12. Anastasia
I’m rolling a dart between my fingers next to Silas as he takes his turn. My aim with a gun is getting better, but I have little coordination with this game. To Silas, however, it’s clearly a pastime. I’m glad for the movement though, rather than just sitting and observing the crowd of Lumina Lounge. It helps me process what we speak of.
“So Matthew was taken away by his mother when he was ten, not cast out,” I repeat.
“Perhaps his mother lied to him about the why. You’ll have to decide what you believe. My truth is just that. Damien hasn’t earned his name on hollow gossip. He only has one rule: no harming women or children. He’s a very powerful man. Matt’s mother was obsessed with my dad even when she found out he had a mistress. Out of respect for her, he kept the marriage and provided for them in another home, but he moved my mother into his own house to have me, then eventually my two brothers, a year apart. When I was nine, Damien finally divorced Matt’s mother to marry mine. Matt’s mother turned crazy, obsessive, and for my mother’s safety he cut all ties, but for our sake, as we’d grown to know Matt as a brother, he requested joint custody. She told him no, she’d met someone else, and he figured it wasn’t worth the battle. We later learned she’d met this someone else years ago; they already had a son together.”
I throw my dart, which hits the outer ring, crooked. “He said Damien tried to have them killed.”
“Like I said, his mother likely spun that story in her own delusion. I have no doubt he was firm and clear with her. Maybe he did threaten her if she threatened my mother in any way. People interpret things how they want to hear them sometimes.”
Silas went to retrieve the six darts we’d thrown, stalking back with them.
“Do you think he could have turned out differently ...? Do think all of that with his mother, who his father is too, made him the monster he became?”
“Honestly? No. I don’t believe rape, battery of women, and seeing flesh with a price tag can be blamed on nurture or blood relations. I don’t believe there are any what-ifs to a person’s circumstances for that. There are criminals like me—and I’ve warned you before, I’m among the most wicked of them—but then there’s pure evil. Nothing more than sick, vile pleasure. If Matt were alive, now I know all he’s done, I would kill him myself.”
He says it so cold and confidently. He despises what Matthew did even though he doesn’t know me or Nina, or if there were others. This is his side of trust. And it’s time to flip a new coin. Each one feels dangerous, but Silas might be my only hope to get to Rhett.
I can’t help the glance I spare behind us. Kenna sits nearby, on a stool by the private bar now, leaning with her elbows on it as her crossed leg swings and she idly watches the crowd, lost in thought.
Silas hands me three darts, voicing his observation quietly. “You don’t trust her?”
“I barely know her. I’ve never truly been in Alistair’s service, but she has, for more than thirteen years. She’s his best spy. It’s her job to tell him information he wants.”
“She’s never smiled—not truly.”
“Your point?”
“Do you know how she came to be in Lanshall’s service?”
“No.” I shift my eyes to him then as a muscle in his jaw flexes as he watches her.
He asks tightly, “How do women usually end up in his service?”
I frown. “He deals in trafficking, but I don’t know any other women there recruited against their will.”
“You know one of his locations. One of dozens, Ana.”
“She— No, she can’t be there against her will. I’m pretty sure she’d assassinate him tomorrow if that was her wish.”
Silas sets down his darts, and I shiver at the change in him this topic has evoked. I watch him. It’s as if he’s dissecting every possible prospect and scenario regarding Kenna Radley and Alistair Lanshall.
“How do you know she’s just an assassin and a spy?” he asks. His dark eyes lock on me, and I feel the threat in them. He studies me as if he’s waiting for the slightest reaction that will give him reason to make me his enemy and shatter the small dose of trust we’ve built.
“I ... I don’t. I’ve only been there just over three months, and the first time I even seen Kenna was for this task.”
Something I said relaxes an inch of him, but his mind is still storming.
“Wouldn’t it be highly possible she was sold to him young, trained by him, and now used by him? For all we know, she has nowhere to go, and perhaps there are more skills of hers he’s exploited as his best.”
I realize what he means. Why this is getting to him so much that I’m beginning to fear he might march out of here and confront Alistair for the sure answer himself. He thinks Kenna is sleeping with Alistair, perhaps against her will. If not by force, then by manipulation.
Now I have the idea in my head, it’s racing my thoughts too. She’s so cold, distant. Kenna wears steel around her mind, heart, and soul. What if that’s the only way she copes with things I can’t begin to imagine?
“Oh god,” I whisper.
“Don’t say that. I’m already one loose thread away from doing something very reckless.”
“You can’t do anything—please.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t pay our friend Lanshall a visit right now to discuss this alliance that will begin and end with a bullet in his eye?”
My heart pounds; my skin slicks. He can’t. He can’t.
“Rhett Kaiser is alive,” I blurt.
I’m panting shallowly now, braced on a razor’s edge of anticipation. That shocks him enough to snap his eyes from Kenna to me.
“He’s alive, and I need your help to get him back.”
Silas’s eyes flex. “So you’ve had an agenda for me this whole time, and it started with Alistair Lanshall?” he says darkly.
“No. I didn’t know I’d be meeting you, but I think that has always been Alistair’s idea with me. He staged Rhett’s death and thinks all this time I’ve believed it. Honestly, I had no real help or proof until recently.”
“Let me guess—Xoid?”
“You know of it?”
“Of course I do. I actually might say I admire their work.”
It’s a small trickle of relief amid the tension to explain what I can while Silas balances all our fates in his hands.
“They have a guy who made it into Alistair’s network to confirm Rhett is being held somewhere. Then Alistair told me about you—his plan for us—and I had to come up with something. Truthfully, I didn’t have high hopes after what I’d been through with Matthew and what I’d heard about your father. I thought you would be just like them, and that I would have no hope here. But you’re not like them. At least, I really still hope you aren’t.”
I can hardly breathe, and he must notice. Silas takes me by the elbow over to the sofas, a little farther away from Kenna. Someone brings me a glass of ice water.
“You’re not what I expected,” Silas says.
I huff a laugh because Rhett told me that before, and I still don’t know what it means.
“What did you think I could do for you?” he asks.
After the ice water numbs the pain in my throat, I try to pick up from where I tapered off in panic. “Jacob knows I’m with Alistair. I’ve been feeding him information to keep him satisfied. Alistair doesn’t know about my meetings with him, or I’m sure I wouldn’t be sitting here. Before you, I planned to tell Alistair something about Jacob and have him believe it was intel I gained for him through the skills he taught me. I wanted to get it right and watch them tear each other apart before I stepped in and finished the job. If Rhett were truly gone, all I wanted was to avenge him. Then, when I knew he was alive, I asked Jacob to find him, and in exchange I would get you to meet with him instead under Alistair’s radar.”
I laugh at myself, because this must sound like child’s play to him. A woman in over her head in a den of vipers. It’s too late to stop the confession now.
“I hoped to ally with you. As me, not for either of them. I wanted you to help me by meeting with both of them of your own interest, as a ruse to keep them content and busy. Then help me get Rhett back.”
Silas takes a long, deliberate breath when I finish. Then he takes out a cigarette, even offers me one, but I decline, and he leans back, folding his ankle over his knee and hooking his elbow over the back of the sofa.
My knee starts a nervous bounce as I watch him. It shakes the water in my glass, and I’m starting to get too cold, so I place it down and rub my arms.
Silas doesn’t speak. He’s thinking deeply over every detail I’ve so brazenly spilled and deciding if I’m worth his efforts to save. He’s taken three drags of his cigarette, watching the smoke as usual. Sometimes he blows it out carefully, deliberately.
Then he chuckles, as if he’s gotten to a part in my story in his mind that amuses him.
“I’ve given you several sides of my coins,” I say. Maybe it’s pitiful, but I’m crumbling here.
“Indeed, you have. I’m bathing in my riches right now,” he answers with a smile.
“Please.”
“Don’t beg, Ana. You’ve come this far without it, and I much prefer the woman who stormed in here with the confidence of this rather ... interesting plan. I could be exactly like Matt. I could be far worse. What might you do then?”
“I would have still tried.”
“So what’s in it for me?”
“You want to relocate to D.C. You have this club, but you’ll want to expand. I want to take down Alistair and Jacob, and once I do, their empires will be waiting, full of power, influence, and money, for someone to step in.”
“I have no interest in the trafficking business.”
“Come on, Silas. You may be a criminal, but you’re a businessman. I’ve seen the meticulous control you have in here, how they fear you, but they respect you more. You’d know exactly how to keep what you want out of the wreckage we make of their networks. Kill off the pure evil and pluck at the bones that are left that will still hold astronomical roots of wealth throughout several states. You’ll have done something your father never attempted. People won’t hear the name Balenheizer and think Damien first—they’ll think of Silas, the man who single-handedly took D.C. all for himself.”
“Single-handedly?”
“The president’s daughter can’t very well take any of the credit.”
Silas leans in, his eyes dancing with fiery delight. “Well, well, Miss Kinsley. You had me worried there for a second, but you are one incredible woman.”
“All I want is Rhett back. Him, Xoid, they won’t want any credit either. Truthfully, you’ll still be operating other kinds of shit they take down daily, but we’ll help for this goal of stopping the trafficking ... It would be worth it.”
“I wouldn’t want them to stop. A little threat keeps the fire burning.”
My anxiety can’t be settled yet. Even if this is his agreement, he could decide at any moment it’s too much, too difficult, and abandon me. But for now, it’s the best chance I have.
“He must mean a lot to you,” Silas says, taking a drink. “Rhett Kaiser.”
“He’s everything to me.”
Silas doesn’t fully look back at Kenna, but in the shift of his eyes to his shoulder, I know where his thoughts have gone. Perhaps he’s wondering what it would feel like to have someone regard him that way.
“One day at a time,” Silas says—the best sort of alliance agreement I’m going to get for now. “In the meantime, I have a condition.”
My stomach knots, and he tries to suppress his amusement, so I know it’s going to be something I won’t like.
“I want to know everything about Kenna Radley.”
“Don’t you have the means to get that yourself?”
“The moment she stepped inside Lanshall’s home she became untraceable, unless I want to risk a lot of shit, and then we would not have a prospective alliance. But what I want to know is if she’s there by her will.”
“I have just as much chance of getting close to her to find that out as you do.”
Silas shrugs. “You have more opportunities. That is my condition. Get me that answer—and it had better be the truth—and you have yourself a deal, Anastasia.”
I inwardly groan. Talk about impossible.
“And a note for encouragement. If you can trust her enough and get her in on this, you have my word I won’t back down. You’ll have Kaiser, and I won’t stop until their empires are ashes.”