“I’m not working for you,” I remind him, looking forward at the casket, trying to pay my respects. “I’m not working for anyone. I’m here for a little bit, and then I’m out of here.”
But even though I’m staring at the casket as the rain falls down and the priest comes up in front of the crowd, out of the corner of my eye, I can see Pascal smirking at me. Like he knows something I don’t.
Like he knows there’s no way I can leave now.
Not after seeing her again, after being reminded of what I’ve really been looking for all this time away.
Her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SERAPHINE
I’m dreaming.
One of those dreams that teeters between sleep and consciousness, where you wake up and fall asleep again for a few minutes, and in those minutes a world unravels. The twilight of dreams.
In this dream I’m being choked again at the masquerade ball. Blaise is across the room, reaching out and running in slow motion. He freezes on the spot, hands stretched out, never getting to me. But where I was paralyzed before, this time I can move my hands. I put them over the hands of my attacker and pry them off.
I turn around and see a man in a black mask lined with silver zippers.
I reach up and take his mask off.
It’s Gautier, grinning at me with eyes as black as his soul. Inky tar, sticky and fathomless.
Then he morphs into Pascal.
Then into Jones.
And finally . . .
Into my father.
I gasp, unable to hold back my shock.
“Father?” I cry out.
He leans in and winks, and in that moment I realize it’s not my father at all, but someone else pretending to be him. “It all started with me,” he says in a raspy voice.
Then I’m awake again.
In my darkened bedroom.
The light in the hallway is on, and the hair on my arms is standing at attention, just as it’s happened on many nights lately.
Except this isn’t a matter of me leaving the hall light on and passing out.
There’s a man in the doorway.
A familiar silhouette.
“It’s okay.” Blaise’s voice cuts through the dark. “I think you were having a nightmare.”
Everything comes flooding back to me. Drinking here, getting the text from Jones, meeting him at the bar, hearing that he had no evidence against my father and the whole thing was in my head, the Vulcan maneuver he pulled on me when he threatened to kill me if I didn’t pay up. Then falling off the stool, hitting my head on the floor, the racist guy helping me to my feet and groping me, followed by Blaise.
Blaise, who seemed to come out of nowhere.
Blaise, who is now in my bedroom.
“I am having a nightmare,” I manage to say, my throat thick and dry as dust, my head throbbing. I run my hands down my body, feeling relief that my clothes are still on, everything except my shoes. “The nightmare is that you’re in my bedroom.”
“Not quite,” he says. “I’m standing just outside.”
I prop myself up on my elbows and let my eyes adjust to the dark. I still can’t see his face. “Why were you there, Blaise? That wasn’t a coincidence.”
I wish I could see his face. He’s hard to read in the light, but even so, I want to make some guesses. He remains in the doorway, a shadow from my past even though I see him nearly every day.
He doesn’t say anything, but the room is thick with tension.
“You should get some more sleep. It’s only two in the morning,” he finally says. His voice sounds strange. Like he’s in pain.
“I’m awake now,” I tell him. “And everything is coming back to me. So why don’t you tell me why you suddenly became my knight in shining armor tonight? And please tell me the truth. I’m so very tired of being lied to.”
He laughs dryly. “You would never trust the truth from me.”
He has a point. “You’re right. But I’d still like to hear whatever lie you have so I can figure out the truth from there. Usually it’s the opposite.” I pause. “You were following me.”
I don’t know what made me come to that conclusion before I passed out, but the moment it left my mouth, I knew it was right.
“I told you I was,” he says.
This surprises me. His admittance. I sit up straighter, ignoring the swirling of the room and the ache in my head, and lean over to flick on the light on my bedside table.
Now I can see him, blinking at the light, leaning against the doorway. Now he’s real, and I’m less afraid.
“Why were you following me?”
He stares at me for a moment, gathering his thoughts, maybe picking apart the lies or weaving together the truth. “I was told to.”
I feel my chest seize up with something cold. My whole body is stiff. I didn’t expect the truth so easily, and because of that, I’m not prepared.
“By who?” I whisper.
“By Pascal,” he says. He sounds torn, like he knows he shouldn’t have said anything but wants it off his chest.
“Why?”
“He knows about you.”
Oh fuck. My hand goes to my chest, my fingers gripping the neckline of my blouse. “What do you mean he knows about me?”
Blaise doesn’t say anything and averts his eyes to the floor, taking in a deep breath. It’s only now that I realize he’s in the same suit that he was in at work earlier. Dark gray, his white shirt splattered with dots of blood from the man he beat.
If Blaise hadn’t been there, I would have been in a world of trouble. I should be thanking my lucky stars that he was following me.
Protecting me.
And yet I don’t dare let myself dwell on that feeling. I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me too many times, especially by him, and the man just told me he was there because his brother told him to be.
I switch gears. “Were you supposed to protect me?”
He looks up at me, dead in the eye, and shakes his head. “No.”
“But you did.”
“I know.” He licks his lips.
“Why did you? Why did you protect me?”
He frowns at me, his posture straightening. “Why do you think?”
“At this point, I’m going to say it’s because you were paid to do so.”
His lips twist into a smile, and even though it’s a bitter one, it transforms his face. For a moment, I’m thrilled to have his protection.
“I wasn’t paid to do so. I wasn’t paid to do anything. Pascal told me to follow you because he thinks you’re dangerous.”
“Me, dangerous?” I burst out laughing. “What the fuck is that about?”
“You should know,” he says simply.
My brows knit together in confusion. “Come here.”
He looks at me in surprise. “What?”
“Stop hanging out in the doorway like a creeper and come over here.”
Now he looks as wary as I feel. He slowly makes his way across the bedroom floor and stands at the foot of the bed.
I smack the space beside me. “Sit here.”
He studies me as if he thinks I’m setting some trap, but all I really want is to see him up close. I need to see what he says to me from here. I need to find out the difference between the lies and the truth.
He takes a seat beside me, and now, fuck, now everything is a million times more complicated. I could ask him questions when he was across the room, and I could take in his responses, but it felt like I was talking to a hologram.
Now that he’s beside me, sitting on the edge of my bed, I’m struck with too many competing feelings and emotions.
He smells fucking terrific, for one thing. Like cinnamon and sugar and coffee and a comforting cold day. Even though his shirt is splattered with blood, and some blood remains in a smudge above the dark arches of his groomed brows, it’s like I’m seeing him as a teenager again. Back in those hot summer nights when I saw him as something else. Not
a cousin, not family, but something else. Some intangible mysterious thing that belonged in my life. More than a friend, not quite a lover. Unrequited love, perhaps.
You’ve hit your head, I remind myself. You need to be careful right now.
And I’m right.
I close my eyes for a moment, gathering my thoughts. I hear the pounding of my heart in my head and the unsteady rasps of Blaise’s breath.
He’s the first man I’ve had in this room in a long time.
He’s supposed to be family.
I’m not sure what he ever was to me.
Maybe just the man who is trying to steal my job.
Maybe a man who just beat the shit out of someone for harassing me.
“I don’t know who you are,” I burst out, unable to hold my confusion back. “Who are you right now?”
He’s looking not at me but at a blank spot on the floor. His shoulders are slumped forward, his hands clasped, wringing them together. “I’m trying to do right by you.” His voice is low and rough and rich with something that sounds like emotion. Something I haven’t heard from him in so long. “That’s who I am.”
“Do you think I’m dangerous?”
His gaze goes to me and he holds my eyes in his, and I see so many things in them that I’m overwhelmed. This isn’t the man I work with. This is someone in pain, someone who is showing his cards even if he doesn’t know it.
“You’re only dangerous to me,” he says hoarsely.
“Why?” I whisper, sitting up even more, leaning forward so that I can stare at him in greater detail. “Why to you?”
“Do you really want to discuss that right now? Or do you want to know why Pascal had me following you?”
I want both.
But Blaise is fickle and subject to change with every passing second, so I have to run with what’s most important. “Why were you following me?”
“Pascal called me over to the house the other day,” he says, staring down at his hands. “No one was home. He showed me footage on his phone. Security footage. Of you, going into the castle and up to the security room.”
My mouth is open. My body is prickling, like a million fire ants are running through my insides, making me hunch over. “He saw that?” I whisper, horrified.
He nods. “Yeah. He did.”
“I had no idea. I thought . . . why, how would he find out I was there?”
“He was following you himself.”
Fucking hell. “Why? What did I do?”
“He knows what you think.”
Anger flares through me like a bullet, and I suddenly grab Blaise’s shirt collar, pulling him right into me. “You told him,” I grind out. “You told him what I told you and Olivier last year, right when we got into the car accident. You told him what I thought.”
He rubs his lips together, his head shaking ever so slightly. “No,” he says, his eyes pausing at my mouth in such a way that my stomach does a backflip. “I didn’t.”
I don’t let go; I just stare at his eyes inches away from mine, searching for the truth, searching for some simplicity in this messy matter.
“I didn’t,” he says again, his voice a whisper. “You don’t have to think I’m a good guy, Seraphine. I’m not. We both know it. But I didn’t tell him. I don’t . . . I haven’t told anyone anything when it’s come to you.”
For some reason I believe him.
Maybe it’s because of the look in his eyes.
An old familiar look that I’ve dreamed I’d see again.
One of sincerity. Of wanting.
I breathe in deeply and let go of his collar. “Okay. I believe you. But then why did Pascal follow me?”
He stares at me for a moment, a wash of sadness coming over him. “Maybe he knew you’d figure it out.”
“Figure what out?” I say sharply.
“That you’d want someone to blame, and it would be him or our father. Either way, he was following you. He knew what you did and what you’re looking for. So he asked me to follow you and find out more. And so I did.”
I grimace, feeling so violated. “What did you see?”
“Whatever you’ve been doing this last week, that’s what I’ve seen. Most days you just go into your apartment. But some nights, like tonight, you go to that bar, and you have a meeting with some pretty untrustworthy people. People who will put you in danger more than I ever could.”
For some reason, knowing that Blaise was there watching on both those nights makes me feel relieved. Like if something had gone down when Cyril was there, he would have had my back.
“So then you must have seen what happened earlier tonight. With Jones. The other guy, who wasn’t Cyril.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t. I was late. Traffic. I saw him storm out of the bar, and that was it. I went inside, thinking that it couldn’t have been good, and I saw you and I . . . I don’t know, I just reacted. I shouldn’t have but—”
“I’m grateful you did,” I tell him softly and instinctively reach out and touch the blood on his shirt. “You’re usually so cool and collected, I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“So what happened with Jones?” he asks, his eyes focused on my fingers, the fact that I’m still touching his chest.
I take my hand away, and it takes more energy to do that than to keep my hand there. “He . . . he didn’t find anything.”
Blaise frowns. “What do you mean? What did you have him do?”
“I had him try and bring back the files from the security camera, the footage from that night. It’d been deleted, and I figured that it had evidence on them. But Jones said he went down there and checked out the files and that there was nothing unusual about that night.”
“And you trust his word?”
I think back to the way he held me—how powerless I was in his grip—ready to kill me. I shake my head, surprised at the tears springing to my eyes. “No.”
Blaise continues to frown, his brows knitting together. “What happened before I got there?” he asks.
I bite my lip, closing my eyes. The shock of the earlier trauma is wearing off, and now it’s all coming back to me. The fear. The utter fear in knowing I made the wrong choice, that Cyril betrayed me even if he didn’t know it, that I hired the wrong guy.
A tear rolls down my cheek.
Blaise puts his hand at the back of my neck and I flinch. “No,” I say through a wet, messy sob, trying to move away.
Blaise puts his hands on my biceps instead and holds me steady, trying to meet my eyes. “Seraphine, what happened before I got there? What did this man do to you, say to you? Tell me. Tell me because I’m the only one who can help you now.”
“He . . . I told him that he didn’t deliver. I was so dumb. I felt brave, I felt entitled, I don’t know. I thought this man would be my savior, that he would expose the truth, and I was so mad that he said he went to the castle and produced nothing. He didn’t even have any proof to give me. I wanted to see it all with my own eyes, not through his, not through a stranger. And then he reached back like you just did now, to my neck, and he did something that paralyzed me and . . . my God, I’ve never been so scared. I almost pissed my pants. I couldn’t move and he had me, and I looked into his eyes, and he told me that if I didn’t pay him in twenty-four hours, he’d do the same thing to me and cut off my oxygen supply.”
Even though my vision is blurry as I struggle to control my tears, I can see Blaise is about to explode. His face is red, there’s a muscle ticking at his jaw. His eyes are wild again, like when he was slamming his fist into that guy’s face, over and over again.
He doesn’t say anything either, he’s just trying to compose himself. His breath is short, his nostrils flaring. I’m almost scared to set him off.
“I’m going to pay him,” I add. “I don’t want any problems. Not from him. I just . . . I don’t know. Cyril wasn’t there tonight, and I thought he would be. He’s who set me up with him.”
“Fuck Cyril,” Blaise says thro
ugh gritted teeth. “I swear to God I’ll kill that fucker the next time I see him.”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have reached out to him. I just . . . I had no one to turn to.”
“But he sold you out,” Blaise says.
“I don’t know,” I say but my words are shaky with doubt. “Maybe he didn’t quite know how Jones would operate. He wasn’t there to keep an eye on me.”
“No,” Blaise says sharply, his hands sliding down to my hands and holding on to them, and I hate the feeling that washes over me, the comfort and the warmth and the calm amid all this fucking chaos. “He sold you out.”
I don’t get it. Blaise sounds adamant. “What do you mean?”
He swallows. “I told you what Pascal asked me to do. It was to follow you and see what you were up to. He was afraid you’d try and blame him or my father for your father’s death.”
“Because they did it!”
He gives me a hard, dismissive look and holds my hands even tighter, thumbs pressing into my palms, as if he thinks I’ll fly away.
“That’s all Pascal asked me to do,” he continues. “And I did watch you. And I didn’t see anything interesting until you were at the bar that first night, and I saw you with Cyril and Jones, and I had no idea what was going on. Then you all parted ways. Pascal told me to follow you and I didn’t. I lingered in that alley long enough to catch the conversation between them. The conversation about you.”
“What did they say?” I whisper, and the walls are already caving in around me, because I know in the heart of me where this is going. I know.
I am so fuckin’ stupid.
Cyril hired someone who would never help me so he could split the money with him. Simple as that. “It was a scam, wasn’t it?” I add.
But Blaise shakes his head. “No. It wasn’t a scam. You just weren’t the highest bidder. Jones was already hired by someone else. You were a conflict of interest.”
“Who? Who hired him?”
Blaise stares at me for a long beat, and the room seems to get darker. “They were meeting with the highest bidder, the person who would cancel you out. And I followed them to their meeting.”
I can barely breathe as I wait for him to go on.
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