years, making four in total now.

I didn’t know this guy. Why did I react to him this way?

Turning around, I found Kai standing just inside the bedroom doorway, his head cocked to the side as if he found me a puzzle.

I’d seen it before, but his presence was like a punch to my sternum. He’d been devastatingly handsome at sixteen and he was even more so now, and that set my teeth on edge.

Dressed in a business suit, the shirt unbuttoned and the ends pulled loose from his pants, he had bare feet. He looked as if this trip to see me was the last thing he had to do before relaxing completely, as if I were an afterthought.

Then he shrugged off his suit jacket and shirt, catching the collars of both and tossing them on the bed. He turned to the closet behind him, which opened to showcase an array of men’s clothes.

My mouth dried.

This was his bedroom.

Was it?

I glanced to a second closet, wondering if I’d find women’s clothes in there or more of his.

He brought out a T-shirt and pulled it on. It molded to him, revealing broad shoulders and a lean waist that had been trimmed down to a core of solid muscle.

His hands dropped to his belt buckle, and I pulled my gaze away and turned around.

Reaching out to steady myself on the railing, I heard his pants drop to the ground. My fingers clutched the steel railing, my nails digging into it.

“So are you?”

I hadn’t heard him move, but his voice was closer. I turned again to find him fully clothed, wearing a pair of dark gray sweatpants that molded to his bottom half the way his shirt did to the top.

He motioned to me. “Come on. I’m tired, and I don’t want to have this talk worrying my little sister’s dear friend might jump to her death.” He snorted to himself. “She’d really be furious with me then.”

There was a twinge in his voice. Exhaustion? I heard it now. I followed him, at a reluctant pace, as he went to the bedroom’s far wall and pushed a button.

Two doors slid open, revealing an entire bar built into the wall. As he poured a glass of bourbon, I saw the slope in his shoulders. There were bags under his eyes, and a tired softness around the corners of his mouth.

I really was an afterthought for him. He’d been somewhere else, doing something else, and whatever it had been had tired him out.

The power and charisma he exuded was still there; it was just slightly diminished. Slightly.

He was dangerous. I felt zapped by his energy, and as I moved into the main room with him, that zap just grew. He sucked the air out of wherever he was—so much that my insides started to feel his same exhaustion.

“Are you going to speak, or do I need to test your vocal chords a different way?” he asked, swinging his heated eyes my way. His nostrils flared as his hand tightened on his glass. “Hmm?”

Make them underestimate you.

My Hider training kicked in, and I lowered my gaze.

I didn’t like the storm inside of me. I was all over the place—feeling enraged, then heated, then other things, but rounding back to hate. I needed him to view me as submissive, timid, so even though my neck tightened so much I could barely move, I forced myself to look at the ground.

The goddamn ground.

This guy—he didn’t deserve having me look down before him.

I knew he’d had thousands killed for the Bennett family. He’d murdered his older brother. And Brooke had never said anything, but I didn’t believe for a millisecond that their father had died in his sleep. Kai had killed him too.

He was a murderer, and he was behind so many girls being trafficked, behind millions of dollars of drugs moving through his territories—he didn’t deserve anything from me.

He deserved to be killed. And if he was the reason for Brooke’s disappearance, I was going to be the one to do it.

I would cut him from dick to throat, in that direction too.

He snorted again, this time with a twinge of genuine amusement. “Don’t kid yourself, and don’t insult me, Riley Bello. You don’t have a timid bone in your body. If you did…”

He started for me, and I couldn’t help myself. I raised my head, and I couldn’t look away.

“You wouldn’t be a Hider for the 411 Network,” he finished softly.

My worst nightmare.

He droned on, sounding almost bored, “You were recruited into their network when your father murdered your mother. Six months after I pulled Brooke from Hillcrest, they told you your mother was missing, but you knew. You knew what happened to her when you went home the next day.”

I was frozen.

“You went to her funeral. You sat beside your father, but you knew the whole time he’d killed her, because that’s what he did. He hurt her. It’s why you were sent away, so he wouldn’t hurt you too. Am I correct?”

I felt sick.

“Their recruiter agents approached you when you were shopping. It was the day after you’d buried your mother in an empty casket. You were at the mall with two of your friends, or two girls your father had deemed appropriate for you. You didn’t even know them, but they were daughters of his colleagues, and you didn’t like them. Am I correct?”