Read Online Beating Ruby by Camilla Monk - Free Book Online

Cause of death is asphyxia. We have evidence of two men entering the building via a maintenance tunnel around two thirty. Accomplices, likely. They killed him sometime after he was done wiring the money and destroying the servers.”
    TTX. Tetrodotoxin. Paralysis; loss of sensation. A painless yet horrifying death. As a kid, puffer fish had been among my favorite animals until an old encyclopedia taught me that they were—quite literally—full of that shit. I struggled to focus back on Alex. My voice sounded muted, distant to my own ears. “Will it be made public? Will you tell his wife?”
    His lips curved; his gaze softened. Not really a smile—a silent apology. “You know we can’t. Death has been ruled a suicide.”
    “I see. And I suppose it’s a complete coincidence that you’re the one investigating all this. I mean, you must be bored already. Greenwich Street doesn’t sound nearly as exotic as your usual destinations,” I said bitterly.
    Lines appeared on Alex’s brow that I wasn’t sure I had ever noticed before. He seemed equally tired and conflicted, and when he spoke again there was an edge to his voice. “Don’t play with me. I know you’re smarter than that. The CIA is involved because US interests are threatened, and I am involved because you are threatened. My boss gave me the job because he knew I could never stand watching someone else—”
    “Treat me like this? Locking me in a room for interrogation?”
    “Yes,” he admitted.
    I looked away. “You’re lying. All you’ve done is lie from the start, anyway.”
    “As you lied to me,” Alex gritted out. “If I recall, you told me your mother had been a French diplomat. I must have missed the part where you mentioned her job as a spy.”
    I wondered, as he said this, if he knew about the Cullinan affair as well, or even . . . Dries.
    He was the other surprise package my mom had left for me to discover after her death. You see, she never delivered the diamond after she stole it, and was murdered before she could reveal where she had hidden it. What the Board would learn only a decade later was that she had double-crossed them with her lover, and incidentally my biological father, a supervillain hell-bent on world domination and known as Dries. No wonder my mom had chosen the nice American banker she had shared a brief fling with to raise me, instead.
    Here is where things get even trickier: she was supposed to give Dries the Cullinan, but for some reason she decided against it and vanished off the grid in Tokyo with me. Dries, however, belonged to a little club called the Lions, a secret fraternity of deadly and incredibly arrogant South African assassins who seemed to believe that the rest of us were maggots and the world was theirs for the taking. Said fraternity often took care of the Board’s dirty jobs: they got summoned to catch my mother and recover the diamond. Very convenient, as you can imagine.
    Except that on the day Dries was supposed to kidnap us, one of his men went rogue and shot my mom while she was driving, without any valid explanation, save for some bullshit about a faulty aim. I should have died too, but Dries’s favorite disciple, a young assassin he brought everywhere with him, turned his back on his “brothers” to save my life.
    That young man was March.
    I was fifteen, he was twenty-two, and unbeknownst to us both, he had set in motion a chain of events that would change our lives forever, like they say in movies.
    March left the Lions after that, and went on to fly solo, “cleaning” people on his own terms and becoming some kind of legendary criminal wildlife regulator, mostly for the Board, but sometimes also for the US government itself. I didn’t even remember him, until one fine night in October, he came knocking at my door—well, breaking in, really—for that goddamn rock . . .
    I figured I’d better not ask Alex if he knew any of this, and risk getting myself in even more trouble than I was