Page 149 of Boardroom Ties
“Poor baby,”she said. “You sound like a frog with emphysema.”
She had somewhere to be, but she stayed anyway. She read me three chapters ofThe Westing Game, doing all the funny accents wrong on purpose so I’d laugh and stop touching the lump in my throat. When she thought I was asleep, she kissed my hairline and whispered, “I’m always here, dummy. Always.”
I close my eyes against the window’s last light.
I’m always here, dummy.
Always.
… But you know who isn’t here, right?
No. I can’t think of him. It hurts too much.
I press a hand low on my belly and let the dark take me.
47
MAT
I’m at the front door of the bank by the time the sun rises on Monday. It isn’t open yet, obviously, but that doesn’t stop me from pacing around the sidewalk like a madman, muttering complete nonsense to myself.
“Jersey… Jazzy… Chintzy… Doozy…”
I still can’t figure this shit out, and it’s driving me insane. What could Susan have been saying to Caroline before she died? Will the answer be in Bill’s safe deposit box? Or am I burning precious hours on a wild goose chase?
I check my watch. In forty-five minutes, we’ll know.
I pivot on my heel and squint at my reflection in the bank’s mirrored front doors. Fucking hell, I look like shit. Hollow-eyed and stubbled, with the collar of yesterday’s shirt riding crooked under my coat. I look like…
… the sort of man who’d leave his woman in a cage.
Because that’s exactly what I am.
The guilt stabs me like a knife in the ribs. Coincidentally, those flare up, angrier than ever, like barbed wire scorching me from the inside. I double over and clutch against them, sucking in ragged breaths of freezing air, until finally, the pain starts to ebb.
It’s the thought of Cass’s belly hidden under prison grays that kills me the most. That image is night and day from the first time I ever laid eyes on her, when she strutted into Khaza in those ridiculous Prada heels, trying to project confidence in a room full of killers. She held her chin high, even with the daubs of concealer on her cheekbone showing anyone who cared to look that she was trapped in an abusive nightmare.
Anyone with eyes could see she was prey. And still she’d marched in there, proud, defiant.
I know, I fuckingknow, that she’ll carry that same proud defiance into her cell. They’ll try to break her, because that’s what penitentiaries and court systems do best. And she’ll fight them to the bitter fucking end.
But she shouldn’thaveto. That’s the whole damn point. She shouldn’t be in this at all.
I’ve made so many mistakes along the way. The best thing I could’ve done would be to have never said a word to her.
If not that, then the second-best would have been to throw her over my shoulder then and there, get in a car, and justdrive,until this place wasn’t even a smudge in the rearview mirror.
How the hell did I let this happen? How did she letmehappen? A woman like that, choosing a man like me... It’s the closest thing to a miracle I’ve ever witnessed, and I have spent most of my life believing in nothing.
Sure, I was supposed to frame her. I came into her penthouse ready to do exactly that. But in the moment that mattered, I wouldn’t have gone through with it. I know that now.
She’s bound to me. Tied up in my life, just like I’m tied up in hers.
There isn’t a fucking person alive who can pry us apart.
The bank manager unlocks the door at eight fifty-nine. As soon as there’s a crack wide enough for me to get through, I’m inside. “I need a manager who can open a safe deposit box for me.”
Her eyes widen as she takes me in. I understand now how Lukas feels all the time, because she looks horrified and cowed into submission. Some people, you just don’t fuck with.
