If there was any lightness in Blaise’s features, it fades into something grim. “I ran into Pascal this morning. Before work. He wanted to speak to me alone.”
That’s never good. I quickly slam back the rest of my red wine before my hands start to shake again.
He goes on, leaning in and lowering his voice to raspy levels. “He wanted me to stop following you.” That should be a relief, but I know it’s not. “More than that, he was following me this whole time.”
“You? Why?” What a psycho Pascal is.
“He doesn’t trust me for the same reasons you don’t trust me. You think my loyalty lies with him. He thinks my loyalty lies with you.”
“But why?”
“Because of what I told you the other night. In Mallorca. He told me he did see us.”
I blink hard. “He’s known all this time?” Oh, bloody hell. That must mean the rest of the world knows.
My heart sinks to new lows.
“He knew. But he said he never told anyone.”
“How can you be so sure?” I say, scrunching my face.
“I can’t be but . . . think about it. He definitely didn’t tell my father or your father or anyone else. We would have known by now. He just kept it to himself because he didn’t think it was his business.”
“That’s awfully mature of him,” I say slowly, and I don’t care what Blaise says, but I’ll never trust Pascal.
“I’m not taking his word on it, I’m just taking in the evidence that supports what he’s saying is true. I don’t think anyone knows. But he does. And that’s why he wanted me to follow you to begin with. To see if . . .”
“What?”
“If I’d interfere with whatever they have planned.”
If I was a pile of nerves earlier, then this is something else entirely. Every single part of me is at attention and frozen with fear.
It’s like I can barely breathe. “What do you mean?”
He stares at me for a moment, trying to think. “I don’t know,” he eventually says. “I really don’t. All I do know is that it’s in your best interest to pay Jones and forget everything, and before you start getting worked up as you usually do and say you owe your father, why don’t you ask yourself what your father would tell you right now? He would tell you to value your life over the truth. He’d agree with me in wanting you to drop this.”
“It’s so easy for you to say that,” I say softly. God, I’m trying so hard not to lose it right now on him, especially with all that he’s agreed to help me with, all he’s said, but it’s so damn hard. “Do you know what it’s like, to know that my uncle is a murderer? That he murdered his own brother?”
“I can imagine.” A line forms between his brows as he studies me. “I can imagine because . . . you’re talking about my father. And do you know what it’s like to know that the man who raised you is a murderer? The man you’re supposed to idolize and love, the man for whom you tried to do both things and he never gave anything back? Do you know what that’s like? Spending your whole fucking life asking for someone like that to love you?”
I exhale slowly, realizing that, perhaps for the first time, Blaise doesn’t have it much easier than I do. I’m convinced his father murdered my father. He’s becoming convinced of the same.
“So now what?” I ask, wanting to get the subject away from what’s making Blaise go to a dark place. I can see it in his eyes, the change. I don’t want him to go there. I saw him go there the other night when he beat the shit out of that guy. Tonight I need him by my side and focused and levelheaded in ways that I can’t be, just in case something goes wrong.
“So now we go pay Jones and be done with this.”
“But what if I can’t do that? What if I can’t be done with it? Then what are you going to do? Leave me? Turn on me?”
“I’m going to be by your side for all of it.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“That’s fine with me. I’m used to my patience being tested, especially with you.”
I don’t have anything clever to say to that. I’m starting to think I might not ever.
I finish my wine and then, to Blaise’s amusement, I finish my coffee, and then we’re out of the café and out to the blustery streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The snow and cold rain have stopped, but the wind is blowing something fierce and the sidewalks are slippery. Before I can stop myself, I’m leaning into Blaise, and he’s putting his arm around me as we walk down the street to the Uber pick-up point.
Is this wrong? I think, and for once it’s not so much about whether I can trust Blaise or not, because I know now that I have to. But it’s about the fact that he is my cousin, even if not in an icky way, and being this close to each other in public is something new.
But I don’t let those thoughts stay in my head for very long. In a way it’s refreshing to worry about that, because it feels like such a simple and mundane problem to have: the world might not approve of our relationship. The reality is, I might fucking die tonight, and I’m not sure having Blaise there is enough to save me.
Also, you don’t have a relationship for people to approve of, I remind myself. So stay fucking focused like your life depends on it, because it does.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BLAISE
The car ride seems to last forever.
Seraphine sits beside me, her purse clutched to her chest like a child. She stares out the window at the passing lights of the city and the occasional hit of wet snow on the windowpanes that turns Paris into a distorted mess, mirroring how I feel inside.
I wasn’t sure she’d contact me tonight. Her pride is a mountain that can’t be summited, and I feared she would go to Jones trying to strike a bargain. I thought that she would rather appear meek and unprepared and naive to a bona fide thug than to ask me for help. Not to say I couldn’t blame her, but it gnawed at me all the same.
Still, I was ready. I lied when I said optimism wasn’t my forte. When it comes to Seraphine, it’s all I’ve got. I figure the consequences of being wrong aren’t enough to cancel out the chance that I’m right.
And now we’re beside each other in this car, in the darkness of the back seat, and I am so fucking torn that it’s rendering me useless.
There’s fear on one hand. I don’t know Jones; I just know that if my father, who has connections with every Mafia group across the globe, trusts him to do shit, then this asshole is the real deal, and he is to be feared. I have no shame in admitting that I’m afraid of what will happen when we get out of this car. Will Seraphine’s life be in jeopardy? Will mine, when I step in to try to protect her? Pascal brought up all that training I did in Thailand, and though I can take most normal people on and leave relatively unscathed, I have never fought one of my father’s henchmen before. Probably because no one fights his henchmen. You either kill or be killed. There is no fighting.
There’s lust on the other hand. But it’s not just the lust that I’ve learned to deal with over the years. The physical lust that turns you inside out, that reduces you to nothing more than an animal. It’s not that, which is so much easier to compartmentalize. It’s the lust of the heart. It’s the yearning, the pining, wanting someone to feel the same way about you that you do about them.