I shrug and give her a sour smile. “He’s done it before, remember? I’m sure he’ll have no problems now, when I actually deserve it.”
She eyes my coat, where the gun is resting against my side. “Are you sure we’re not better off with the police?” she says, keeping her voice barely audible.
“Did you learn nothing from last year? From the car chase with Olivier? We reported it to the police, and they did nothing. They did nothing because it’s like it never happened. That’s what my father can do. One word and it’s like everything . . . and everyone . . . disappears. He has everyone in his pocket.”
“Except you.”
“Not anymore.”
The Uber driver must have caught some of what we’re saying, because he’s eyeing us in the rearview mirror with interest.
I take it as a sign to shut up.
Eventually we get to Marie’s neighborhood, and I make sure that Marie comes to the door to greet Seraphine and let her in the building just in case.
Seraphine looks back at me in the car and nods stoically, trying to be strong in front of her friend. Marie peers over at me, concerned, then maybe almost happy to see me, and then the two of them disappear inside.
I lean back in my seat and breathe out a long, rough sigh.
“Bad night?” the Uber driver asks.
“You can say that again.”
“Are you not getting out?”
“No, I’m afraid not. Not yet. Can you give me a minute?”
I know the drivers hate having to go to a new destination on the fly like this, but I need to make sure I’m going to the right place.
I make a call to the office and get the receptionist, Nadia.
“Nadia, it’s Blaise,” I say. “Is my father or Pascal there? By the way, don’t tell anyone I’m calling.”
“Okay,” she says brightly. I guess she’s used to the eccentricities of the Dumonts. Probably why she’s still working for us. “Your father is in his office. I don’t know where Pascal is. He hasn’t come in yet, but he’s usually here by now. Where are you and Seraphine?”
“Uh, I’ve got a dentist appointment. I don’t know where Seraphine is. I’m sure she’ll be in.”
“Okay. Will I see you later?”
“Of course. And if anyone asks for me, tell them I’ll be in then.”
I hang up and decide to take a shot. I lean forward and tap the driver on the shoulder. “If I pay you extra, are you up for taking a drive into the country?”
“Where in the country?” he asks me suspiciously.
“Just outside Versailles. Take the A-13 to Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche.”
His face says it all: No fucking way.
I sigh and reach into my wallet, pulling out €500. My wallet has been a revolving door of cash lately.
I wave it at him, and his eyes follow it like it’ll disappear if he doesn’t. “This is five hundred. This is for taking me there, dropping me off around the corner, and waiting for maybe an hour. Is that okay?”
He nods, eyes widening. “Yes. That’s fine.”
I give him three hundred and put the rest in my coat pocket. “That’s for now. You’ll get the rest later. And if you can get us there quick, well, that would be great.”
“No problem,” he says, straightening up and pulling away from the curb. “Though I do have to say, if you’re willing to spend that much on Ubers, you might as well buy yourself a car.”
“I hate to drive,” I tell him. The truth is, I’m not about to chance going back to my place and getting my car. I’m not trusting anything at the moment. Do I really believe my own father would put a car bomb under my car? Probably not. But Jones could be operating on his own now.
Hell hath no fury like a hit man scorned.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BLAISE
By the time the Uber pulls up alongside the country lane, a few meters from the entrance to the driveway to my family’s estate, I’m a mess.
It’s not just that I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
And that I don’t know what I’m going to do.
It’s that Seraphine hasn’t answered any of my texts over the last thirty minutes.
She had been sporadically, saying she was sitting with Marie in her kitchen and having coffee and that Marie would be going off to work soon, but now it’s like radio silence. I’ve tried calling a few times, too, but it goes straight to voice mail. I can only hope that she’s just busy, as she should be.
Planning a new life for herself.
A life that hopefully includes me in it.
Everything has changed so much and so fast, I’m not sure when we’ll ever be able to come up for air and make sense of what happened.
And if I don’t play my cards right as Blaise Dumont, we may not come up for air at all.
I stick my hands in my coat pockets and hurry down the lane. Out here, the fields are full of frost, and though the birds are singing, the sound is muffled. It’s overcast and gloomy, and the chestnut trees look deader than ever before. It’s like spring doesn’t exist for a family like us.
I head up the long and winding driveway, passing underneath the skeleton trees, then head straight for the front door.
I ring the bell and wait. Pascal’s Audi is in the driveway, so I know he’s definitely home. I wasn’t about to phone him to make sure, so the gamble to come out here has paid off.
For now.
I ring the bell again, and when the door finally opens, I expect to see one of the housekeepers who live in the servants’ quarters at the edge of the property, but to my relief, it’s Pascal. I want to be completely alone with him.
He doesn’t seem surprised to see me, but he fakes it.
“Blaise,” he says, brows raised. “Why are you here? What the fuck happened to your face?”
“Got in another bar fight. I was hoping to have a word with Mother.”
“She’s not back yet,” he says warily, taking in my busted features.
I knew that, of course. Our mother has been at a fitness and wellness resort in Portugal for the last two weeks, which I know is code for plastic surgery and liposuction. She’ll come back thinner, with a face tighter than an elastic band, and she’ll blame it all on yoga. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Shouldn’t you be at work? I just came from there.”
He frowns, trying to figure out if that’s true or not. “I wasn’t feeling well,” he says. He looks over my shoulder at the driveway. “Where’s your car?”
“I took an Uber,” I tell him.
“Why?”
“Can I come in?”
I put my arm against the door and hold it so that he can’t shut it on me. I make sure my body is wedged in there and that I’m looming over him, hoping to intimidate him.
He doesn’t intimidate easily. “Something wrong?” he asks, holding his ground until he eventually relents and lets me walk in.
He closes the door behind him and turns to face me. “Well?”
I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. The gun is burning a hole in my pocket.
My expression must be saying something, because he seems to be a bit on edge now, his posture straighter, stiffer.
“Blaise?” he prompts.
“I need to talk to you,” I tell him. “Brother to brother.”
“Okay . . . isn’t that how we always talk?”
This isn’t going to be easy. I really hope to use the gun as a last resort. I have no plans to shoot him, I just need it to threaten him if things don’t go the way I want.
I have a feeling they won’t go the way I want.
Not with Pascal already on the defensive. I don’t know if he has a gun; I’m going to assume he does, but he’s already very slowly making his way back into the study.
The cane is still leaning against my father’s desk.
The sword inside.
Interesting. He obviously knows that this isn’t a friendly visit between two brothers.
<
br /> “Come in here and talk, then,” he says, gesturing to the study and heading for the desk.
He leans back against it, legs crossed at the ankles, seeming ever so casual as he reaches for the cane, as if he fiddles with it out of habit. Perhaps he does.
I stop in front of him, just far enough so that the sword couldn’t reach me, not about to let my guard down and sit down.
“So what do you want to discuss?” he asks carefully, slowly twisting the horse’s head around and around.
“Pretty much what I told you before,” I say. “I want to quit.”
His brows knit together. “So then quit. I’m not stopping you.”
“And I need for you to get Seraphine a job at the new office in Dubai.”
Now I have his attention. His eyes widen. “What the hell are you talking about? Dubai?”
“We just opened an office there. I think it would be a great environment for her.”
He flips the cane around in his hands, still frowning. “And why are you speaking for her?”
“I think you know why,” I tell him calmly, even though I’m anything but calm inside.
“Are you saying I should reward my cousin by giving her an even better job than the one she has right now? And what would I be rewarding her for? The fact that she thinks our father is a murderer? The fact that she will do anything to prove that he is, even if it means throwing one of us under the bus?”
“She’s not throwing me under the bus,” I tell him. “And depending on what you did and your involvement, she won’t throw you either.”
“What I did?”
“Where were you last night?”
“Here,” he says.
“And let me guess: Father can back you up?”
“And the help.”
“Also under your payroll.”
He studies me for a moment, his grip tightening on the cane. “What are you getting at, Blaise? You want to try to set me up for something I had nothing to do with?”
“It’s just that you said you had been following Seraphine when I was following her. So I have reason to believe that you were following us last night when Seraphine made her payment to Jones.”
He shrugs. “I wasn’t there.”
“Do you know what I plan on doing to you if I find out you were there?”
It’s like he perks up at that threat, like a fucking dog. Seraphine was right about him being a wolf. “Do tell me what you plan to do. I would love to know.”
My gaze hardens. “Were you there or not? So help me God, tell me you didn’t witness everything that happened to us. Tell me you didn’t see what they did, that you didn’t watch it all unfold and didn’t say or do anything.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I don’t.”
“You know what happened!” I scream at him, spit flying from my mouth. “You knew she was meeting Jones, you knew what was going to happen to her!”
He swallows, shakes his head. “You need to calm down.”
“Calm down?” I yell. “I don’t think I’ll ever fucking calm down again!”
I reach into my pocket just as he slides the sword out of the cane.
But before he can bring it around to point at me, I’ve got the gun aimed at his face.
And my hands aren’t shaking.
“What the fuck,” Pascal cries out. “What the fuck is wrong with you, a gun? Get that fucking thing out of my face.”
“Drop the sword. What the fuck do you think you are, a musketeer?”
But he doesn’t drop the sword, and even though I don’t need to cock the hammer, I do so anyway, for emphasis, my finger firm on the trigger. “I said drop it,” I repeat.
I’ve never seen him so taken aback before.
Good.
He shakes his head in disbelief and then drops the sword and cane so both clatter at his feet.
“If you try and reach for that, reach for anything, I’ll fucking shoot you. I might not blow your pretty-boy head off, but I’ll make sure it fucking hurts.”
“Blaise, you have lost your damn mind,” he says roughly.
“I haven’t. I’m thinking more clearly than ever. So I need answers. I need them now. Tell me what you knew about last night, and I’ll tell if you’re lying. You pride yourself on being such a good actor, but let’s just say this gun is like a truth seeker.”
“I was here last night.”
“But you knew Seraphine was meeting with Jones.”
“Yes,” he says hesitantly. “I knew she was going to pay him and then hopefully drop this whole thing.”
“And how did you know that?”
“How do you think? Father told me.”
I take in a deep breath, trying to put out the fire I have rising inside me, the anger that wants to lash out at the mention of my father. I have to keep a cool head, especially when I’ve got the barrel of a gun aimed at my brother’s face.
“What did he tell you, exactly?”
Pascal doesn’t say anything, his mouth pressed into a thin white line.
I aim the gun at a point just off his shoulder and pull the trigger.
The blast reverberates throughout the room, the bullet going straight into a book, hopefully a rare edition of some bullshit.
“Fuck! Blaise!” Pascal screams, and I have to delight a little in scaring him. That’s not easy to do. “Calm down, okay, just calm down.”
I cock the hammer again for show and grin at him with no love left. “My patience is being tried, brother. What did he tell you?” I grind out the words.
“Okay, okay,” he says, raising up his hands. He licks his lips. “He said that he wanted to scare her. To rough her up a little.”
My heart is beating so loud in my head it’s like I’ve got a drum inside me.
“He said what?” I eke out, my hand starting to shake just a little from the pure fiery anger. “He wanted her roughed up?”
Pascal nods slowly. “I don’t know what happened. I just assumed that meant maybe, uh . . . maybe . . . he—”
“You knew that Jones was going to fuck her up, and you were okay with that? Ignore the fact that she’s your fucking cousin, a girl you grew up with, she’s a fucking woman! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I don’t know!” he yells. “I didn’t think it would be bad; maybe just a slap, maybe just to scare her. He just wanted to scare her, okay? I know that much, and I was okay with that because she needed to be scared, okay? She needed to know she had to knock it off before it was too late.”
“And what the fuck is considered ‘too late’ to you? Huh? Because if I hadn’t been there to stop them, then it would have been too late. Do you understand what you’re dealing with here? Do you understand just what you let happen?”
“Whoa, hey. No,” he says, shaking his head. “I didn’t let anything happen.”
“You did. They fucking attacked her. Two other guys, trying to drag her off to a waiting car. What do you think they were going to do with her, huh? Give her a slap?”
“Maybe they were random thugs.”
“They weren’t random thugs, they were with Jones—Jones, who threatened Seraphine right after she gave him the money. Don’t try to justify this. You knew they wanted to scare her, you should have known that scaring meant rape and possibly murder.”
“Father would never—”
“He would!” I yell. “He would and he has before.”
“Oh God.” He sneers with a roll of his eyes. “Not you too.”
“Yes. Because I’m not a fucking sheep. I’m not blind, not anymore. We both grew up in this house knowing what he was capable of. Somewhere along the way you decided you wanted to be just like him.”
“Wait. No. I am not just like him,” he protests, shaking his head and coming toward me.
“Get the fuck back!” I put my other hand on the gun and aim it right at his forehead. “Don’t you fucking make me shoot you, becau
se I will. Just to scare you.”
Pascal freezes and then immediately backs up against the desk. “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”
“No, I’m not. And frankly, I don’t fucking care about your threats. Or Father’s threats. When I’m done with you, I’m walking away, and I’m walking away with her.”
“What are you, in love with her?”
“You know I am,” I say, and there’s nothing but truth and conviction in my voice.
“It will never work.”
“That’s none of your business. As you said, it never was. And it never will be. I’m in love with Seraphine, and when I leave this place, both of us are leaving Paris for good, and you’re going to set it up so that we’re never bothered, never followed, never threatened again.”
“I can’t do that,” he says in disbelief.
I fire the gun again; this time the bullet goes over his other shoulder, slicing through another rare book. I think that one might have been Dickens.
“Fucking stop it! Just stop it!” Pascal yells, covering his ears. As he moves, though, he goes for the desk, sliding open the drawer and reaching for something.
I don’t take the time to guess what it is.
I leap over the desk, using it as leverage, and drop-kick him right in the chest so he goes flying back against the books.
He scrambles for the drawer again, and I strike up with my knee until he’s doubling over, falling to his knees. I bring my elbow down on his shoulder until he’s fully collapsed on the floor and then pistol-whip the back of his head. Serves him right for making fun of me and my Muay Thai training in Thailand.
I reach down and pull him up by the collar, pressing the tip of my gun into his temple. “Now you listen to me, brother,” I growl in his ear. “You’re going to do everything I’ve said, and I’m going to let you live. I probably won’t even shoot you. Roughing you up a little, just as you wanted Seraphine roughed up, actually feels pretty good.”
Pascal doesn’t say anything, he just moans.
I push the gun into his head harder. “I mean it. I want Seraphine and me to walk out of here, and I don’t want to see you, or Father, or Mother ever again. I want nothing to do with the Dumont name; as far as I’m concerned, I’m no longer part of the family. Maybe I never was.” My heart is racing so fast but so hopeful with the possibilities of starting over. “I want Seraphine to have the head job in Dubai, and if she deems it not acceptable, then she’s free to do whatever she wants. But the point is, both of us are free.”
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