“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 angry 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.”