Night's Deep Hush: Reveler Series 4 by Erin Kellison Read Free Book Online Page B

already. A night of tense thinking does that to a person. “Do you know who you and your father were working for before I drowned you and your father died?”
    Vince agreed the who was as good a place to start as any. “The only contact I had was with a man named Murray Graeme. My father had borrowed a great deal of money from him in an attempt to save our company, and all I had to do to relieve the debt was produce you, preferably as a willing employee in a new Rêve venture.”
    “Willing. Ha. Guess how long that would’ve lasted?”
    He opened his mouth to deny it, but no words came out. They’d killed his father. Who knows what they would’ve done to her if she hadn’t cooperated.
    “So you flirted with me,” she said.
    He’d been a worm. Shrugging, he said, “I generally do well with women.” Not Jordan, though. He knew she’d been flattered at first, but she’d also been reserved. At the time, he’d had no idea she had this…intensity behind her polite face.
    She put her cup of coffee down. “The same awful people you and your father did business with are behind the ongoing trouble Malcolm and I have had.”
    Vince frowned. When he’d witnessed Malcolm Rook being dragged into a waiting SUV, he had feared as much. He’d apologized already, so he didn’t do it again.
    “Except,” she continued, “it turns out they also have people inside Chimera. We’ve been in hiding since, trying to figure out what to do.”
    “So find the right Chimera marshal to report the corruption to.” He hadn’t liked that one last night, Marshal Cain, but Marshal Fawkes seemed competent. There had to be others. An internal affairs office.
    “Chimera’s not an option,” she said. “It goes too high.”
    Graeme had seemed like little more than a thug, not someone who operated an organization that included the control of highly placed Chimera. Her situation was bad, but maybe she was playing into the excitement a bit.
    “They’re also involved with the kind of nightmare that attacked you in the Scrape,” she said. “They’ve been…feeding revelers to them.”
    “No.” His heartbeat quickened, so he pushed his coffee away. He didn’t want to hear about the nightmares, tried to block the memory.
    “It’s how they killed your father,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
    He stood and turned away from her. “Graeme did this?”
    The nightmares on the Scrape were icy, grabbing creatures. Vince had killed one to survive. It was that or die, and he’d chosen to survive. He’d become a berserker fighting to the last drop of blood. When he was done, his dream self had been splattered with sticky black tar, the creature’s jaw ripped from its skull. The savagery had made a nightmare out of him . That his father had faced such terror…? Vince’s eyes burned.
    “No, someone else is responsible,” Jordan said. “Graeme’s probably dead by now. We had him briefly—he actually helped Maisie—but we couldn’t keep him and run, so we let him go.”
    Silence fell as he battled the cold inside him. It felt as if he were back in the Scrape, that harsh wind blowing all around him. Last night she’d said the situation was much worse than he knew, and he’d gone along with her because she was finally speaking to him. But if this was true, no wonder she’d left him collapsed in the middle of the city.
    “So the money?” she asked.
    “I’ll get you your damn money. I want the bastard who—” He couldn’t even say it. “Tell me who killed my father.”
    “I don’t know if I can trust you.”
    He turned around to argue. “My father —”
    “—is dead,” she finished. “Your love and loyalty reflects only on the past. You could be trying to save your skin in the present.”
    “How do I prove I’m not working for them anymore?” He had no doubt she’d already thought this through. She seemed to have an answer for everything.
    She folded her arms. “You have to go Darkside again, so I can