Crazed: A Blood Money Novel Read Online Free

camera. Big brown eyes, so dark a man could get lost in their depths, stared back at him, lifting at the corners in the faintest of crinkles as she laughed at the photographer. At him.
    Ilda Almeida had been the most beautiful individual Casey had ever met, inside and out. And she was dead, leaving him a secret widower and unable to tell a damn soul how her loss made him ache on the insides of his bones.
    He turned off the phone. Fucking demons.
     

Chapter Two

Chicago
    Tobias took the teacup and saucer his brother-in-law-to-be, Raleigh Vick, offered him, nodding his thanks as he leaned back in the leather club chair. Thankfully, the contents of the delicate porcelain weren’t tea but coffee, with enough of a kick to rev Tobias’s brain into high speed.
    His fiancée was handed tea, however. The British were weird.
    Chandler McCallister didn’t take a seat as she sipped her morning beverage, standing tense and alert next to him. Her hip brushed his shoulder, and the warmth from that contact worked better than any caffeine burst. Settling his saucer on the clouded glass side table at his left, he shifted to grip the back of Chandler’s thigh, his fingers slipping over the slick stretch fabric of her black jodhpur pants. He stroked the subtle seam running the length of her inner thigh, not saying a word, because they were being watched.
    Not overtly, of course, but Tobias was aware of every cautious glance directed their way. Unsurprising, seeing as this was the first time Chandler had been in this particular group’s company since the February night Beth was taken and subsequently tortured, nearly to death. Since then, Chandler had proven not to be the evil accomplice the Faradays had initially believed her, but the tension lingered.
    Still, she was the woman Tobias loved, the woman he needed to get through each day, and he and his siblings were going to have to get over this uncomfortable hurdle, sooner or later.
    The situation with Adam necessitated the former.
    Beth lounged on the couch across from Tobias’s seat, her hands wrapped around a giant mug of steaming coffee. Her short dark hair was growing out quickly, he noted, curling around her ears and brushing her forehead. Her head had been shaved during her ordeal, and Tobias—and the rest of the family—was relieved to see one of the most obvious outward signs of trauma fading. The scars on her arms, pale pink against the dusky gold of her natural skin tone, were also fading, more slowly than any of them would like, similar to the marks on her calves. Marks the entire room could see because of the sleeveless navy sheath dress she wore.
    It was a deliberate outfit choice, Tobias knew, and though his heart hurt—for Beth, for Chandler—he understood. His sister wanted his lover to see the damage inflicted by John Nash, Chandler’s former MI6 partner, wanted Chandler to know she was strong enough to not only survive that torment but to thrive in its wake. That dress was a pointed message: I won .
    But Beth’s weren’t the only pair of eyes on them. On the large flat-screen mounted over the living room fireplace, his other sister, Gillian, stared at the gathering with avid interest. It was early in San Diego, before sunrise, but Gillian had an energy drink in hand, her hair in a messy knot at the crown of her head, black-framed glasses adding angles to her rounded face. The head of weapons development for Faraday Industries looked to be in her home office—for once, thank goodness. Much like the rest of their clan, the brilliant thirty-year-old engineer was a workaholic.
    A few minutes ago, Casey had clomped down the stairs from the guest bedroom he’d crashed in for a few hours after arriving at Beth and Vick’s two-story home in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago late last night. Now he had a coffee in his hand, pacing from one end of the open-plan kitchen and living area to the other. He’d settled a bag—Adam’s bag—on the island counter in