Rage and Ruin | 2

2 | 9

R I L E Y

Jake called everyone to the living room after meeting again with Johnson, the Club member he'd apparently gotten information from. Having not been there the first time, of course I didn't know exactly what had gone down. But I'd heard that Jake had threatened to kill Johnson's child. Knowing that he'd done that, I wasn't exactly excited to hear what he had to say now.

"I got Johnson to inform me of the masked assassin's next mission so that we can be there to catch him."

"Where is it?" Kane asked sharply. He was doing his best to look like his normal stoic self, but I knew that he was internally distraught.

"Your brother has been assigned to extract information from guests at a gala tonight and then kill a man named Henry Waterson," Jake informed us matter-of-factly. "The gala is luckily being held downtown at five, so we'll be able to make it."

"Wait," Gigi said, waving her hands as she tried to catch up. "How are we going to take him down in a room full of hundreds of people?"

"Not with violence," Jake announced. "Riley's going to poison him instead."

I raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

"Your expertise in plants, poisonous or not, will aid us in incapacitating him enough to entrap him and drag him to Hunt."

"How am I supposed to poison him without being seen? Poison darts won't work in a room so crowded and I can't easily inject him with anything." I couldn't believe that I was actually debating doing this, especially after what Kane had told me about Benny.

"There will be waiters serving various beverages. You'll just pose as one of them and he won't suspect a thing when you slip a non-lethal dose of poison into his drink." I wasn't quite sure how Jake knew that I had poisonous plants in my possession. I doubted that I wanted to know.

"And what if he does?" I asked, crossing my arms flippantly. "What if things go wrong and he goes after me instead?"

He stared me down. "You'll live. The rest us will also be stationed at points in the crowd or venue, watching your interaction with him. If he makes a move to injure you, we will step in."

I looked down at my red-painted nails for a moment. "How soon do you want the poison to work?"

"Fifteen minutes or less after he drinks it," Jake instructed, having already thought this whole thing out. "Once it begins working, he'll realize that someone there poisoned him. He'll try to leave but won't make it because we'll reach him before he can. In that weakened state, he'll be much easier to apprehend."

"Alright," I agreed after a few seconds of hesitation. "I'll prepare the poison."

Before I left the room to head upstairs to my quarters, I made eye contact with Kane. His gaze was unreadable and I wondered if I was doing the wrong thing by poisoning his brother. He may have been a mass murderer, but he had once been a young boy with a good heart.

Once I was inside my room, my gaze swept over the familiar place. Plants of various kinds sat out on almost every flat space: on my side table, perched on the windowsill, even growing from a crack in my wall. The parts of my room that weren't dominated by plants held cages of small animals I'd gathered. As I walked by, one of my snakes hissed through the glass. A tarantula scuttled across the wood shavings in her enclosure.

Running my fingers over my plants, I searched for one in particular. When I found it, I needed to be careful not to touch it without gloves. Then, I spotted it: a dark green, dry-looking plant with small purple berries hidden between the leaves.