I was beginning to see that King was a thing of darkness, fighting to bring light into this world the only way he knew how. Defiance. King’s defiance defined him. He even defied his own evil heart. “I wish I’d met you before.”
“Before what?”
“Before your life took a wrong turn.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked, sounding amused.
“I see how much good you’re capable of. I would’ve fought tooth and nail to keep you from fucking it up.”
“Trust me, Jeni. It would have been a waste of time. My wife was a fighter like you. She did not give up on me until her last breath. But…” His voice faded off.
“Tell me. I want to know—I need to know who I’m really dealing with.” Could I trust him? Because now my dad’s life was riding on it.
He met my eyes again. “Mia gave up everything to be with me, including being a Seer with more than enough power to save herself and our children.”
I let that sink in. He’d created this monster he couldn’t control—Ten Club—and he was the reason his wife had been vulnerable, unable to defend herself or their babies.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I whispered, trying and failing not to tear up again. “I—fuck—I don’t know what to say, other than—”
“Say,” he quietly snarled, his eyes filled with torment, “that you will end them, Jeni. I do not care what price I pay. I do not care if I am torn limb from limb and left alive at the bottom of the fucking ocean. As long as Ten Club is gone, I will rest contently.”
He mentally opened up, allowing me to experience his brutal anguish. He showed me his memory of meeting his wife Mia for the first time. He had been instantly enamored, but somewhere deep inside, he knew their story would end in a tragedy. He knew if he truly loved her, he should let her go.
But no. Like an arrogant fool, he told himself he could change their future, and he kept on believing it until he saw what those monsters did to her and his children—Ariadna and Arch. Ten Club made sure his family couldn’t be brought back like he could. Their bodies were destroyed. Their souls moved on. And King blamed himself for everything—his greed for power, the selfish need for his wife Mia, the despicable pride he felt giving her the life she wanted: free and safe from Ten Club. A lie. She had been unaware they were still in the picture with him at the helm.
I had no words to describe the void inside King. It felt like someone had come along with a buck knife and scraped out his insides, leaving him with nothing but his demons.
“I should’ve known,” his voice was filled with deep regret, “that a dead king, damned thousands of years ago, had no business loving a woman like her.”
Thousands of years old. How was that even possible?
King continued, “That is unimportant. What matters is that I will not be repeating my mistakes.” He extended his hand and brushed his thumb across my lower lip. “When this is over, I will ensure my breed of evil never walks this earth again.”
He wasn’t evil. He was damaged. There was a difference. “Can’t you see that what you’re doing now, everything you feel, the love you have for your wife and children, all prove you’re not evil?”
He inhaled slowly, as if summoning his patience. “Jeni, you and your father will be the only two people walking out alive from that party. This is what I have been attempting to tell you, and there will be no discussion on the matter.”
I frowned, not quite understanding.
He continued, “It is like I said; you will end Ten Club once and for all. And along with them, the person responsible for sending me to the bottom of the ocean: Me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
King spent the next few minutes describing those final days before he locked himself inside a steel safe and paid some fishermen to throw him into deep waters just off the coast of Florida.
As I listened, panicked as hell and thinking about how this would all play out for my father, I realized that King was like a dark, jagged puzzle. Each piece that fell into place painted a picture of a man who’d lost everything because he believed he could contain the evil elite of Ten Club, like the devil who ruled over the souls in hell. King believed that these corrupt, greedy, sick individuals needed a real king to lead, police, and punish them.
Maybe they did.
But what he failed to understand was the one thing I was beginning to see that he couldn’t: King wasn’t evil enough. It would take a very special kind of bastard to control a group who held no regard for human life, and he simply didn’t fit the profile. That was his fatal mistake.
Nevertheless, I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that they existed. Slavery, torture, and murder as forms of entertainment? King even told me about a man who used to collect women’s skins and put them over his dead lover’s corpse like paper dolls.
Nasty.
And when members got bored of level one—as I called it—they went to level two and started dabbling in the occult. Also shocking was that they each paid a billion-dollar annual membership fee, and together, this money went into a sort of insurance pool, used to buy people off, shut them up, or make them disappear if they tried to interfere in a member’s business. According to King, they had politicians, judges, and CEOs from major companies from all around the world in their pockets. He called it a “membership perk,” complete immunity from the law. All it took was a net worth of ten billion dollars, an annual due of a billion, and a proclivity for brutality.
“So if there were no rules,” I asked, “what did you punish members for?”
“There are rules. Members are not allowed to steal from one another. They must trade and keep their agreements—verbal or written. They must obey the leader and not disclose the club to anyone outside.”
“And if they break the rules?”
“I had a team of powerful Seers to assist me in detaining the member, and then punished them if they were found to be guilty. Unfortunately, fate had its own punishment for me in store.”
King went on to explain that his wife found out he was still running things after he’d sworn to dismantle Ten Club. She left him and moved in with her parents back in San Francisco, where she was from. To get her back, he decided to step down and put another person in place to keep them in check.
He continued, “I chose Serina. She was the only member who had similar tools to mine.” He tapped the side of his head. I assumed he was referring to crawling inside people’s heads. “We worked out a deal for her to take my place. She would get my arsenal of objects and agreed to eliminate a few of the more dangerous members with axes to grind.”
“So you tried to leave.”
“Yes. And no. If I wanted to make things right with Mia, I needed to end them. Putting Serina in place was merely a Band-Aid. I knew eventually the members would start jockeying for leadership and eliminating competition. They are just as backstabbing as they are depraved. I thought to let it all play out—let the members do the work of killing each other off. I would take care of anyone left over. But my goal was to stay out of the picture once and for all, with the exception of that final piece.”
I gave it some thought. I wondered why he didn’t just invite them all to a private island and blow it up.