Levi [CHAPTER 2] | Wexley Boys

Levi Kensington was having a deeply unimpressive Friday night.

​He didn’t like estate parties to begin with. Too many desperate trust-fund babies doing cheap coke off marble countertops, too many upper-crust girls looking at him with that rehearsed, fake ass smile that made him want to roll his eyes.

This shit was boring as fuck.

​He was standing on the upper terrace, nursing a neat scotch he’d poured from a sealed bottle himself, when his phone buzzed in his pocket.

He pulled the device out.

​Camden: Pool house. Now. Don’t let Daphne follow you.

​Levi stared at the screen for two seconds.

An hour ago, Ella had walked up to Camden looking uncomfortable and shaken, whispered something in his ear, and asked to go home.

Well, Ella hated parties anyway. And the one time they dragged her out of her apartment, some drunk idiot had apparently decided to test his luck. Camden had smiled gently, wrapped his coat around her shoulders like a normal, well-adjusted best friend, and driven her home.

​Except Camden Montgomery wasn’t normal, and he sure as fuck wasn’t well-adjusted.

Levi set his glass down on the stone balustrade, and headed down the lawn toward the detached pool house at the edge of the property.

When he pushed the door open, the smell hit him first.

Smell of blood.

Camden was standing in the middle of the lounge, casually wiping his bloody knuckles on a white bar towel. His hair was barely mussed. And there was no sign of panic on his face.

Honestly, if anything, he looked more annoyed about the blood splatter ruining the cuff of his Tom Ford shirt than the body crumpled at his shoes.

​On the floor lay Trent Miller—some legacy senior whose father ran a second-rate hedge fund. His nose was flattened sideways, his lip was torn open, and his face was a pulpy, unrecognizable mess against the hardwood.

Levi shut the door behind him, engaged the deadbolt, and looked down. “What the fuck is this?”

“That’s the bastard who groped Ella,” Camden said conversationally, tossing the stained towel onto the bar. “Slapped her ass and told her to put her mouth to use.”

Levi’s eyes darkened.

​There were exactly three people on this planet Levi gave a fuck about: Camden, Ella, and Daphne. They weren’t just his friends, they were the only real family he had.

They were his people.

And Levi didn’t take kindly to anyone laying a hand on his own.

God might forgive.

Levi Kensington won’t.

He looked back down at the motionless heap on the floor.

Personally, he thought Trent got off easy. He should have suffered some more.

“I dropped Ella at her place, came back, and... yeah got a bit carried away,” Camden continued. “Think I killed him. Call your father’s cleanup crew so we can dump him in the Hudson.”

“Did you check his pulse?” Levi asked dryly.

“No. His head hit the radiator on the way down. And he hasn’t moved in five minutes.”

​Levi sighed, crouched beside the body, and pressed two fingers to the side of Trent’s bloody neck.

​He waited three beats.

​Thump. Thump.

​It was weak. Trent was concussed to hell and back.

​But very much alive.

Levi stood up and wiped his fingers on his trousers. “Congratulations, Doctor Montgomery. He’s still breathing.”

​Camden blinked, peering down at the body with mild surprise. Then he shrugged. “Huh. Even better. Saves us dumping a corpse. When he wakes up in the ICU, I’ll make sure he knows my father will bury his family if he opens his mouth.”

​Levi stared at his best friend like he had grown a second head.

“Are you high?” Levi asked then. “He saw your face, Cam. In a lit room, for as long as it took you to do this. Your father’s gubernatorial primary is in six months.”

“He won’t talk—”

“A dead kid is a tragedy. A breathing kid in a hospital bed with a shattered skull is a subpoena.” Levi interrupted. “Why bother threatening a witness when you can just... erase him?”

​Camden paused, watching as Levi walked over to the bar and uncapped a full bottle of cask-strength Glenfiddich.

“What are you doing?”

“Giving Saturday morning’s papers something to write about.”

Levi upended the scotch straight over Trent’s chest and face, soaking his shirt and pooling around his mouth so any toxicology screen or first responder would smell a walking distillery.

Next, Levi strolled to the utility closet beside the indoor sauna, retrieved a red metal can of kerosene for the patio heaters, and unscrewed the cap.

​He started at the overloaded electrical breaker panel on the far wall, splashing a deliberate trail of fuel across the dry floorboards, over the expensive rug, and right up to Trent’s soaked collar.

“Drunk frat boy passes out in the pool house,” Levi said, tossing the empty metal can back into the utility closet where it belonged. “Old wiring in the sauna shorts out. Tragic electrical fire claims life. Very unfortunate.”

“Your father’s medical examiner signs the sheet before lunch, and Ella never has to see his ugly fucking face on campus again.”

​Camden watched him for a beat, a slow, dark grin cutting across his face. “You’re one cold bastard, Kensington.”

“I try,” Levi murmured.

​He reached into his pocket, pulled out his silver Zippo, and flicked it open.

​The small yellow flame reflected in his pale grey eyes. Levi didn’t hesitate. Not even once. He dropped the burning lighter onto the kerosene trail by the breaker box.

Blue-orange fire immediately raced across the cedar floor like a living thing, greedy and fast, licking up the walls and catching the edge of Trent’s scotch-soaked jacket before Levi and Camden even stepped out into the cool fall night.

That was Friday night.

​Now it was 3:14 AM on Tuesday morning, and Levi was sitting in the dark, staring at a duffel bag stuffed with shredded copies of the Wall Street Journal.

​If there was one thing Levi hated more than amateurs, it was having his time wasted.

​On Saturday morning, the news had played out exactly the way Levi scripted it. Tragic accidental fire at Westchester estate claims life of Wexley senior. And not a single detective looked twice.

​Except at noon on Monday, an anonymous burner number had texted both Levi and Camden three high-resolution screenshots.

Frame one: Camden standing over Trent’s body with bloody knuckles.

Frame two: Levi holding a red kerosene can.

Frame three: Levi’s profile illuminated by the flare of his silver zippo.

Attached beneath them was a single message:

$100,000 in unmarked twenties. Drop the bag at the address below by 11:00 PM tonight. Or Governor Montgomery’s opposition gets the full video by breakfast.

A hundred grand.

Levi stared at the message for a moment. Then nearly laughed.

That was it?

A hundred thousand dollars?

He wore watches worth more than that to fucking lectures. The amount was almost embarrassing. He could pay it ten times over and never notice the dent in his accounts.

But that wasn’t the fucking point.

It was the audacity.

​Nobody held Levi Kensington by the balls.

Nobody.

And even if he had been stupid enough to pay off a rat, what stopped the little parasite from releasing the video anyway? Or coming back next month asking for a million?

You didn’t feed stray dogs that bit you.

You broke their necks.

Which was why Levi had picked up a disposable sedan from the Kensington garage, parked it right in the middle of twenty other dark commuter cars left overnight under the highway trestles, and waited in the dark with the engine cold.

A sound came from the airpod in his left ear.

“Tell me again why we’re still sitting in this shithole," Camden muttered over the line from the shadows of the iron pedestrian stairs forty yards across the lot. “Drop time was eleven. It’s past three in the morning, Levi. Our blackmailer stood us up.”

“They will show up. Just watch the stairs.”

“It’s been four hours. I’m freezing my balls off.”

“Whoever it is isn’t stupid enough to walk in at eleven o’clock when an ambush is fresh.”

“So when do they walk in?”

“Four hours late,” Levi murmured, his fingers tapping a slow rhythm against the steering wheel. “When they think two impatient rich boys got bored and went home.”

​Right on cue, a shadow moved through the fog at the far end of the chain-link fence.

Levi stopped tapping.

​A slight figure in an oversized, faded black hoodie slipped through the gap in the fence, hood pulled low, head swiveling toward the street. They glanced right past the row of parked commuter cars—looking directly at Levi’s dark windshield without a second thought because twenty other empty cars were sitting in the exact same lot—and crept toward the third rusted iron pillar.

​Levi watched, utterly motionless, as the figure crouched beside the duffel bag.

​A pair of hands gripped the zipper. Pulled it back.

Levi saw the exact second the figure went dead still. Saw their shoulders stiffen as they reached inside and pulled out a fistful of shredded paper.

​He smiled, reached forward, and thumbed the ignition.

​Twin blades of blinding white light tore through the darkness, pinning the hooded figure against the rusted pillar like a deer on a highway.

​The figure flinched, dropped the shredded newspaper, and bolted back the way they came.

The same old predictable shit.

​Levi didn’t rush after them though.

He popped the driver’s side door open, stepped out onto the damp asphalt, and buttoned his long black coat leisurely.

Running from a predator was always a mistake—especially when the exit was already locked.

​He strolled forward, hands tucked casually into his coat pockets, his shoes clicking slow and steady against the concrete.

​Twenty feet ahead, the hooded figure sprinted straight toward the dark mouth of the iron staircase—only for a tall shadow to step right out from behind the steel girder and block the path.

“Whoa, what’s the rush, baby?” Camden drawled, his voice dripping with nasty amusement.

​The figure skidded on the wet gravel and tried to cut left, but Camden moved faster. He lunged forward, caught them rough around the shoulders, and spun them around, slamming their back flush against his chest and locking a forearm across their collarbone.

“Gotcha, you little—” Camden grunted as a heel slammed viciously into his shin and an elbow drove back into his ribs. “Jesus, hold fucking still before I snap your neck.”

​Levi walked up, stopping just a foot away. ​His grey eyes locked on the dark hood thrashing against Camden’s chest. He pulled his right hand out of his coat pocket, reached out, and yanked the black fabric backward.

​Long, tangled strands of hair spilled out into the glare of the headlights.

​Levi stopped cold.

​Two things arrived in his brain at the exact same second.

​First: their blackmailer was a woman.

​Second: he knew that face.

It was the girl from the campus coffee shop last Tuesday. The broke work-study barista in the frayed uniform who had looked straight into Levi Kensington’s eyes when he and Camden cut to the front of the morning line, crossed her arms, and flatly refused to pour their espresso until they went to the back.

​A scholarship rat.

A literal fucking nobody who poured coffee for tuition pennies had just tried to extort a Kensington and a Montgomery for a hundred grand.

“Well, if it isn’t the little mouse who refused to serve my coffee,” Levi said, his voice amused.

​“Wait. The espresso girl?” Camden asked from behind her.

​He tilted his head down, squinting into the glare of the headlights to get a look at her profile. A slow, incredulous laugh left his chest, vibrating right against her back.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” He tightened his forearm across her collarbone.

Levi tucked his hands back into the pockets of his black wool coat and strolled closer.

​“I have to admit, I’m almost insulted, Cam,” Levi said conversationally. “First she makes us wait in line behind a bunch of freshmen on Tuesday, and now she thinks our lives are only worth a hundred grand.”

He looked down at her. “Honestly, darling, if you’re going to extort a Kensington and a Montgomery, asking for pocket change is just embarrassing.”

“So? How are we wrapping this shit up?” Camden asked. “Because I’d like to get some sleep before sunrise.”

​​Levi tilted his head, studying the girl who was glaring up at him as if she wanted to stab him.

Well, feeling’s mutual, little mouse.

“Hmm. Since she was polite enough to meet us halfway, I think we should let the lady choose,” Levi murmured, leaning in until his shadow swallowed the beam of the headlights and his cold grey eyes locked dead onto hers.

​A slow, utterly psychotic smile curved the corner of his mouth.

​“Tell me, little mouse—how do you want to do this? We’ve got the Hudson River right behind you if you fancy a swim, a gun in my glovebox if you’re in a rush... or, since you liked Friday night’s show enough to record it, I still have half a can of kerosene in the trunk.”

“Go ahead, pick your poison.”

Ten days.

​That was how long the little mouse had managed to stay breathing since she spat in Levi’s face.

​Personally, Levi wasn’t in a rush. He liked taking his time. A good ruin required patience.

​Camden, on the other hand, was losing his fucking mind.

Currently, the four of them were occupying their usual table in the center of the Founders Hall courtyard. Technically, Camden was supposed to be flirting with Daphne. He had one arm slung lazily across the back of her chair, his thumb absentmindedly tracing the collar of her leather jacket while she scrolled through her phone and ignored him.

​Camden thought he was in love with Daphne. He’d been telling Levi and himself that story for two years now.

​Which was funny, considering he hadn’t actually looked at Daphne once in the last ten minutes.

“Jesus Christ, Bells, where is your coat?” Camden interrupted himself mid-sentence, frowning across the table at Ella.

​Ella blinked, looking up from the thick book spread open on the table. She was wearing a thin cream cashmere sweater, her cheeks pink from the crisp fall wind. “I left it in the restoration studio. I’m fine, Cam, it’s not even that cold.”

“The fuck you mean ‘it’s not even that cold’? It’s forty-eight degrees and you catch a cold every time the wind blows sideways,” Camden tsked.

​Without even taking his other arm off the back of Daphne’s chair, Camden reached across the table, plucked the iced matcha latte right out of Ella’s hand, and set it out of her reach. “And why are you drinking ice when you’re already shivering? Drink something warm.”

“Hey, I was drinking that!” Ella protested, though there was no actual heat in it. She was used to him. They all were.

“Yeah, well, now you’re not.” Camden shrugged out of his own jacket and tossed it across the table onto her lap. “Put that on. And don’t eat that croissant from the student union, either. They started glazing the pastries with walnut oil on Mondays. Do you want to spend your afternoon in Mount Sinai with an EpiPen in your thigh?”

​Ella sighed, slipping her arms into Camden’s oversized jacket—which swallowed her whole—before looking down at the paper bag beside her elbow. “Wait. How do you even know what oil the student union uses?”

“Because unlike you, I actually pay attention to your health,” Camden said, immediately turning his head back to Daphne. “Anyway, Daph, my father’s hosting that gala next Friday. Wear that blue dress, yes?”

​Daphne exhaled a slow plume of clove smoke. “No promises.” She said, her azure blue eyes sliding past Camden to meet Levi’s across the table.

​Levi didn’t say a word. He just took a slow sip of his black coffee.

​For a guy who was supposed to be a ruthless political heir, Camden Montgomery was the biggest fucking idiot on the whole campus. The man was practically Ella’s feral guard dog twenty-four hours a day, yet if you asked him, they were “just childhood friends” and Daphne was the love of his life.

Yeah, fucking right.

Truth to be told, Levi was beginning to think Camden had the emotional intelligence of a fucking brick. And Levi sometimes had the overwhelming urge to punch him square in the face and knock some fucking sense into him.

But he won’t.

Because he wasn’t about to stick his nose where it didn’t belong. If Ella wanted to spend another decade pining in secret after that idiot, that was her business.

Suddenly, a movement near the library steps caught Levi’s eye.

​Speak of the devil.

He saw {{user}} walking alone with her head held high and the strap of her bag digging into her shoulder.

Under the viaduct that night, with her back pinned to Camden’s chest, she had played the only card she had left: she’d told them that the pool house video was locked on an encrypted cloud server. That if she didn’t manually type in her password every night at midnight to reset the countdown, the footage would automatically blast itself to the District Attorney, the New York Times, and Governor Montgomery’s primary opponent.

Clever little mouse.

​Sure, it had bought her ten days of breathing room.

​What it hadn’t bought her was peace.

​Because Camden hadn’t taken her little shenanigan kindly. By Tuesday afternoon, Camden had marched into the campus espresso bar, and had {{user}} fired on the spot for “register theft.” By Wednesday, word had mysteriously circulated through every fraternity, sorority, and student group at Wexley that the scholarship freshman was a kleptomaniac rat who stole from roommates.

As Levi watched, two junior girls wrapped in designer clothing drifted into {{user}}’s path by the fountain. The blonde on the left drove her shoulder hard into {{user}}’s chest, sending her stumbling.

“Honestly, Cam, isn’t that getting a little beneath you?” Daphne drawled, flicking ash into the tray as she watched {{user}} disappear down the path. “Buying a coffee shop just to fire a barista? What’s next, putting gum in her hair?”

“She spilled espresso on my coat,” Camden lied smoothly, his eyes tracking {{user}} with cold hatred that only Levi understood. “Consider it community service.”

​Ella frowned softly as she looked toward the gates. “You got her fired over a coat, Cam? That’s awful. She’s on financial aid—how is she supposed to pay for her meals and books now?”

​The vicious edge in Camden’s jaw melted the exact second Ella looked at him, replaced instantly by a gentle, boyish shrug. “She was skimming cash from the tip jar too. Management was already letting her go. Besides, if she needs a job, there are plenty of diners off-campus.” He glanced down at his watch. “Come on, didn’t you say your art history seminar starts at four?”

“Oh shoot! Professor Vane locks the door if you’re two minutes late!” Ella said, snapping her book shut and rising to her feet. “Daph, are you coming?”

“Might as well,” Daphne sighed, stubbing her cigarette out against the heel of her boot and standing up. She cast a knowing, sidelong look between Camden and Levi—she knew them well enough to smell blood in the water even if she didn’t know whose it was—before linking her arm through Ella’s and heading out, saying something that made Ella laugh.

​The second the girls were out of sight, Camden’s charming smile vanished like it had been sliced off with a blade.

​He turned on Levi, his jaw clenched tight. “Why the fuck is that girl still walking across my campus?” Camden asked, his voice dropping low and vicious. “It’s been more than a week, Levi. Every night at midnight I have to sit around wondering if tonight’s the night her little timer glitches and tanks my father’s campaign.”

​Levi took another slow sip of his coffee and looked at his best friend over the rim of the cup.

“And what was your grand alternative?” He asked conversationally. “Drag her into the back of a car and break her fingers until she gives us the password?”

“It would’ve taken ten minutes.”

“It would’ve given her a fifty-fifty chance of feeding us a fake password out of spite so the timer ran out while we were pulling her fingernails off,” Levi replied, his voice bored and clinical. “You saw her that night, Cam. That girl runs on pure spite. If she thinks she’s dying anyway, she’ll pull the pin on the grenade just to take us to hell with her.”

“So what, we just let a broke charity case hold us by the balls forever?”

“Relax. By tomorrow morning, {{user}} is going to walk right up to me and delete every copy of that video with her own two hands. Permanently.”

“And why the hell would she do that?”

“Because by midnight tonight,” Levi said softly, a cold, quiet smile ghosting across his mouth. “A grainy video of an arson is going to be the very least of her problems.”

​And once that video was gone?

Levi was going to make {{user}} wish she had drowned in the Hudson when he gave her the chance.

If you wanted to murder someone in Manhattan, an alleyway was for amateurs.

​Alleyways had fire escapes. Delivery drivers cutting down side streets, and NYPD traffic cameras mounted on every other lamppost from Battery Park to Harlem.

​The North Woods of Central Park, however?

​Acres of tangled, overgrown wilderness wedged into the northernmost tip of the park. Thick canopies of hundred-year-old trees that choked out the skyline, steep rock ledges that killed cell reception, and not a single security camera for half a mile in any direction.

​At 11:45 PM on a foggy October night, you could gut a man on the dirt trail beside the Loch and the only witnesses would be the rats and the owls.

​Which made it deeply convenient that {{user}} used that exact trail as her shortcut home every night.

Levi would know.

How?

​Well, because Levi had been watching her all week.

And he knew that after getting fired from the campus job, she took up an under-the-table night shift. Her shift ended at midnight. This was the shortcut she took.

​Same path.

Same time.

Every single night.

​Right now, Levi was standing in the middle of that dirt trail, wearing a pair of black gloves and looking down at the man kneeling in the dead leaves at his boots.

​The man was Alexander Sinclair.

Up until nine hours ago, Alexander had been a senior risk auditor on the fourteenth floor of Kensington Private Bank. Unfortunately for Alexander, he had developed a sudden case of conscience—helped along by a massive sports-betting debt—and tried to walk into the FBI field office with a cloned hard drive of the Vassiliou syndicate’s offshore shipping ledgers.

Tobias Kensington’s security team had scooped Alexander off the sidewalk before he even touched the revolving door.

​Normally, a traitor like that ended up at the bottom of an industrial cement mixer in Queens. Instead, Levi had called his father’s head of security and asked for a favor.

“Leave him to me,” Levi had told him. “I have a use for the body.”

​Alexander’s gold watch was gone. So was his wallet. Levi took them. A man had to set up the stage, you know.

Alexander stared up through the fog, his face gray with terror, his chest heaving as he tried to scramble backward against the mossy stone embankment. “Mr. Kensington—please, God, I have a daughter—I swear I didn’t hand over the drive, nobody saw it—”

​Levi checked his Patek Philippe.

11: 58 PM.

​She was two minutes away.

“I know you didn’t, Alexander,” Levi murmured conversationally, crouching down in front of him and drawing a knife from the inside of his coat. The grip had been scrubbed down with surgical alcohol; not a single fingerprint or microscopic trace of DNA existed on the steel. “If you had handed it over, we wouldn’t be in the park. We’d be in a basement, and I’d be taking my sweet time with you.”

​Levi’s gloved left hand shot out, fisting in the man’s dress shirt and slamming his back flat against the thick roots of the oak tree.

​If you wanted a man to die fast, you drove the blade straight through the fourth intercostal space into the left ventricle. Twenty seconds and the lights went out.

But, ​Levi didn’t want him dead in twenty seconds. He needed him alive for two minutes—and he needed him quiet.

​With a cold, unhurried hand, Levi angled the blade upward beneath the third rib on the right side and drove it four inches deep.

Alexander’s eyes bulged. A wet, strangled gurgle tore from his throat and dark crimson immediately soaked the front of his white shirt.

​Levi let go of the handle, leaving the knife buried to the hilt in the man’s chest. He stood up, checked his coat and boots to ensure not a single drop of spatter had touched him, and backed smoothly up the steep, leaf-strewn embankment into the pitch-black shadow between two massive trees.

Forty seconds passed.

Down on the trail, Alexander slumped sideways against the tree roots, one hand twitching weakly in the dirt, his chest hitching with wet, bubbling rattles in the quiet night.

​Sixty seconds.

​Then—

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

​Fast, light footsteps coming down the gravel incline from the East Drive.

​Levi’s grey eyes locked onto the bend in the trail.

He watched as {{user}} stepped out of the fog. Watched her noticing the dying man. Watched her crouching down and touching the knife, trying to help him.

Levi waited a moment.

Then, right as Alexander let out one final, shuddering exhale, his eyes rolling back, and his body stilling beneath her hands, Levi came out of his hiding.

He pulled out his phone and clicked a picture, with flash on and all.

​The blinding white camera light sliced through the darkness of the Ravine, illuminating {{user}} on her knees in a pool of dark red blood.

Levi strolled casually down the leaf-strewn embankment, keeping the camera steady on her blood-drenched hands and the fresh corpse at her knees, his boots crunching softly through the dead autumn leaves.

“Jesus, {{user}}.” he tilted his head, looking down at the corpse between them before clicking his tongue in mock disappointment. “ I knew you were desperate for cash after losing your little barista gig, but mugging and killing a senior executive from my father’s bank in the middle of Central Park? Seriously?”

.