Prey (Primal #1)

3

W hat’s your hunch? Do you think it’s her?” I pressed Shaun as he sauntered into our campus headquarters in the basement underneath the science library. I’d been waiting for his report since this morning and organized him to befriend the girl, siphon information out of her, and then report back to me. I gave him strict instructions that he must not touch her until we had a definite and irrefutable identity on her.

If it was not her, he could do whatever he wanted, but if it was her, he needed to keep his hands to himself.

“It’s hard to tell just by a couple of photographs of what she looked like three years ago,” Shaun answered, parking his ass down in the armchair opposite us.

Ronan, who was practically family, sat quietly, taking it all in as he usually did. He listened and internally scrutinized before coming to a conclusion or making a decision. He’s a senior here at Gotland and had been running the syndicate on behalf of my cousin for three years until our lawyers proved at a hearing that Mikael was set up and would be released from prison next week.

Thank fuck because we need him back.

The deal was that Ronan had to work for his degree while overseeing the Gothenburg syndicate, but all orders still came from Mikael directly from Gothenburg prison.

“She’s definitely hiding something, though,” Shaun added as Callum came striding in and picked up a pool cue. “I tried to ask her about the town she allegedly came from, but she just gave me generic answers.”

“What is the town?” I asked him for clarification.

“Luton,” he replied. “Population six hundred; therefore, you’d think someone would’ve heard of a Riley Laws. But, Nah. Zilch.”

“Almost like Riley Laws doesn’t exist,” Callum stated as he lined up the white ball to take a shot.

When my parents officially adopted her after living with us for over a year, she was nine years old. It was a no-brainer; she was sweet, likable, quiet, and well-behaved and she quickly became my best friend. We were the same age, and we went to elementary school together, and life seemed normal for us kids.

Except it was far from normal.

My father was the head of the Larsson syndicate, and although business was done away from the house, the police were regular visitors. My father was arrested and imprisoned for four years when we were ten years old and my mom ran the business singlehandedly.

When I was sixteen, my father was murdered, and my cousin, Mikael, my father’s most trusted ally and second in charge of the syndicate, stepped up. He was young but grew up in the business and was loyal to a fault to our family and the cause. He was arrested for our father’s murder a month later, but we knew it was a stitch-up, and we worked tirelessly with lawyers to have his charges overturned.

Now, he’s about to be released from prison, and, Annika , I could barely say her fucking name, was the one who dropped his name, claiming to be a witness.

She disappeared three years ago and went underground into a police protection program, and we couldn’t find her anywhere. Her name and appearance were undoubtedly changed, but since she had no family to run to, it was harder to track her down.

A week ago, I saw a girl who looked like my foster sister Annika at Gotland University. I know it’s been three years, and her hair is different, and she’s wearing glasses, but some things never change. The way that ass wiggles in skin jeans and the bow of her head and the way she bit her lip and furrowed her brow when concentrating.

Shaun took a swipe card from his pocket and placed it on the old wooden beer crate we used as a coffee table. “A copy of her keycard,” he stated proudly, “at Hallen Hall.”

“So, you had a look around her room?” I prompted, eager to hear what they discovered, but by Shaun’s casualness, I doubted they found anything of interest.

“Yeah, but we found nothing to indicate that she was anyone but Riley Laws,” he confessed. “But as I already said, she’s hiding something. She’s on edge, nervous, and always looking around like she’s expecting someone to jump out of the bushes. I tried to test and trip her up on her name, but she didn’t fall for it.”

“She didn’t fall for it because her actual name is Riley,” Ronan finally speaks. “You’re following a false lead.”

“Or…she didn’t fall for it because she’s well-practiced using a fake name,” I argued.

Ronan had never met Annika. He worked for our family back then but was in the background doing the dirty work under the protection of Mikael and the others and took orders rather than enforced them.

“C’mon, Gunner, we’ve been here before with other girls,” he rationalized, grabbing the keycard between his fingers, slipping it into his pocket, and standing to leave.

“What are you going to do with that?” I protested vehemently. “We have to determine she’s the right girl.”

“I’m keeping it away from you,” he replied flatly and without malice.

“Why?” I asked, annoyed.

“So, you don’t terrify her,” were his last words before he vanished into the hallway, echoed by his heavy footsteps climbing the stairs.

“Since when did he care about her? He hasn’t met her,” I pointed out to Shaun and Callum.

He barely showed any interest in the girl that fucked us over and only looked at the picture of Annika only once, but that’s before shit went down. It was when she was sweet and gorgeous and made my cock hard.

My foster sister was my best friend, with whom I shared everything. When she started to blossom, my eyes drifted to her curves and that dimple in her freckled cheek. As I traveled down Memory Lane, I remembered she had a small birthmark, the size of a dime, on the left side of her elegant neck that was lasered, but the faded scar remained. Or at least it was still there the last time I saw her three years ago.

“Shaun,” I called over to him as he grabbed a pool cue to play a game with Callum. “Did you see a faint scar on her neck?”

Shaun grimaced, staring at a spot on the wall as if trying to remember. “Her hair is always down.”

I opened the gallery on my phone to swipe through the pictures of her, reliving the mostly happy memories, but something happened with her a few months before Mikael was arrested. She distanced herself from me and started avoiding being in the same room unless forced, but she also distanced herself from our parents.

I remembered Mom quietly asking me why Annika was acting strange. She started eating dinner in her room rather than with us and would go out at any opportunity, just to get away. I missed her and hated being in the house without her because just seeing that smiling face lit me up when times were dark.

Dragging my deluded mind out of history, I glanced up at the boys to catch a silent exchange between them that I didn’t like. Once they saw that I was watching, they carried on as usual. Seriously, the fuckers wouldn’t be dumb enough to keep secrets from us unless they had a lobotomy in the last few days and lost their fucking heads.

But I recognized that with my dad dead and Mikael stitched up for his murder by my foster sister, being suspicious and distrustful embedded into my demeanor. Everyone was an enemy until proven otherwise, and it took a while for me to trust anyone.

I befriended these two fools at high school and applied for entry into Gotland because Mikael won over Gothenburg from our Russian enemies and decided to set up the headquarters here just to rub it in their faces.

So naturally, it made sense for us to attend the college here and have a satellite HQ in the college. Shaun and Callum were our lackeys and did jobs for us that were too lowly to do ourselves. Getting a negative vibe that they were not being straight up with me would only work against them in the long run if my hunch was correct.

I’d let it slide until I saw more evidence that they were up to no good. Besides, I still needed Shaun to find out if Riley Laws was Annika Kaiser.

Kaiser.

My father’s surname.

A man who was feared in back alleys, casinos, and gentleman clubs all over the country. They thought they could shut down the Kaiser syndicate by killing the leader, yet they only fueled the contempt and hunger for revenge by those who loved and loyally looked up to my father.

They were wrong. By killing my father, they allowed Mikael to take his place. And if they thought my father was terrible, they hadn’t seen what Mikael was capable of.

Our first objective was to hunt down Annika and find out who manipulated her into making up a story about my father’s murder, then dropped Mikael’s name to the police. We knew she wasn’t working on her own. Therefore, someone crawled under her skin, either frightening her into being blackmailed or maybe offering her something she couldn’t refuse.

Either way, when we find her, we’ll squeeze out the information before slitting her pretty throat.

I stayed seated on the couch, scrolling through my pictures of Annika three years ago and the pics Shaun took of Riley Laws, and then I tried to compare them. The shape of her face, the way she walked, and her height and build were the same. Riley seemed introverted and friendless, whereas Annika, once she grew older and became more confident and self-assured, was fun-loving, bright, and beautiful.

I enlarged the pictures of Riley to see if I could spot the faded scar, but a curtain of long brown hair hung over that long, delicate neck, and it was impossible to see. She used that hair to hide behind, letting it hang over her pretty face, which could be interpreted as a socially awkward girl who abhorred attention or a girl who didn’t want to be identified.

“When do you see Riley again?” I asked Shaun, and he flinched at the question while taking a shot and pocketed the white. His reaction only added to my steadily growing suspicions of him.

He hesitated and shrugged his shoulders. “Not sure. She’s a buzzkill to be around, and I don’t think she’s the girl you are searching for.”

“How do you know? You never met Annika,” I snarled because it fucking annoyed me that he called Annika a buzzkill, even though I didn’t know if that girl was Annika.

And why the fuck did I care if he criticized her? Annika was nothing to me, just a fly on the windscreen that I needed to wipe off. Yet, it was impossible to wipe her from my mind until I hunted her down and destroyed her. This entire situation had been messing with my head, so I found some dope and started rolling a joint while keeping an eye on the body language between Shaun and Callum.

“Yeah, I know. But Riley is boring, man,” Shaun argued. Callum took his shot. “She’s got no friends and doesn’t like to party much and always talking about fish and coral and shit. She’s a fucking nerdy bore and a stark difference to how you described your foster sister.”

“What? Fish and coral?” I questioned, perplexed.

“Yeah, well, she’s studying marine biology,” he informed me as my mind traveled back three years when she was a sixteen-year-old.

I don’t remember her being interested in marine biology or water. She liked to swim in the lake in summer but was not very interested in the minnows and water boatmen that lived there. There were no pictures of fish or squid on her walls when we were kids, although she did have a thing for that skinny actor who played Spider-Man because she got angry at me when I drew a mustache and glasses on his face.

Fuck, maybe I had the wrong girl.