Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-Four

Private Villa Near Jamshidiyeh Park

Tehran, Iran

June 15, 9:59 a.m.

Hugo Vox drew in a ragged breath and let it out through his nostrils, feeling his whole body deflate.

That single word.

No.

Vox stared at the coded cell phone on his desk. It lay beside a bottle of Scotch and a tumbler that was nearly empty. Vox snatched up the glass and drained the last of the Scotch, shivering as the ice rattled against his teeth.

He refilled the glass, drank half of it, set it down.

His sleeve was still rolled up and he looked at the injection mark, then touched the others beneath his shirt. They still hurt, but other things hurt worse.

“You miserable backstabbing little fuck,” he said aloud. The house, however, was empty. Toys had been gone a month now, and Vox knew that he would never be back. On the computer monitor in front of him was the log-in screen of the bank to which he’d wired the billion he’d given to Toys after the Seven Kings fell apart. One hundredth of the assets Vox had in over seven hundred global markets, banks, and trusts. When Toys had left him, Vox had been determined to switch all but a penny out of it. That would have made a statement, sent a message.

So far he hadn’t done it, even though he logged in to the banking site as often as six or seven times a day.

The fact that he could not yet do it irritated the shit out of him.

“You goddamn Judas,” he growled. It was far from the first time he’d said that.

What troubled Vox most was his own reaction to Toys’s betrayal. He should have been doing an Irish jig instead of sulking. Toys had found exactly what Vox had wanted him to find. Upier 531, the Upierczi, the Holy Agreement. All of it, exactly as planned. Vox still could not understand why Toys had reacted so … weirdly. This was exactly the sort of thing Toys had been involved with his whole adult life, first as Sebastian Gault’s personal assistant and since then as Vox’s protégé and unofficially adopted son. This was Toys’s fucking heritage. All he had to do was join him for this last little bit of fun and the kid would have access to the other ninety-nine billion dollars.

How could anyone piss on that?

He closed his eyes and remembered the fight they’d had.

* * *

Vox had been in the kitchen at their villa, removing cardboard containers of takeout food from a cloth bag and placing them on the table. Humming to himself, happy with the way things were going with Grigor, and with that numb-nuts Charlie LaRoque. When he heard Toys open the cellar door, he looked up and smiled.

But the smile died on his lips.

“What the fuck—?”