Page 81 of Reign

“But he never told us whathisgreat crime was,” Blaze mused.

“Could have been anything,” Twist said.

“He seemed to know so much about everyone else’s crimes,” Micah said. “It was probably blackmail.”

The four men celebrated gently the rest of the day and more robustly that night because it was in their nature to mark the accomplishments that any one of them had managed. With Twist’s AI success and Micah’s IPO, they had plenty to celebrate.

When they’d been at boarding school and surrounded by the children of billionaires and royalty, they’d been made all too aware that they came from nothing and to nothing they would return, so every triumph was also evidence that all four of them were not the losers they had been pegged as being during high school. The scholarship kids had not been treated gently, and they’d toughened up fast.

After supper and carousing that night, Twist left the rest of them at their hotel and stumbled back to his yacht. When he’d decided to rent the yacht in order to reside in Monaco with its 5G broadband and lack of income tax, he hadn’t considered the rocking motion of his home when coupled with too much celebrating, but he would just have to survive the night.

As he staggered around the boat, grabbing onto furniture that was thankfully nailed to the floor, his hand once again rested on the white card stock envelope he’d received in the mail that morning that bore his full name,Tristan Fortunato King.

Curious and having nothing better to do, Twist found a knife in his small galley and slit open the mailer, dumping the few pieces of paper inside on the small table on which he usually ate breakfast.

Across the top of the first page, in bold letters, was the sentence,Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

That was weird.

As he read the rest of the letter, his skin prickled with cold sweat.

At least he hadn’t opened the letter in front of the other guys. Even his best friends in the world wouldn’t forgive him for this.