I grab the papers before they fall.

“What does it say?” he asks, voice hoarse. His face is pale, beaded with sweat. “Read it for me.”

“We should go,” I say, worried. “You don’t look so hot.”

“I fucked up my arm. What does the letter say?”

I unfold the papers, my heart booming. “My dear Storm,” I begin. “There are a few things you need to know, and I can’t keep them from you any longer. Soon you will come into your inheritance, and you must be made aware of things past which bear on the present. I thought—” I stop and frown. “Was he so formal in real life, too?”

“Worse.” Storm looks terrible, and I hope Hawk comes in soon. I’m not sure Storm can walk out of here without help. “Please read.”

“I thought I’d spare you this knowledge, and the Organization doesn’t want me to tell you. Which is understandable, but I trust you not to take action against them. It would not be in your interest. I will explain in the course of this letter why not and how this organization has affected your life, starting with the death of your parents.”

Well, damn. Storm makes a soft sound in the back of his throat, like a moan.

“You see,” I read on, “the leaders of the Organization take hard decisions to protect its interests. I’m one of them, Storm. And I want to say I’m sorry.”

Chapter Nineteen

STORM

The words still echo, tumbling and crashing inside my skull, when Hawk hauls me up and secures my good arm around his shoulders.

“Let’s go,” he says. He pulls me out of the office, Raylin hurrying along. “More reporters are arriving. I hope you got what you wanted.”

“We did,” Raylin says. She says something more, and he replies as we stumble out of the house, but their voices barely reach my ears.

I’m sorry. I’m one of them.

What the hell. What… I can’t even begin to wrap my head around this. He wasn’t just a bystander. He didn’t only watch my parents get killed. He directed their murder, orchestrated it. He killed my parents, but spared me. Saved me.

Fuck, why? Why? It’s as if the more I know, the less I understand. The pain isn’t helping, and by the time we drive back to the airstrip and board the plane, barely avoiding a mauling from a crowd of reporters, I’m looking forward to a bed in the fucking hospital next to Rook.

We take off the moment everyone’s on board, the letter clutched in Raylin’s hands. She passes it to me once we’re flying high enough nobody is trying to climb up the landing skids anymore, and I skim through it, my eyes blurry.

This is a record of how my parents took the small company inherited by my mother from her own father and turned it into a behemoth worth hundreds of millions with the help of the Organization. The Organization funded new projects, pulled strings and arranged for the untimely demise of dissenters and opponents. Licenses changed hands in favor of Jordan Enterprises. Companies were taken over and land obtained regardless of the cost to people by cultivating long-term relationships with certain organized crime groups.

And Antony ‘Tony’ Jordan supervised it all from within the Organization as one of its top leaders.

“This is so fucked…” I close my eyes. My head is killing me. “My uncle was a goddamn gangster and murderer.”

“What does it say?” Raylin asks, trying to read without climbing into my lap. Which I appreciate, because what on any other day would have been awesome is today a bad, bad idea.

“This Organization rules the local underworld, moving independently from gangs and the mafia. It’s apparently a local thing. My parents screwed up. Got the money, never complied with the Organization’s demands. They thought having someone on the inside, a leader no less, meant they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. And that got them killed. Fucking idiots.”

Damn them. It happened all those years ago, and their death still hurts. Knowing they brought it on themselves doesn’t make it any easier.

“Anything we can use?” Hawk asks, who can be practical when not clowning around.

“He had a tattoo.” I frown. “A circle. Ray, I told you about it. He says that’s the ink marking an Organization leader. It’s an ouroboros. A snake biting its tail, a sign of rebirth, just like—”

“—the phoenix.” She nods.

But Hawk is staring at me, eyes too wide. “Circle. Where?”

“On his shoulder. So it’s actually a snake, only you don’t see—”

“No.” He leans back, rubs both hands over his face.

“No, what?”

“No, this is a coincidence. Fucking coincidence, is what it is.”

“Dammit, Hawk, my head is killing me, my arm is fucking misery, and you wanna talk in riddles?” I wave the letter in the air, and Raylin snatches it and smooths it down on her lap. “Fuck.”

He stays silent for a bit, and then exhales and shoves both hands into his hair, raking his fingers through it. “My dad,” he says.

“Your dad what?” Raylin is clutching the letter as if she doesn’t know if she wants to rip it apart or kiss it.

I feel the same way.

“My dad has a tattoo like that. On his shoulder. A fucking circle.”

The engines whir. Between the three of us, the silence is deafening.

No reason to ask if he’s sure. He wouldn’t have said it if he wasn’t. The white lines around his mouth, the paleness of his face tells me he knows what it could mean.

“So what happened?” Raylin asks after a while. “Did your uncle transfer the money from Jordan Enterprises to pay off their debt to the Organization? And why did he save you? Wasn’t he better off keeping everything?”

The letter doesn’t really say, not as far as I can see. So I shake my head. “I don’t know. He only says they weren’t pleased with him.”

“And what changed?” At my blank look, she clarifies. “Why did they come after him and after you now, after all this time? How many years since they killed your parents?”

“Fifteen,” Hawk says.

Why would they come after us both after fifteen years? My uncle had obviously done one thing the Organization didn’t like: he kept me alive. Not only that, but he protected me and taught me to protect myself every single day of my life, until I left home. But I was already gone more than two years when he was killed.

What changed?

“The letter,” I whisper. “I turned twenty-one, the time when I would know the truth, because my uncle set it up this way. The fact that this letter would be waiting for me, with this key. Somebody else must have known my uncle was planning it.”

“The lawyers?”

“They could have conveniently lost it. Opened the enveloped and gotten the key. I don’t think so.”

“He told someone about it. Who did he talk to before he died?”

“The police must know. We should talk to the detective in charge of your uncle’s case.”

“There was no case. They thought he died of an overdose.”

“A man like your uncle, handling your company and all that money?” Hawk wipes at his mouth, not looking at me. “I bet they looked into it more carefully than if it were any average person.”

Right. “You think they made a timetable of who he met with the hours or days before his death?”

Sounds like a script from a movie. Then again, the hidden, sealed envelope stuck to the top of the drawer sounded that way, too.

“Let me make some phone calls,” Hawk says and all but turns his back to us, cell in hand, dialing. “I’ll find that out.”

***

Finding out takes time. Long enough time that we land back in Baltimore, catch Hawk’s chopper and arrive at the heliport of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Only God knows what strings Hawk pulled to be allowed there, but by now I’d saw off my own arm if it meant it’d stop the pain. I even tried putting back the sling, with Raylin’s help, but it’s not doing much.

It feels like acid is running through my veins, burning and eating me up. As if my bones are melting from the inside out. Sweat is drenching my shirt, sticking it to my back as I try and fail to get comfortable.