“You just said we have a traitor in our midst.”
“So you think the best way to draw them out is clue them in by torturing everyone else?” Lucien asked. “What if he’s not one of the first? You don’t think people will talk? Leave? Retaliate?”
“We’re not. Torturing. Our members.” King’s booming proclamation was final.
Again, silence descended, until Lachlan threw up his hands.
“Then who has a better idea how to catch this motherfucker?”
Benoit rubbed his forehead. “I’m still confused why they went to the trouble of creating the fake video of Theo if they just wanted to kill him.”
“I wondered that too,” I said. “But what better way to sow distrust between us? To have us all wondering if Theo had gone rogue? To try to blackmail Theo and me with photos, threatening to go to King? It’s clear to me that whoever this is, they want to break the seven of us apart. They want us fighting and they don’t want us to trust each other. If they’d killed Theo,they knew we’d end up blaming each other for what we did or didn’t do.”
“We can’t let them break us,” Lucien said, nodding in agreement. “No matter what. This fucker is smart, but he’s not the only one who can fight dirty.”
“There’s another thing.” Theo set his cigarette in the ashtray and pulled up his sleeve, where an ugly red line ran down the length of his forearm. “He knows about our trackers. Pulled mine the fuck out.”
Curses rang out, but I raised my voice over them. “It’s not like members wouldn’t have seen us scan our chips to get down here.”
“But to know they’re trackers…” Benoit mused, tapping his lips before he shot up in his seat. “Holy shit. What if he’s gained accesstoour trackers. Is that how he found Shep and Theo at the safe house?”
Instantly, I felt King tense beside me.
That was exactly the question he’d been hoping wouldn’t be brought up, and there it was, laid out for everyone to hear.
King had fucked up.
He had brought danger right to our goddamn door.
And then he’d left Theo in the jungle.
I clenched my teeth, trying not to let accusations fly out of my mouth. It wouldn’t solve anything to fight with him now, not when we were all trying to come back together.
But I was pissed,sofucking pissed, and trying my damndest to bite my tongue and see if our leader had anything to say.
All I could hear was the jackhammering of my heart as the room remained dead silent. I didn’t dare look at King, not right now, because there was no way I could keep a poker face if he didn’t come clean.
Theo, on the other hand, clearly didn’t give a fuck about the question hanging in the air, or the repercussions.
He picked up his cigarette, tapped the ashes, and looked straight at the man to my left.
“Great question, Benoit. Why don’t we ask King?”
9
THEO
OUI, YOU HEARD right, oh fearless leader—explain thyself.
I hadn’t planned to call King out in front of everyone at tonight’s meeting. In fact, I’d thought I’d gotten over the way he led my captor to the jungle and then decided to abandon me there once it seemed I was out for the count. But as I sat beside Shep, in a room full of my brothers who were asking questions they all deserved the answers to, I realized I wasn’t fucking over it.
King had left me in the goddamn jungle.
I could maybe understand that if it had been a day or three in and there was no sign of me or if I had, I don’t know, any form of survival training. But this wasmewe were talking about. The Prince of Monaco. A man who’d grown up in a literal castle, for fuck’s sake.
So what in the hell had he been thinking?
Shep had said King surmised my kidnapper might’ve left with me, which Isupposedwas plausible, since that had in fact been the plan. But he didn’t know that for certain.
