Page 1 of A Lethal Game of Trust

Prologue: Pick Your Poison

Four months before Luís Castillo’s murder

Dom

I wiped a furious sheen of sweat from across my forehead as I descended the stairs to the run-down, concrete basement. I followed my father and Luís to the fuckers who had taken my sister and my Leonie.

They’d left my sister, Issy, crying in a storage room. Their real target had been Luís’ daughter, Leonie, and they hadhurther.

Looking at the scumbags, though, they were just men. Larger than me but probably far less ruthless.

The three of them dangled from the ceiling. Two struggled against their gags, tears streaming down their dirty faces. The other was passed out, swinging on the tips of his toes that brushed the floor. Other than the whimpers, there was just the noise of water dripping.

It had been three days since we found Leonie and these soon-to-be corpses. We’d found my sister that first day only a few hours after they went missing.

Leonie had been with them for twenty-seven hours when we finally got to her.

At their home half an hour ago, Luís had begged her to come and inflict more pain on the men, but she had refused.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have the stomach for it. During her captivity, she’d killed one of them and stabbed two others, despite her sixteen years. It was that she was exhausted.

I was here to provide pain in her place.

The concrete floor was covered in a plastic sheet, ready to be ruined by blood and urine. Though there were three to play with, I stood before the one asleep. He had taken Leonie and touched her. He’d made her cry. She had hardly slept these last few days, except on the armchair in her bedroom, cuddling into me.

It was hard leaving her, but both our fathers knew I needed to avenge her and Issy. Now that I was eighteen, a man, it was expected of me.

The men were only part of a low-level gang. The message had to ring clear:the Belovs and Castillos were not to be trifled with.

She wouldn’t ever be hurt again.

But this fuckhead before me, oh, he would hurt a lot.

Luís unrolled a mat of tools at the man’s feet.

My dad gestured to them. “Pick your poison.”

I took the hammer and swung it at his knees.

I

The Falling

1

PlayNice

10 years later

Leonie

“I’m so sorry. I tried to fight it the best I could,” Derek winced on the other end of the phone. His voice was dismal, broken. His words alone could have brought me to tears, but his tone was the final nail in the ten-year-old coffin.

I sniffed and nodded, though he couldn’t see me. In my dark apartment, I sat alone on the sofa, the phone pressed to my ear. The TV was the only light; the credits of the film I hadn’t focused on rolled. There wasn’t a hope in hell that I could pay attention to the rom-com when I’d been expecting this call. I’d been expecting this result.

“The parole hearing is going ahead,” he continued as I picked at the fringe of my blanket. It was ridiculously hot outside for the beginning of the English summer, but I needed the comfort. “And as much as you don’t want to hear this and already know this, Firdman’s record since being in prison has been impeccable. His lawyers are pretty bloody good, too.”

“Mm-hmm,” I mumbled, picking harder, pulling the cotton out and placing it on the arm of the chair. “New lawyers. Again. Where is he getting this money from?”