“Did you know he’s been trying to create an alliance with the Black Reapers?”
My heart sank. My face froze—hopefully, versus growing angry. The hair on my skin raised.
The Black Reapers? The fucking Black Reapers?
“Define alliance,” I said, hoping that my voice sounded far more even-keeled than I actually felt.
“I’m working on a story of old Vegas versus new Vegas,” Delilah said. “Old Vegas, you can think of as the crime-riddled world that we knew. Black Reapers versus King’s Men. Cops powerless to do anything but stop speeding tourists. Mayorsmere puppets of those organizations. New Vegas is what’s grown in the four years since. King might be gone, but his influence and the aftereffects of his actions are very much not. The Black Reapers? Definitely not gone.”
“I thought they had mostly retreated to their other places,” I said. “California and New Mexico, no?”
“There are still a couple who have become Black Reapers in name only,” Delilah said. “Crush and Prince. His son and, well, in the words of others, his former lap dog. Cassius is trying to use them to establish a link with the Reapers.”
No.
No.
No!
That could not fucking be. The group—the gang, I knew they fucking hated that name but I wanted to call them that—that had ruined my father’s career and forced me to flee to Phoenix. If Cassius knew me as much as he claimed to, he had to have made at least an educated guess that I fucking despised them.
Yet he was trying to pull them into his orbit?
Why? What could Cassius possibly need in New Vegas that he couldn’t get with his power and money?
“What do you think is going to come of it?”
Delilah shrugged, but she didn’t look happy about it.
“Honestly, at the moment, nothing,” she said, which only brought a fleeting relief. “Neither Crush nor Prince has shown up on the police blotter in four years. I looked up the original chapters, there’s a couple of speeding tickets and drug possession tickets, but even those are for low-grade offenses, not like cocaine. But you know how owning a gun that hasn’t been fired in a few years doesn’t mean it’s not capable of something deadly?”
Delilah nodded. My head was spinning, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be here anymore. I wasn’t even sure if Iwanted to be around Cassius anymore. If he was going to affiliate himself with… with… with assholes and evil men like that!
I took in a breath. I had to give fair weight to what Delilah had just said. The two Reapers living in Vegas hadn’t been on the blotter since the infamous violence that took down King. The Reapers elsewhere hadn’t been in trouble for more than weed and going too fast on the freeway. These were still bad men, but maybe, just maybe, they weren’t the bad men of years past.
They are still bad men, Sarah.
“What else?” I asked, forcing the words out before considering them would have made me nervous.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re doing a profile of Old Vegas versus New Vegas. Surely you’ve uncovered something more. What else have you found? What else have you uncovered about Cassius that I might not know about?”
“I… don’t know what you don’t know,” Delilah said. “The gist of the article, I suppose, is that while the current climate is far more peaceful than it was before, there’s still the looming threat of powerful entities going to war, not giving a shit about who falls in the crossfire. Before, it involved motorcycle clubs and crime rings. Today, it involves executive leadership and billionaires who have never lost before. The Vales are on one side, but there are others coming. Most notably, the Morrils.”
I flashed back to what Leo had done at the New York City gala. Kissing my hand before Cassius. I had no idea if he actually found me attractive, but he sure knew Cassius found me attractive.
Well, I would not become a fucking pawn in their game of billionaire chess. I still felt something for Cassius that might explode or might delight, but I had zero, zilch, nothing for Leo. Cassius could break my heart and stomp on my spine, and I would never look Leo’s way once.
But that was simply a side thought to the bigger question looming over my head.
What else was Cassius not telling me?
Plenty, obviously. He was a billionaire with trade secrets, family secrets, and personal secrets. He could be a hundred-thousandaire, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to know everything. A better question: what else was Cassius not telling me that could affect me?
Plenty, unfortunately.
And how much of that was he hiding from himself? Or was aware of but refused to acknowledge it?
