Mine To Take (Nine Circles) (2 page)

Gabriel didn’t bother looking at her. Whatever point Alex was trying to prove—and he was always trying to prove some point—Gabriel couldn’t be bothered with it now. Not so soon after his mother’s funeral and finally finding out the name of his bastard father. For twenty years his mother had refused to tell him because she hadn’t wanted him to go after the prick, so he’d never pressed her.

But now she was dead and everything had changed.

“She has to wait outside,” Gabriel said, meeting his friend’s gaze. “You know the drill. No lovers. No strangers.”

Alex shrugged and tossed his tuxedo jacket over the back of the sofa in front of the fire. “What’s up, Gabe? You sound a little pissed about something.”

Alex always knew when he had a problem. And he always called Gabriel on it. The bastard.

“Yeah, you could say that.” Gabriel pulled the decanter toward him and tipped some more scotch into his tumbler. “My mother died a few days ago.”

Silence.

“Shit,” Alex murmured. He waited a beat then turned to his bodyguard. “Katya mine, I think the time has come for you to wait outside. Private, fucked-up billionaire business.”

“Of course, sir,” his bodyguard said expressionlessly, a trace of a Russian accent tingeing her words.

As the door closed behind her, Alex went over to a long, low coffee table that had been set before the fireplace. On the table was a tray of whisky tumblers, along with cigars and some canapés. Alex ignored the food and the cigars, picking up a tumbler instead and coming over to where Gabriel sat. He said nothing, lifting the decanter and pouring himself some scotch. Then he took a sip, stared at Gabriel. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because you didn’t need to know.” His mother’s life was private and so was her death. She’d hated fuss so he’d made sure to keep her funeral short, simple, and sweet.

One of Alex’s brows rose. “Is that so? Funny, I thought we were friends. And usually friends tell each other that kind of thing.”

Gabriel wasn’t going to defend his reasoning. He hadn’t before the priest that morning, and he wasn’t going to now. “Yeah, well, I fucking didn’t.”

Alex’s sharp blue gaze flickered. “You’re pissed off with me?”

“Not with you.” It wasn’t Alex’s fault that the name on that million-dollar check in his wallet would be familiar to his friend. Very familiar. But that didn’t make him any less angry about it. A rage that had been eating away at him for all the years since his mother had told him what his father had done. A rage that had no outlet.

Until now.

“So why are you looking at me like I’ve personally offended you?”

“How’s your stepfather these days?”

The other brow rose this time. “My stepfather? What the hell has he got to do with anything? And, more importantly, why do you think I would know?”

A fair point. Alex had no contact with his family, not since he’d left home at sixteen.

For the past nineteen years all his time had been spent flying from one casino to another, chasing the big poker games and the big money.

But the man who’d married his mother had come along after Alex had left.

Still, the anger that burned inside Gabriel’s veins demanded release in some form. “You don’t have any contact with him you’re not telling me about?”

The other man didn’t respond immediately, just took a long sip of his scotch, blue eyes unwavering. “No,” he said after a moment, “and you know it, too. What the hell is this about?”

The door opened again before Gabriel could answer, admitting a small, fine-boned woman in black jeans, a black Led Zep T-shirt, and cherry-red Doc Marten boots, hair the color of new-fallen snow peeking out from underneath her black beanie.

Eva King, ex-hacker, now owner of one of the largest software companies in the world, in her “incognito gear.” Another founding member of Alex’s Nine Circles club.

She pulled her beanie off as the door closed behind her, ponytail uncurling down her back in a silvery waterfall, and eyed Gabriel and Alex. “You two look like you’re having a special moment. Shall I go out and come back in again?”

“Yeah, do,” Alex said. “Gabe was on the verge of telling me something important and you just interrupted.”

“It can wait.” Gabriel didn’t want to talk about it with the others. It only concerned Alex at this point. Besides, he’d waited years for this, another hour or two wouldn’t matter.

“Uh-huh.” Eva threw the beanie onto the sofa near the fire and went around the side of it to stand in front of the blaze. “Jesus, the weather in New York doesn’t get any better, does it? I think I preferred Zac’s island.”

The last meeting of the club had been a couple of months ago, on the private Caribbean island owned by the fourth member of the group, Zac Rutherford. Certainly there had been sun, and sure, that had been great, but Gabriel wasn’t one for lying around on beaches. He preferred doing things. The venue for the next meeting would be his choice and he’d been thinking about getting everyone up to his Colorado lodge for a couple of days skiing or hiking.

Then again, that had been before his mother had died. Before he’d found the check and seen the name on it. The check that had been dated exactly nine months before he was born.

He’d found it in amongst his mother’s things. There had been no note with it, nothing to suggest why she’d been sent such a huge amount of money or why she’d never cashed it. Puzzling, considering she’d spent many years as a teenaged solo parent, struggling just to survive.

But Gabriel knew. Despite the lack of any hard evidence, his gut was certain of the truth.

That money was from his father. His not-so-nameless-any-longer father.

Eva looked up from the fire and sent Gabriel a narrow look. “You’re broodier than normal, Gabe. Anything up?”

Mercifully, Alex answered for him. “Corrine died a few days ago.”

“Oh, hell.” Eva’s brow wrinkled, smoky-gray eyes concerned. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said gruffly. “The cancer was getting to the torture stage so I’m glad it’s over. And glad she doesn’t have to deal with it anymore.”

“You should have let us—”

“No, I shouldn’t.” He reached for the decanter again, taking the little scotch that was left. Something had to cool the fire inside him since the first few glasses hadn’t done the trick.

Another silence fell and he knew Alex and Eva were exchanging glances. Probably meaningful ones. Well, he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to talk about it now.

Eva turned away and stuck her hands out to the fire. She wore black fingerless gloves, her nails tipped with chipped silver nail polish. Alex had wandered over to the sofa, throwing himself down on it, sprawling like a lazy house cat.

“You said something in your e-mail about an investment opportunity, Eva,” Alex said, sipping at his scotch. “Care to share?”

“Not yet.” She rubbed her hands together. “You’ll like it though.”

“Why does that sound like a threat?”

“I don’t know. Why does it?”

Gabriel watched them bicker from his armchair.

The Nine Circles weren’t ones for heart-to-heart chats, but they looked out for each other, watched each other’s backs. All of them knew what it was to be a misfit, a loner. To have nothing and no one. No support, no family to call on. No one they trusted.

That’s why the original nine had formed their own little family one night after a poker game. Their own support network. Because, God knew, they had no one else. And sometimes, even that wasn’t enough.

A couple of minutes later, Zac finally arrived. The fourth member of their club. Ex-SAS, ex-merc, Zac was now the head of a multimillion-dollar security company. And he looked like the consummate CEO.

Especially in the dark suit with his tats covered up by pristine black cotton and charcoal-gray wool. It didn’t take much, however, to realize that Zac’s exquisitely tailored façade was just that—a thin veneer of civilization over a man with the heart of a predator.

A quality Gabriel always respected since he was mostly predator himself.

“You’re late,” Eva said to him as Zac shut the door. “Fifteen minutes to be exact.”

“Chill, angel,” Zac said calmly, his cultured English accent at odds with the scars on his face and the casual slang terminology. “I always get here eventually. And besides, the snow was a bastard.”

Only Zac could call Eva angel. Mainly because he was the only one who could get away with it. He’d been the one to discover her when she’d tried to hack into his company’s client database, and he’d been the one to hire her to make sure no one could ever hack into it again.

Eva rolled her eyes. “Okay, whatever.”

Gabriel nodded to Zac from his chair but made no effort to move.

“I heard about Corrine,” Zac said to him as he shrugged off his overcoat and slung it over a nearby chair. “My condolences.”

“Thank you.” It didn’t surprise Gabriel that Zac already knew. The guy knew lots of things, especially things he wasn’t supposed to know.

“How did you find out?” Alex asked from the sofa. He sounded annoyed.

“I read the obituaries. Like anyone else.”

Alex sighed. “I don’t read the obituaries.”

Zac came over to the fire, reached for a tumbler, then looked around for the decanter. “Maybe you should.” He frowned in Gabriel’s direction. “Have you finished all that bloody scotch, Woolf?”

Gabriel shrugged, unrepentant. “My mother is dead. I think I deserve it, don’t you?”

“Guys, please,” Eva interrupted, looking impatient. “Could we forget about the booze for a second? We can get some more in a minute. I want to talk about the opportunity I e-mailed you about.”

The last shot of whisky had settled comfortably in Gabriel’s stomach, making his limbs feel loose. But the anger inside him still boiled away like a saucepan of water on an open fire. Wasn’t confessing one’s sins supposed to help? At least that’s what his mother had always said. But not today it hadn’t. If anything, confessing had only made his anger burn hotter.

“‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’” his mother had always told him. “Not ours, Gabriel. Ours is to forgive.”

Maybe his mother had forgiven the man who raped her. But Gabriel couldn’t and never would.

What had the Reverend said to him once?
“Keep it cold, Church. Don’t let emotion get in the way of what you have to do.”
The Reverend had been the old president of the Angels and had known what he was talking about. Emotion clouded your judgment. Made you weak. And he couldn’t afford to be weak.

This anger had to be cold. Clean. So he could deliver justice for his mother with a steady hand.

“Honor St. James,” Eva was saying. “That’s who.”

Gabriel blinked as the name permeated suddenly through the whisky haze.

Alex was still sprawled on the sofa but his posture was now not so much lazy cat as a lion about to pounce. “Honor?” His voice was soft and deadly.

Eva, standing with her back to the fire, smiled. “Yeah, Alex. Honor. Your sister.”

Everything inside Gabriel paused.

He and Alex had been sixteen, both of them laborers on the same building site. Alex had just left home—or rather deserted it—yet Gabriel still remembered the woman who’d turned up at the site one day looking for her son, a beautiful woman with black hair and Alex’s blue eyes. She’d had a serious-looking eight-year-old girl in tow. A girl who’d stared at Gabriel and Alex as they were summoned by the site foreman. Saying nothing. Just staring. Accusing.

Honor.

Alex never spoke of her, just like he never spoke about any of his family.

“What about her?” Gabriel demanded, instinct suddenly gripping him tight. He could feel Zac staring at him from across the room, golden eyes unnervingly direct.

Understandable really, since two days ago Gabriel had asked him to do some digging into a man called Guy Tremain. The name of the man on his mother’s check.

Zac’s contacts had turned up all kinds of interesting facts.

Such as Guy Tremain’s marriage to Alex’s mother nineteen years earlier. His role as doting father figure to Alex’s sister, Honor. His successful hotel chain. His reputation as a veritable pillar of the community.

All the while no one knew the most important fact of all: that he was a rapist.

Eva gave Gabriel another one of her narrow, suspicious looks. She didn’t trust easily and hated men who took advantage of women. “Why are you so interested?”

“Don’t be stupid, Eva,” Gabriel said shortly. “You know me better than that. I’m not going to screw with her in that way.”

“Then what way? You’ve been zoning out for the past ten minutes and at the mention of her name you’re suddenly all ears?”

Alex was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No and no. Keep out of it, Eva.”

“Get a grip, Alex,” she said. “She’s got one of the best investment firms in the city and I’m not going to ignore her just because she’s your damn sister. If you’ve got a problem with her then perhaps you need to work it out? Have you ever thought of that?”

Alex went even more still, if that was possible, and the temperature in the room plunged.

“Eva, that was insensitive,” Zac said mildly enough, though the reprimand was unmistakable. “And also Alex’s business.”

There was never any pressure to speak of the things they didn’t want to talk about. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was one of their first rules. Every single one of them had wounds that remained hidden. Eva especially, from what he’d heard.

She didn’t look at Zac but her intense gray gaze flickered. “When I need a father, Zac, I’ll ask for it, okay?”

Zac opened his mouth to say something but Alex held up his hand. “It’s fine. I accept your apology, Eva,” he said, even though Eva hadn’t offered him one, “but for future reference, can we keep my family out of any of these ‘great investment’ deals?”

“Tell me about the deal,” Gabriel said, ignoring the flare of blue as Alex turned to look at him.

Eva lifted her chin. “You didn’t answer my question. What’s with the sudden interest in Honor?”

He wasn’t quite sure yet. All he knew was that she was connected to Guy Tremain. And perhaps that
did
make her a potentially useful tool. Especially since it concerned claiming justice for his mother.