Page 88 of The Hitman's Prince

He nodded like it made sense I’d still have it.

“I knew it was only a matter of time before you showed up,” he said, taking a drink of his whiskey and making a show of smacking his lips. If he was trying to intimidate me the way he always had, it was working.

I needed to get over it, though. I needed to be brave, because my father was a threat, not just to my life, but to Vince and Jacob and Caspian as well.

“Is that so?” I asked, taking a breath and stepping into the office. His desk was to the left, leaving me to face him down from the middle of the room. At least, that was until he stood up and walked out from behind his desk. He used his body to block the door, and that was when I realized he had his drink in one hand and his Ruger in the other.

Chapter 65

Vince

With Orion back in my line of sight, the number of things I wanted were reduced to less than half a dozen.

I wanted Jacob.

I wanted Caspian.

And I wanted everyone with the last name Moore—Jacob and Daren being the only exceptions—dead.

The Mandeville patriarch would probably pose a problem as well, but maybe after the last of his friends and business partners had been wiped off the map, he’d be a little more agreeable about falling into line.

I’d tried to do things differently from my father, but I understood truths that Gideon and Fletcher never had. It wasn’t easy to dismantle a system that had been in place for decades, harder still to organize a replacement that would be sustainable. They hadn’t cared about the first and never even thought of the second. I admired theirability to be shortsighted, to be so focused on the men at the ends of the dicks that nothing else mattered.

Unfortunately, it was that narrow focus that had gotten Orion injured, that had a bounty on Caspian’s head, that had a very real threat hanging over Jacob’s life. I no longer had the luxury of being patient and waiting for everyone else to reveal their hands. Orion had eliminated Vanessa, which I’d be sure to reward him handsomely for one everything was said and done. Caspian was safe, and Jacob was on the loose. There were too many places to be and not enough versions of myself to cover them all.

I watched as Orion put himself back together, checking his holster, smoothing out the wrinkles in his slacks. He’d come in my hand, in his pants, and I’d put him away with the whole mess so I could hopefully savor the taste of him later. He stood from the rickety twin bed and cracked his neck… and then in a flash he wason. He was Orion Delmar, no longer the beaten beast my father had created, but now the ferocious dog I’d trained and tamed for myself.

“Before we go after Jacob, I want you to know?—”

“Please don’t,” he said, the first and only time he’d ever interrupted me in both of our lives.

“Don’t forget your place, Orion,” I warned.

He inhaled sharply, body swaying with the force of it.

“Please, Sir,” he said quietly, tongue darting out and licking a line across how lower lip that I wanted to desperately taste for myself. “Just…not yet.”

“Why not now?” I asked.

He looked at me with wide eyes, jaw tense but wary. “I already know, but if you say it…If you say it, there’s no going back and there’s still things you don’t know about me.”

“You tried to have me murdered,” I reminded him. “What else could there be worse than that?”

Orion collapsed to his knees, taking my hands into his again, pressing them against his forehead. It was a new display of devotion, of service, and based off all the ways my body—and my heart—responded to it, I didn’t think it was something I would ever grow tired of receiving.

“There’s things I did.” His eyes were downcast, the shame painted across the parts of his face I could see, clear even in the shadows. “Things that were done to me.”

“I don’t care.”

“I want you to know what happened,” he said, “the night you found me in your father’s room.”

“Not yet.” I offered his own plea back to him, pulling him to his feet and standing so we were once again eye level with each other. I kissed the corner of his mouth, our hands still joined in the way he’d managed it. “We can do this after, yes?”

Orion’s eye twitched and I knew him well enough to know he wanted to argue, but instead he gave me a soft, “Yes, Sir.”

“Jacob first, then?”

I would love Orion as much after I had everyone safe as I did when they were all in mortal peril. I would lovehim the same after I’d brought everyone into line or killed them trying. Loving him had been the best mistake of my life, but it had turned me soft. It had let everyone forget I was Vince Angelini, son of Ricardo Angelini, Prince of the Angelini fucking family, and that name and that title deserved some goddamn respect.