“There’s no misunderstanding to explain. If he wants you, he can come and get you. Or die trying.” His voice is flat, but I don’t miss the glimmer in his eyes.
“You’re cocky,” I observe.
“I’m not worried about a man who makes his wife run off to a convent. He sounds like a cunt.”
“A cunt who has the full force of my father’s money and political power behind him. He’s ruthless. Untouchable.You don’t get it,” I counter because I really don’t think he understands the seriousness of the situation.
“It almost sounds like you’ve got a schoolgirl crush on him. I thought you swore off those.”
I try ignoring his jab, but my cheeks pink anyway. “I’m just trying to get you to understand the reality.”
“Let me worry about that. You just focus on behaving yourself on this flight and not disrupting the crew.”
“Or what? You’ll have your friend take care of me?”
“I don’t need anyone’s help to take care of you.” The threat sends a chill down my spine, reminding me that, however much I might have thought I knew this man—as a selfless priest who wandered the archives and gardens with me, only too happy to discuss literature and art and music—I had no idea who the wolf really was behind the sheep’s clothing. His brow raises at my silence, and he asks again, “His name?”
“Corey Craig,” I say his name quietly. Judging by the way Levi’s face falls, he knows exactly who my husband is.
TEN
Levi
“She’s not justAbbott Schaefer’s daughter. She’s Corey Craig’s wife,” I explain to my brother as I drop into the chair across from him in his office.
“Wife? You told me she was a fucking nun!” Grant’s brow arches skyward as he sits up straighter, his palms flat on the desk.
“She hated him that much, I guess. She said they have a deal that she can live out the rest of her days at the convent. But if she left, he’d kill her and anyone who helped her leave.” I speak about it as if it’s a third-party business rather than a woman I know involved. I’m still reeling from the information.
“Live at the convent? Why not just divorce her?” Grant sits back in the chair across from me. He takes a sip of whisky to dull his irritation.
“Ego? Power? The connection to her father, I assume.” I haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet, but I will. I just need some time to adjust to the changing roles Zephyrine and I have foundourselves in. Not to mention the fact I haven’t slept in way too goddamn long.
“If he’d sell her off to a man like that…” Grant’s face darkens.
Corey Craig is the used car salesman of the underground world, wrapped in dangerously thin skin. He fancies himself old money while barely having enough of the new kind to fake it. He’s poached a few clients of ours. The kind that are too impatient to do all the layers of paperwork and deal with the standard wait time to keep their money squeaky clean in the laundry.
Corey should be dead for the way he does business, but he’s got an unhealthy love of bombs, a deranged attachment to brutal violence, and enough connections higher in the food chain that he manages to survive year after year like a cockroach. Imagining Zephyrine as his wife makes the sandwich I had on the plane threaten to resurface. It’s revolting that her father ever considered him an option, let alone forced her into it. The convent makes perfect sense now.
“It explains her disappearance. Why she never comes home.” I’m rambling because my mind is imagining the feisty little nun in the hands of a man like him. I want to break every finger he’s touched her with slowly and methodically. Take each nail and—Grant’s voice interrupts my daydreams.
“If Abbott and he are working together, we have a bigger problem than we imagined. Who knows how many people he’s in bed with or what we’re up against when we start turning rocks over.”
“All the more reason we have to put an end to it sooner rather than later.” I’d like to put an end to him. I don’t need her to tell me what he’s done. I can guess. The thought of him being alone with her is more than enough for me to sign his death warrant.
“I suppose it makes her all the more valuable.” Grant mulls the thought.
“She’s valuable. She knows Abbott’s business. Corey’s. She might know things she doesn’t even realize are valuable. Rowan thought you and Hudson would want to kill her.” I scoff at the idea in retrospect.
“Kill her? No. Not unless we have to. Ransom might be an option though. We might be able to get the relics back for her.” Grant takes another draw off his glass.
“She doesn’t seem to think ransom’s an option. She warned me as much.” I think back to the way she swore up and down that she had no control over her father.
“What do you think?” Grant pins me with a serious look.
“I think I don’t know enough yet. I need more time with her. She trusted me at the convent, but now, well…” I shrug my shoulder and tilt my head to the side. “Now it’s a little more complicated.”
“Understandable.” He takes the last swallow of whisky and sits up in his chair. He studies me before he asks the last thing I expect. “You fuck her yet?”
