Thayer’s jaw locks tight. He stares at me, the silence stretching into an agonizing, suffocating eternity. He is calculating. He is weighing the cost of letting me into the darkest, most irredeemable corner of his soul.
"Six years ago," Thayer begins, his voice dropping into a hollow, dead frequency that makes the tiny hairs on my arms standstraight up. "My father, Lorenzo Thorne, suffered a massive heart attack in his private study. The Syndicate mourned. I took the throne. It was a seamless transition of power."
"That's the official story," I breathe, my heart hammering a bruised rhythm against my sternum. I know the tone of a lie. I grew up drowning in them. "What is the truth?"
Thayer slowly pushes himself up into a sitting position. He completely ignores the wince of agony that tightens the corners of his eyes as his torn shoulder protests the movement. He swings his legs over the side of the hospital bed, planting his bare feet on the white tiles.
"The truth," Thayer murmurs, his pale gray eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that completely paralyzes me, "is that my father's heart didn't fail. It stopped because I put a hollow-point bullet directly through it."
The air completely evacuates the room.
A ringing vacuum fills my ears. I stare at him, my lips parted in sheer, unadulterated shock. Parricide. He murdered his own father. He murdered the Don of the Syndicate in cold blood and orchestrated a massive cover-up to seize the empire.
"You killed him," I choke out, my hands flying up to cover my mouth.
"I executed him," Thayer corrects smoothly, entirely unapologetic. He leans forward, resting his uninjured right forearm on his thigh. "Lorenzo Thorne was a ruthless, paranoid tyrant, but that is not why I pulled the trigger, Sybil."
"Then why?" I demand, a hot tear slipping past my lashes, terrified of the answer, terrified of the monster sitting in front of me.
"Because of you."
The words hit me with the force of a physical blow. I stumble backward, my spine colliding hard with the chrome edge of the medical supply cart. The metallic clatter echoes loudly, but I barely register the pain.
"Me?" I whisper, violently shaking my head in denial. "I didn't even know you six years ago. I was twelve years old, Thayer. I was a child."
"You were," he agrees softly, his eyes tracing the frantic pulse beating at the base of my throat. "And you were the only thing in my miserable, violent life that I had ever felt an ounce of pure, uncorrupted possession over. After that night in your father's hallway... I couldn't stop watching you. I paid off your staff. I bought the loyalty of your security detail. I acquired a mountain of surveillance on you, Sybil. Photographs, schedules, medical files."
My stomach pitches, the sickening reality of his six-year obsession rushing back to the surface.
"My father found the files," Thayer states, his voice turning entirely to ice. "Lorenzo was not a man who tolerated weaknesses. He saw my obsession with the daughter of a pathetic, indebted gambler as a fatal flaw. He told me that a Don cannot have a vulnerability walking around outside the perimeter. He ordered his enforcers to eliminate you to teach me a lesson."
A cold sweat breaks out across the nape of my neck. I remember a day, shortly after my thirteenth birthday. A black sedan following me walking home from my private school. The terrifying feeling of being hunted. And then, the sudden, violentcrash at the intersection that left the men in the sedan dead. The police called it a tragic accident.
"They were coming for you," Thayer murmurs, correctly reading the horrifying realization dawning in my eyes. "I intercepted the hit. And then I walked directly into my father's study, aimed my weapon at his chest, and told him that if anyone ever touched a single hair on your head, I would burn the entire city to ash."
"And he didn't listen," I breathe, tears streaming freely down my face.
"He laughed at me," Thayer says, a dark, dead smile curving his lips. "So I killed him. I took the Syndicate, and I built an empire strong enough to completely isolate you from the rest of the world."
The cognitive dissonance completely fractures my reality.
He is a murderer. He is a psychotic, manipulative mastermind who slaughtered his own blood. But he did it to save my life. I have been breathing for the past six years entirely because Thayer Thorne committed the ultimate sin to protect me.
"And now my father has the proof," I whisper, wiping the tears from my cheeks with trembling hands. "He somehow found out what you did. And he is going to use it to destroy you."
"He will try," Thayer growls, standing up from the bed. His massive frame completely dominates the sterile room. "But Arthur Vance is a dead man. I am going to walk into that railyard, and I am going to rip his throat out with my bare hands."
"I'm going with you."
The words leave my mouth before my conscious brain can even process the sheer, terrifying audacity of the demand.
Thayer freezes. He slowly turns his head, looking at me as if I have just spoken to him in a dead language. The pale, glacial gray of his eyes darkens into a storm of pure, unrestrained fury.
"No, you are not," he commands, his voice a low, vibrating rumble that shakes the medical equipment on the cart behind me.
"He is my father, Thayer," I argue, my voice rising, pushing back against the crushing weight of his authority. "He asked for a parley because he knows you have me. He is using me as leverage. If I don't show up, he will know you are planning an ambush, and he will trigger the dead man's switch before you even get out of the car!"
"I don't care about the switch!" Thayer roars, the sudden, violent explosion of his volume completely shattering the silence of the room. He closes the distance between us in two long strides, ignoring his injury, completely trapping me against the chrome cart. "I don't care if the federal government brings down the entire Syndicate! I am not putting you within a hundred miles of the Commission's guns!"
