“Then you tell her to stop blaming Father for Ludovic’s murder,” he mumbles.
I laugh bitterly. How naive can he be?
“She’ll stop,” I tell him. “She’ll stop because she’ll have no choice. You and Father will be free to do whatever the fuck you do here, but we won’t have any part of it, won’t have any ties to it.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he says, “Fine.”
“Is that a promise?” I ask, and when he doesn’t answer, I haul him up to his feet, pressing him against the books with my forearm against his windpipe, the gun at his head. “Tell me it’s a promise. Or else.”
“You’ll shoot me,” he says, wincing. “As if I were never your brother.”
“No,” I tell him. “Seraphine will share the files I’ve been recording since I got here. From my phone in my pocket. The microphone picking up everything, it’s going straight to the cloud that she has access to. She’s in a safe place. Maybe you’ve bought the Parisian police, but she can take this to the tabloids, and you can bet they’re just dying to run something against the great team of Gautier and Pascal Dumont. A murderer and an accessory.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Pascal whispers, but there’s fear in his eyes. He believes me, even though I actually lied through my teeth. My phone isn’t recording, and I can only hope that Seraphine is safe.
“I’m starting to think you don’t know me very well,” I tell him. “But I’m always willing to prove myself. Now promise me that you’ll sort something out for us, because if you don’t . . . I will ruin your whole life, and that’s going to hurt a lot more than a bullet to the head.”
He closes his eyes and sighs. “Okay.”
Just then the sound of crunching gravel comes from outside.
I continue to hold the gun at Pascal’s head, and I drag him over to the windows and peek outside.
My father is home.
And it’s not just my father.
It’s him and Jones and three large men. More disciples.
Two of them are from last night.
One of them with several layers of gauze wrapped around his neck, hunched over and in pain.
So Seraphine didn’t kill him after all.
Shit.
Now I wish she had.
Pascal and I exchange a glance.
You know them? his look says.
I bring him back over to the desk and sit him down, then I crouch down under the desk so I’m hidden. I keep the gun trained on him and whisper harshly, “Handle it.”
Pascal stares down at me, maybe calculating how fast he can turn me in and if I’ll shoot him before that. Then he glances up at the door as the front door opens, and I hear the men step inside the house.
“Pascal?” my father’s voice says, echoing in the hall. “What are you doing in the study?”
I have my head craned up at Pascal, watching his face carefully, waiting for him to give a nonverbal signal to our father that his crazy son is under the desk with a gun.
But so far Pascal just shrugs, easily playing back into his lackadaisical attitude. “Wanted to pretend to be you for a while.” He then frowns as his gaze goes from my father to someone else who walked into the house. “Is everything all right?”
“No, everything isn’t all right,” my father says, sounding tired and on edge. “Have you heard from Blaise?”
I hold my breath. This is it. My brother could rightfully turn me in and take a chance with a bullet.
He shakes his head. “No, why? He wasn’t at work?”
“No,” my father says. “Listen, we have a major problem on our hands, and I’m going to need your help with it. In case you haven’t met before—I can’t remember these days—this is the infamous Jones. These other guys, it doesn’t really matter—the only thing you need to know about them is that two of them were involved in a fight last night in Paris.”
“I can see that,” Pascal says evenly. Even though his face and upper body are cool as a cucumber, he’s tapping one foot right beside me. It’s a light, quick movement, and it’s enough to tell me that he’s actually nervous as hell.
That makes two of us. I’m starting to think I won’t come out of this alive.
Maybe Seraphine was right.
“What happened?” Pascal goes on.
“He was shot.”
“Shot?”
“By Seraphine.”
Pascal’s eyes widen, and his shoe-tapping stops. I didn’t tell him that part.
“Sorry . . . you said Seraphine shot him? How? Why?”
“You know why,” my father says gruffly.
“Then tell me again because I don’t remember that part,” Pascal says, frowning slightly.
I hear my father sigh, and I can picture him dragging his hand down his face. “Let’s just say the roughing-up part didn’t work out as planned. She fought back. And more than that . . . I think Blaise was involved.”
“What makes you say that?” Pascal asks as he tilts his head, surveying the men.
A throat is cleared. I hear Jones speak: “When I met with Seraphine, she was alone. She was on her guard. She wouldn’t come with me. So I had my men here try to take her. They say a man came out of the bushes and started fighting them.”
“Could be any good Samaritan.”
“What a lovely world it would be if that were true,” Jones says. “Except most random strangers aren’t trained in martial arts, and this guy was good enough to handle these guys. Or at least one at a time. When Seraphine pulled a gun on them and shot Rufus here through the neck, I knew the two obviously knew each other.”
“Do you know where Blaise was last night?” Father asks.
At least now I know that Pascal was telling the truth about staying home. He hadn’t been watching it all unfold. I probably would have killed him had I known he’d stood by and let it happen.
“No,” Pascal says. “Are you sure it was Blaise? Why would he be involved with Seraphine?”
Hmmm. The way he says this makes it sound like he truly never discussed the relationship between Seraphine and me. Part of me would feel relieved, if only I could feel relief right now, crammed under this desk, the gun slick under my sweaty grip.
“I have suspicions I won’t dare let myself think about,” my father says. I notice he doesn’t outright say that he thinks I’m in love with her or we’re having an affair. He might only suspect those, but it’s an embarrassing thing—for him—to admit in front of other powerful men. “But Blaise is soft around the edges, and Seraphine has no one. It’s possible that she went to him for help.”
“But she suspects you of murdering your own brother,” Pascal points out. My father snorts at that, like it’s amusing, like it’s true. “How could she know that he’d believe you did that?”
“Oh, come on, Pascal. We both know that Blaise is a waste of space in this world.”
Pascal stiffens. My fingers tighten around the gun.
My father goes on with his insults. “The only reason he came back to work for us was because he wanted the status symbol. I understand that. Living in Thailand and whatever else the fuck he was doing, that gives him nothing. No name. Nothing to show to the world. Try as you might, after a while, being a Dumont is all that becomes important. It’s the legacy and the bloodline that pulls you back in. You can try to escape it, but it turns out you can’t. And that boy has been trying to escape who he is for his entire life.”
“Doesn’t mean that he’d throw it all away for his cousin.”
“Perhaps he’s more like her than us. Maybe he should have been Ludovic’s son, pathetic and weak. I don’t know what it means. But I know what we have to do now.”
I swallow and wait. Whatever he says, I’m not going to like. I just have to hope that Pascal doesn’t like it either.
“What?”
“We need to take Seraphine out of the picture.”
My father’s words have extra weight in them as they hang in this cold room. As ang
ry and hot as I was earlier, now I feel the pit of my stomach turn to ice. Not that this was unexpected, but to hear him say it like this in front of Pascal . . .
I watch my brother carefully. One of his hands is by his knee, and he’s clenching and unclenching his fingers around the material of his pants.
Pascal blinks at him for a few moments. “What do you mean, ‘out of the picture’?”
“You know what I mean,” my father says, voice lowered as if he is being recorded in his own house. “And you don’t need to worry about it. I just need your help.”
“What do you want?”
“I need you to contact her and bring her to me.”
Pascal gives a twisted smile. “She won’t go anywhere with me. She hates me.”
“But she’s soft and you’re family.”
“I don’t think you know her like I do, Father, but she is not soft. She can be a vicious little bitch.”
I can’t help but smile. Thatta girl. You’ve been scaring Pascal all this time.
“Then you deal with it. You’re the charming one. You bring her to me, use force if you have to.”
Pascal swallows uneasily. I wait with bated breath, not knowing what he’s going to do or say. Is he going to go along with this as he always does, or is he actually going to do the right thing for once? I don’t think Pascal has ever done the right thing in his whole entire life.
“This isn’t really part of my skill set,” he goes on carefully, trying to be funny and deflect. “That’s what you hire those guys for, isn’t it? I’m more of the subtly-terrorize-and-stalk-people variety.”
“We don’t have a choice. She’s going to turn us in.”
“Us? What the fuck do I have to do with any of this?”
“You let it happen,” my father says smoothly. “Don’t you dare think for a second that I don’t have all the evidence in the world to pin Ludovic’s death on you. Because I do. We’re Dumonts, after all. Double-crossing is in our nature. A good father prepares for the fact that one day his son may not want to do as he’s told.”
“But what evidence?” Now Pascal is sweating. “I had nothing to do with it.”
“We know that. Other people don’t, and I can easily make it so that it looks like you did. So fucking easily, Pascal. Now, are you going to get Seraphine for me or what?”
Pascal stares at him, and he’s breathing hard, his hand clenching until it turns white.
Our father is actually blackmailing him.
The tables have turned.
At one point I would have found it amusing that Pascal, for all his shifty dealings and power plays and actually blackmailing our cousin Olivier, is now being blackmailed by my father.
But it’s not amusing.
It’s sad.
And absolutely frightening to know just how far my father will go to keep going; he’ll throw his most beloved son, his wolf, to a pride of lions.
“I have a better idea,” Pascal says evenly, as if my father’s words had no effect on him at all. “Less messy, more legal.”
“What?” my father asks after a beat.
“Transfer Seraphine to the new office in Dubai,” he says.
My eyes widen in surprise.
“What? Why the fuck would I do that?” my father practically spits out.
“It’s easier. It won’t raise any questions. It will keep her out of our hair. She’ll gladly go, I know she will.”
“This doesn’t solve our problem of what she’s trying to do.”
“It will. Look, she’s just one woman.”
“Not when Blaise is involved.”
“I’ll talk to Blaise about it. I’ll get him to reason with her. Seraphine is scared, okay, I guarantee that. She shot a man. That’s what someone who thinks they’re going to die will do. You did your job and you scared her. She’s not going to continue to poke around; she’s learned her lesson.”
“And how do you know this?”
“I’ve worked with her long enough to know that she’s human. She will preserve her own life. Let her think what she wants about us, but if she goes to Dubai, she’ll drop it.”
“Her love for her father is extreme.”
Pascal presses his lips together in thought. “I don’t think it’s extreme. I think it’s normal. For a normal family. Not for us.”
“Not for them either. They aren’t normal. They have everyone fucking fooled,” Father says. “You know what my brother did to me, don’t you? Your saintly uncle? You know why he deserved to die?”
I still, not knowing what he’s going to say.
Pascal shakes his head. “Not really.”
“You were there on Mallorca,” he says. “And you didn’t pick up on it.”
“There’s always something going on—”
“Right. Well, anyway. Don’t go ahead thinking that their side is the good side. It’s not. They share the Dumont name too. The same wicked blood pumps through all of our veins, only we’re the ones who aren’t scared of being who we are. We embrace it. They do it in secret and pretend to be good. It’s all a mask, son, all a mask.”
“Seraphine isn’t even related.”
“And that’s why she has to go.”
“She will go. I’ll make sure of it.”
There’s a pause, and I hear my father’s footsteps on the parquet floors, coming closer to the desk. “I’m not talking about Dubai.”
“You should be. I know your emotions are all mixed up right now,” Pascal says, his posture stiffening as my father gets closer and closer to him, to me. “But it’s the smart thing to do. Forget about it being the right thing—it’s the smart thing.”
My father stops in front of the desk, and I hear it creak as he leans on it. I see his shadow fall as he leans toward Pascal, staring him right in the eye.
I freeze. If I move, there’s a chance that my father will pick up on the movement out of the corner of his eye, and I have zero doubt that I’ll be killed. If he’s willing to blackmail his favorite son, he’s willing to kill the one he hates.
But I’m also willing to kill him.
“What a world we live in,” my father says in a low voice. I can see the bottom of his throat move as he talks. “You telling me what decisions to make. Smart ones, no less.”
Pascal doesn’t shrink. He holds his ground, stares right back into our father’s eyes. “There’s a first time for everything,” he says.
“Right,” he says, and the staring contest ensues.
I can’t even breathe, I don’t fucking dare.
If he looks down at all, he’ll see me.
He’ll see me and I’ll have to shoot him and maybe even kill my own brother, and then I’ll have to fight the rest of them, and then I’ll be dead too.
And then Seraphine will be dead.
And our legacy will come to an end.
Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
But then my father reaches forward and patronizingly taps the side of Pascal’s cheek. “Okay.”
He stands up straight, and I don’t dare exhale because he would hear me, but at least I’m hidden by the desk again. “If the men come back empty handed, then we’ll send her to the Middle East.”
What men?
“What men?” Pascal asks.
“We sent some men to find her.”
“I thought . . . I thought you wanted me to kidnap her? Bring her to you?”
My father laughs. “Oh, son. You really thought that I’d have to rely on you? I know you’re soft too. I just wanted to see where you stand on the whole thing. And it’s fine, really, I don’t expect you to be exactly like me. Roughing your cousin up, you didn’t seem to have a problem with that. Kidnapping, maybe. Kidnapping that leads to death? Perhaps that’s where you draw the line.”
“Where is she?” Pascal asks, saying what I wish I could ask, what my heart is lurching around in my chest over. “She wouldn’t be dumb enough to go to her apartment. Or Blaise’s.”
“Jones?” my
father asks.
“We had some men check out their apartments,” Jones says coolly. “They weren’t there. So we started going through Seraphine’s contacts. The men are checking them out as we speak. If not a friend, then perhaps her brother’s hotels.”
Marie.
They’re going to know about Marie!
“So we’ll see,” my father says. “If they find her, well, I guess you don’t have to get involved with that, Pascal. You can cover your innocent eyes. But if they don’t, okay. She’s off to Dubai. But you would have to make sure she doesn’t have any contact with us and, more than that, that she doesn’t keep sticking her neck out. She has to drop this. You say she’s scared and she’s learned her lesson—well, I’m taking your word on it. But if you’re wrong . . . well, you know what the consequences will be. And it won’t be just for her. It’ll be for you too.”
“And Blaise? What do we do about him?”
He sighs. “I don’t care. If she’s gone, then it doesn’t really matter. Maybe he’ll go with her. Maybe he’ll stay here. As far as I’m concerned now, he’s not my son and he’s not your brother. You understand that? If he’s going to take Seraphine’s side over ours, then we have no choice but to cut him loose. This is his decision, you see. He can’t matter to us if we don’t matter to him. We’ll take him one day at a time.”
If I get out of here, I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure that I’ll never see these two again.
I have no family, except for Seraphine.
And that suits me just fine.
Only there’s a chance now I won’t have her either.
I wish I could check my phone, that I could call her, text her of the danger, but I can’t risk any movement. Not now.
“Now,” my father goes on, “if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to need to use this room for our meeting.”
Oh fuck.
Pascal seems to freeze. “Oh yeah?” he asks, slowly getting to his feet. “You want him bleeding all over here?”
There’s a shuffle and a gasp.
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