The Guru: Shadow (Dark Triad #1)

33. Emma

PLAYLIST: IF YOU CARE - EVAN BARLOW

A holy fucking nightmare, that’s what it is. He made me, just like that, the enemy. The villain. The one Richard and Delilah DeBarra, with their billions of resources, would for sure go after. Even if Deis held stuff back for leverage, he would destroy them, their legacy. And from what she had heard of them, it was just as important to them as it was to Deis. People like them would never let it go, never.

And somewhere deep down in the depths of her body, a shallow feeling crawled up on her. A foreboding feeling that Deis wanted her where she was now. He was a master strategist. He would never let anything so risky or so loosely play out without a backup plan or a different motive.

So, what is his true agenda?

Because clearly there was something he did not tell her, something that made an icy shudder run through her whole body. And while everything around her became quiet, her anger ebbed, and her thoughts became razor-sharp.

He didn’t know about Denny. He knows everything, but not about Denny. Carl tried to tell me something, that Deis is not who I think he is. Carl, who gave me his phone as a last act. And the number on the phon e belonged to the man with the gun waiting at my apartment building, who was Denny.

For a second, her stomach plummeted as she just hoped Deis didn’t look in the inside pocket of her bag while she was out.

I am missing something. There is a connection I am not seeing. Denny and my father were friends. Derrick worked for Richard DeBarra. Deis is not who he’s supposed to be to the outside world. He vanished. And now I am somehow connected to it?

So, when she opened her eyes again, she knew she had to be very, very careful. The noise of everyone buzzing about streamed back into her ears. Her eyes wandered to the screens, headlines jumping at her.

Daughter of DeBarra’s Hitman Speaks Out

Gamma Killing People, Daughter of Hitman Accuses

The Secret Life of Emma Richardson

Deis made her the villain in the story. Everyone would know her as the dangerous daughter of a hitman for the megalomanic Gamma conglomerate. Only she was a nobody. She had no clue, while the world believed her to be a grandiose master of art, she was not.

Deis. The child her father intended to remove from this earth, and there must have been a reason why.

“Deis,” she said silently. “What is your real name?”

“èlyas Leblanc,” he said silently.

Leblanc. I’ve heard that name before. Seen it before, but where?

“And why did my father go after you and your family?”

Her question made the corner of his mouth twitch, which told her it was exactly the right question.

“Because my mother had something Richard wanted.”

The air in the room charged with tension. It made sizzling, electrified waves run over her skin. And somehow, she knew that whatever it was, it was the answer to the question, of who he truly was.

“And what exactly was that?”

Her breathing fastened. She was only a single grasp away from finally knowi ng the truth.

“A ring.”

Leblanc. Ring. I have heard of it before, I think.

His eyes pierced into her, stabbing her with its cocktail of power and dominance.

“And why is this ring so special?”

He tilted his head with knowing curiosity, and his mouth twitched into a proud, smug grin. With a small step, he came so near, his warm mint breath brushed against her skin. Everyone else in the room, everything around them, vanished. They could’ve stood on the moon, she wouldn’t have noticed. And when Deis bent down to whisper in her ear, every one of his words was chosen wisely, so deliberately spoken that the hair on her arms stood up.

“Because it holds a secret, dark as the night, freeing as the wind, destructive as fire, waiting to be released.”

She had to close her eyes from the crackling shudders running through her whole existence, touching her somewhere she could not tell. There was only one last question to ask – a question she did not know she had in her but poured over her lips.

“And what does it wait for?”

Slowly, very slowly, Deis straightened up, he did not look at her as he collected himself into his present, consuming energy radiating towards her, engulfing her with a power she had never felt before.

And just for a fraction of a second, her eyes wandered onto the screen behind Deis. It was 3:33 p.m., December 3rd. The hairs on her arms stood up while he cupped her face with the palm of his right hand. His touch sizzling through her like electricity while his ice-blue eyes pierced her like on the very day she had first seen them, consumed by the pull she had felt, drawing her to him.

Everything became silent.

In her. Around her.

She knew the answer already, but she had to hear it. Because it could not be, could it ?

“You, ma belle . You.”