Chapter 1
Damien
“No luck,” says Logan, his face white.
I bite down on the despair that surges within me. I knew it before he said it. I’ve known since the moment I saw the pictures that it was hopeless. My Seraphina, gagged and bound, stark-naked, and in front of her, the looming crevasse of a coffin-shaped hole.
Angel doesn’t play games. They wouldn’t have dug that hole if they hadn’t planned to bury her in it. They want her gone, and they want me to suffer.
It’s all my fault. I underestimated them.
I underestimated Gabriel’s love for his brother.
It’s a love that mirrors my own—no. Nothing can come close to the love I have for my girl.
The moment I held her in my arms, breathed her in, knew she was mine, really mine…
no words can describe that feeling. It was like coming home.
And now, they’ve taken her from me. She’s gone. They’ve just stripped all reason I had for living.
No, not all reason. They’ve left one, and it’s become my sole drive.
I will find them, and I will smite them. Every last one of them. They will die slow, painful deaths at my hands. I will look them in the eye as their lifeforce is extinguished in a long, torturous agony.
They are all dead. They just don’t know it yet.
Beware the Devil.
The organization I founded with my closest childhood friends—Everest, Vale, Igor and Logan—has fractured.
Now that Vale, the traitor, is dead at my hands, and Logan, the man I once called my brother, has confessed his own betrayal, Devil is no more.
There is only me. The Devil. And I will not give up until all fear that name.
Logan looks at me warily. He knows I haven’t forgiven him.
How he caused my pet harm in a twisted attempt to protect me.
Deep down, I understand why he did it. He was terrified I’d be labeled weak, and Vale would take that chance to swoop in and wrest leadership from me.
Still, I’ll never forgive him. He knows it, too.
He might be doing everything in his power to find my girl, but it’ll only delay his fate.
The minute I find her lifeless body, and punish those responsible for it, I will turn the gun on him. And then, on myself.
“We’ve searched every inch of the forest around their compound,” states Everest, and I turn to the man who was once Seraphina’s only defender.
He never actually cared all that much for her. But he’s a softie, the moral compass of Devil, and he couldn’t bear to think he had played a part in a woman’s abduction. And that I had kept her isolated from the world.
That’s the only thing I don’t regret. In fact, I regret not keeping her even more isolated. If I had, no one would have been able to get to her. She’d still be here, with me.
My fists clench at the thought. If I ever find her alive… The thought rings out in my mind like a sad little refrain, a desperate hope I do my best to quash. If I ever find her alive… I’ll take her to a desert island, and no one but me will ever see her again… no one but the fish.
And the jellyfish, I add to myself, smiling bitterly as I remember her spirit animal.
Then my smile turns into a glare, and hear Everest gasp as he imagines my expression is directed at him. And it is. At him, at Logan, at the whole world. At my girl. At me.
Especially at me. I was supposed to protect her. I was supposed to take care of her. Keep her safe. Instead, I allowed her to get stolen from me, and then murdered.
I bring my head down to my hands.
“I’m very sorry, Damien,” whispers Everest. “When Devil gets their hands on those assholes…”
He doesn’t realize there is no more Devil. None of them do, yet.
“They must have been lying in wait,” I growl, “and the minute I left her alone in my apartment they swooped in. But they couldn’t have taken her very far. Our meeting only lasted about an hour.”
Logan hangs his head in devastation, but I’m not sure whether that devastation comes from thinking of Seraphina’s fate or his increasing fear as he awaits his own.
“Do you… do you think she was buried alive?” blurts out Everest, voicing the thought that has until now been unspoken.
My chest constricts. “It’s likely. But it’s too late now.”
My eyes close as I think once more of all the pain she probably experienced before dying. Nausea, dizziness, and fear, cold, horrifying fear, clawing at her chest. If they did bury her alive, she probably managed to hang on for an hour. Five, tops.
Twenty hours have passed since we began our fruitless search, and there is no hope. Not anymore.
I clench my hands around the cold wooden table of our conference room.
“We’re not looking for the right thing. We shouldn’t be looking for her anymore, but for them.”
My words are followed by a deafening silence. We’re no longer hoping to find her alive. That’s the meaning behind my words.
“I’m on it, boss,” says Vincent.
I nod. It’s an odd world when this eighteen-year-old boy, whose voice has barely dropped, is the only one I can count on. But, after all, he’s Gabriel’s nephew. He knows Angel better than we do.
“It’s unlikely they went to any known location,” I say, cracking my knuckles.
He coughs. “On the contrary. I don’t think they would hide from us.”
I glance at him sharply. “They must be terrified of Devil. They can’t possibly hope to go up against us.”
There’s another cough, this time from Logan. He slides a magazine toward me uncertainly.
I look down, confused, at the Forbes magazine. A page has been earmarked, and I flip to it, on automation, as the memory of what Logan told me during our last meeting, the one just before my world turned upside down, fills my stomach with lead.
Angel: Tomorrow’s Billionaires.
Aaron Garcia, Noel Zapata, Gabriel Murrillo, Elias Cortes: These are the names of the four businessmen who make up Angel, the fastest-rising organization in the country.
They’re an investment company behind a number of startups in the tech industry. At this point, Silicon Valley could be renamed Angel Valley—and at my joking suggestion, Gabriel Murrillo nods soberly.
“We’ve thought about it,” he says, without a trace of humor.
Unlike their predecessors, Devil, Angel doesn’t have a jokester in its midst. I’m mildly uncomfortable as I face the company’s four incredibly attractive leaders—one might even call them angelic, but that might be too on the nose for yours truly—who peer down at me quietly, their entire attention fixed on me like this interview is the only thing that matters to them.
And unlike Devil, which might only vaguely ring a bell if you’ve lived on the East Coast for the past five years, pretty much everyone has heard of Angel—and if you haven’t, that’s about to change.
Their rise is absolutely meteoric. Not content to own a few department stores and fund several blockbuster movies like their rival, Angel has its hands in practically every pie in the country.
It’s hard to know just where their money is coming from, but one thing’s for sure: they’ve got a whole lot of it.
I slam down the magazine, not bothering to finish the article. I’ve read enough.
“What the fuck?” I growl. “Last time I checked, they were a lowly band of criminals. Now they’ve got a feature in Forbes?”
“We were once lowly criminals too,” comments Logan drily, before growing red as I turn flashing eyes toward him. “Don’t worry, Damien. Devil will come out on top. We always do.”
“Fuck off,” I spit. Somehow, this new thing he’s doing of sucking up to me and sugarcoating everything makes his betrayal feel ten times worse.
I want to strangle him. He used to be a brother to me, but ever since I pointed a gun at him, he’s turned into a sniveling kiss-ass.
He can’t even accept his fate like a man.
It feels like I lose his friendship all over again every time he opens his goddamn mouth.
“Right,” he mutters, and the only reason I don’t bash his head in right then and there is my own lack of energy.
I haven’t had the slightest speck of energy since my pet died. The only thing keeping me upright is my need for vengeance.
I turn back to Vincent. “If they’re not hiding,” I grunt, “then where are they?”
He lifts his head slowly from his phone, where he has apparently been busy tracking his uncle’s movement.
“Gabriel’s private jet just set down in Bogota, Columbia.”
I snort. “A whole lot of money, huh? The guy’s just a glorified drug dealer.”
“They took a helicopter to their compound in the heart of the jungle,” adds Vincent.
“What do you want to do?” asks Logan quietly.
“Do? Let’s fucking go. Let’s burn their business to the ground, and Angel with it.”
__
“We’ll be arriving shortly, sir,” says the quiet voice of the stewardess, handing me a heavy backpack.
I look up at the young woman. She’s beautiful in a very banal way.
I can tell she’s never had a hard day in her life: she peers down at me a little nervously, her eyes blue, her lips luscious, her dress too tight and cinched around her waist in a way that draws the eye to her bosom.
She gives me a big smile, flashing her perfectly white teeth at me.
I feel an irresistible desire to bash every one of her pretty teeth in, to make her look as ugly as I feel.
“Thank you, Alice,” I say coldly, turning away. The tick in my jaw is the only thing that betrays my thought.
But Logan knows. Logan always knows. Goddamn him.
I see him staring at me, concern battling it out with fear. He knows me too well. And right now, I could string him up in this fucking jungle, just far enough from the ground so that his death is a long, drawn-out struggle, and laugh as I watch his breath leave him.
He grows white and turns away. He’s reading my thoughts, as he’s always done. Just for that, he’s a dead man. But not yet, because I need a man I can trust. And Vincent is only a kid.