Chapter 52
LUCY
Castle makes it six steps before Hatton is on him.
Hatton’s almost lazy about it, catching him by the collar like a cartoon character.
Then he pivots around and pins Castle face-down on the wooden planks with one knee between his shoulder blades.
But even now—with his hands zip-tied behind his back and helpless—there’s a calmness in Castle’s eyes that makes my skin crawl. He’s thinking, always, always thinking.
“Get. Off. Me,” he orders.
“Yeah, no. I don’t think so, asshole.” Then Hatton laughs. “Did you really think you’d get away?”
“I figured the odds weren’t great, but… better than the zero percent chance I’d have had if I stayed in that boat.” He appraises Hatton. “You know, Kian letting you live? I would’ve lost that bet.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Hatton mutters. “Let’s go, hoss.”
Hatton hauls him up by his suit jacket’s collar and drags him to where Dad and I stand in a ring of gravestones before shoving him to his knees.
“X?” Hatton prompts.
“On it.” X comes up to grip Castle’s shoulder from behind.
“Alright.” Hatton wipes his hands on his pants, leaving dark smears, before removing his gun from his waistband and resting it at his side. Then he looks at me.
“What do you want to do with him?”
Dad steps forward. “Simple. Kill him.”
“I’m not asking you,” Hatton says, without looking away from me. “I’m asking her.”
My father’s mouth opens to object, then closes as he recalibrates. The King of Vegas being told by anyone what to do other than the women in his life is not something he’s used to. Sometimes not even my grandfather has a say.
But Hatton just waits, his eyes on mine.
I blink. “You’re really asking me?”
“He’s yours, Lucy.” His dark blue eyes are steady, serious, stripped of every joke he’s ever used as armor. “You got hurt on his orders. Drugged.” His jaw tics. “He sold you out to secure a connection with the Wildes.” He tsks at Castle. “How’s that working out for you, by the way?”
Then Hatton looks at me.
“It’s your call, my Queen of Hearts. How do you want his story to end?” A small smile lifts his lips. “Off with his head?”
My Queen of Hearts.
I look down at my red sweaterdress, covered in scarlet blood that my Joker spilled for me.
There are cameras everywhere on this island, and I have no doubt all the major players in the underground saw how far the Hatter would go for his Alice.
If he was ever trying to prove a point—that I’m his to protect and everyone else should watch the fuck out—that was it.
His title for me, my McKennon title, settles over me like a crown. I’m barefoot, filthy, there’s blood under my fingernails and an aura of Wonderland still in the back of my mind, but I feel the crown anyway. The weight of it. The power.
I look down at Castle.
His face is bruised, his lip split, and his expensive shirt is torn. But those shrewd eyes haven’t stopped running numbers since he hit his knees. How many people have suffered on his chess board. How many Xs and Duchesses? How many Alices?
“I thought you were complicated once. That you had trauma. A backstory. Something to make your character interesting. Even relatable.” I shake my head.
“But in the end, you were just the villain. A sad. Lonely. Pathetic villain.” Then I shrug.
“Villains have to be taught a lesson, or the story never truly ends, does it?”
I straighten my spine and draw in a breath. “Kill h—”
“Don’t you want to know what happened to your friend?” he asks calmly.
The graveyard goes still. Even the katydids go quiet, interested as well.
“What friend?”
“The Luciano girl. Antonia Rosalee.” He says her name in pieces, like two final moves on a chessboard. Check and mate. “I think you call her—”
“Brylie,” I breathe, and my throat closes up so fast it feels like a hand around my windpipe. I refuse to clear it or show weakness, but my stubbornness backfires anyway, and my voice comes out thready and thin when I force the words through. “She’s dead.
He smiles then, because he knows he has me.
“Perhaps. But the car accident. The coma. Haven’t you wondered how anyone knew she was on the road to the airport that day?
Or why the doctors insisted on taking her off life support?
” He lets the questions hang there between us, baited and poisoned.
“You want answers, don’t you?” His eyes flick between me, Hatton, and my dad. “I can get them for you.”
“Okay, so give ‘em,” Hatton says.
“I don’t have them yet.” Castle huffs a laugh through his nose. “Besides, you expect me to give up all my leverage? I won’t make it off this island.”
“You still might not,” Hatton mutters.
I keep my eyes on Castle. “What’s your proposal then?”
He grins. “Let me go, and I can get you those answers.”
“How?”
“You’re a Troisgarde daughter. You know the drill. Secrets. Bets. If you invite the right people to the table, you never lose the game. If anyone knows that better than I do, it’s the King and Princess of Vegas.”
I fold my arms tightly over my middle, more to hold myself together than anything else.
“So when then? We’re supposed to let you walk, and… what? You disappear off into the dark and I just hope answers find me someday?”
He considers that for a beat, then flicks his gaze up to one of the cameras mounted on the ruins. “I can give them to you in a month’s time. Let me live unaccosted for one month, and you have my word that you’ll get the answers you need.”
“Why a month?” Hatton asks, brows knitted.
“My secrets are my own, Fury,” he returns, an edge in his words.
Dad scoffs beside me. “You expect us to trust you?”
“I expect you to do your own calculations,” Castle says, his voice settling back into that measured calm I’ve come to hate. “The question isn’t whether I’m telling the truth. The question is whether you’re willing to gamble that I’m not.”
His gaze lands on me and stays there.
“Are you, Miss McKennon? Are you willing to gamble your best friend’s answers on the chance that I’m bluffing?”
My mind races trying to analyze every angle while my chest tightens until breathing feels impossible.
“How do we know you’ll deliver?” Hatton asks, his voice flat.
But I can sense the shift in him too. From the look on his face when I listened to Dash’s voice message, I know he wants answers for his brother every bit as badly as I want them for me and Luna. Brylie is our sister. A Troisgarde daughter. Hatton and I would do anything for our family.
“You don’t.” Castle’s mouth curves. Even zip-tied, filthy, and kneeling in the dirt, the man can’t help his sadistic smile.
“That’s what makes it a gamble.” Then he glances up to another camera.
“But if it’s any consolation, the world is watching.
If I renege on this deal, my name is as good as dead anyway. ”
I look at Hatton first. He’s watching me, not Castle. Jaw tight, gaze steady, waiting.
Then I look at my dad. His face is a thundercloud, every instinct in him no doubt screaming to end this right here.
But then I look back at Castle.
The world is watching.
He built a prediction market out of people’s lives, turned suffering into odds and odds into profit. He’s doing it right now. A gun inches from his head as he kneels in the sand, and he’s still playing. Calculating. Offering up the only card he has left to play.
Brylie.
And he knows that last card could keep him at the table.
If he’s telling the truth andI kill him, everything he knows about her dies with him. Sure I could possibly get the information with time and “inviting the right people to the table,” as he put it. But he’ll die without me knowing what he knows, and that will drive me absolutely mad.
And yet, if I let him live, I set a dangerous man back out into the world, one who could hurt people just like he’s hurt me and my friends. Could I live with that?
Could I live the rest of my life in the dark about Brylie?
My stomach knots so hard I nearly double over with it.
“You can’t hurt anyone else,” I say. “If I let you walk, I can’t have that on my conscience.”
“I don’t hurt people, Alice,” he replies with an annoyed little huff, using my stage name on purpose.
As if to remind me who I really am. “I give chances and odds. I never force anyone to do anything. At most, I make the rules, set the parameters. That’s it.
” His gaze drifts over me with the same bland disinterest he’s always worn.
“Take the Smoke and Mirrors Room. You had the option to quit.” He shrugs.
“It’s not my fault you chose to want to manipulate others into gleaning family secrets instead.
” Then he smiles. “A woman after my own heart. You always did remind me of my daughter.”
“Fuck you,” Dad snaps.
I shiver. What I hate most is the shard of truth hiding in the lie. I did have an out. I felt like I didn’t, but I did, didn’t I? Castle never threatened me bodily harm. He threatened leverage. He threatened pressure. He threatened me with choices.
Just like he is right now.
This is a choice. My choice.
I never really thought about running the McKennon branch of the Troisgarde someday, not seriously.
But wielding secrets these past weeks has given me a sense of power and justice I’ve never had before.
Now I crave it. I don’t know what the future holds for me with the Troisgarde, or the Furys, or Wander Isle, but I know I don’t want to lose that feeling again. I want the choice to be mine.
I lift my chin. “I am my father’s daughter. Not yours.” I point toward the dock, toward the island and the broken mess he built. “Which means, here’s what we’re going to do. From now on, The Rabbit Hole is mine.”
“What?” Dad asks at the exact same time Castle’s jaw tics.
I don’t look away from the man kneeling before me.