Page 53 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
Why the hell was Emery Winthrop working a catering gig, anyway? I understood the modeling part. She had the height and face, but catering? Her family’s net worth dipped into the ten figures. Her trust fund had to be at least eight if not nine figures. She could finance a war and not want for money.
Maybe Virginia had sent her on the heiress equivalent of an apology tour. A few magazine covers, and I was supposed to fucking forget she’d known about her dad’s embezzlement.
“Don’t change the subject.” Delilah tucked a dirty blonde strand of hair back into her French chignon and folded her hands on her lap. She took a seat on the absolute edge of my bed, like she feared she would catch my germs. “I asked around about the lead investigator. Brandon Vu. He’s ambitious. Moved up the ladder fast, looking to be the chair of the S.E.C. If you did something, he’ll find it. You have to tell me everything.”
Like hell I would.
“No. Fika took care of it.” I didn’t elaborate, merely pulled out the bundles of bills from my suitcase and shoved them into the built-in safe I’d had installed yesterday. I thumbed through one of the ten-thousand-dollar stacks and pointed at Delilah with it. “You act like I’m a sketchy person. I’m entirely innocent.”
Delilah watched me shove half a million dollars into the safe, my ritual for every penthouse in all my hotels. A fail-safe in case I ever got caught and needed cash quickly and a go-bag to run. “Ugh. Fika. You trust him to take care of it?”
“Took care of it,” I corrected, cramming a small go-bag into the remaining space. “As in, it’s already done. Stop worrying about it. I think I see two new wrinkles on your forehead. You look forty.”
“I’m thirty-one, and I look twenty-six,” she corrected, fingers dabbing her forehead for the aforementioned wrinkles. “It’s Fika. Trusting Fika is like giving Rosco a full bag of treats and trusting him not to finish it.”
No love lost between them. Odd, considering they both shared similar views on the law. Fika pretended it didn’t exist. Delilah dedicated her life to defending people who bent it. Either way, they both treated it like a nuisance.
I didn’t acknowledge this. Keeping them at odds with one another compartmentalized the less-than-legal portion of my life.
“Don’t underestimate Fika.”
I closed the lock and set an anagram for Emery Winthrop as the password. When I realized what I’d done, I swore and jabbed at the keypad, trying to undo it, but I didn’t know how to change the password. Perfect.
Pivoting to face Delilah, I leaned against the wall and added, “Beneath the Jonas Brothers wig, the distressed jeans, and the litany of addictions, Fika is an ex-cop whose calling in life is to break the rules without getting caught.”
She scowled when I adjusted her fingers to where two non-existent wrinkles sat, just to fuck with her. “He literally got caught. It’s why the people of Eastridge fired him as the sheriff.”
“Semantics.”
“No.” Both hands met the air as she tossed them up. “That is not what semantics means. Look, I need to know what you did. How do you expect me to do my job with my hands tied behind my back?”
Readjusting my tie, I pulled off the tag and made a point of feeding it to Rosco in case D got any crazy ideas of asking me to pet sit again. “If you need hand-holding, you’re in the wrong building. I’m sure some midlevel firm will be happy to have you.”
Delilah snatched the tag away from Rosco’s thin lips. “Fuck you, Nash.”
“I’d rather eat a bag of dicks, thank you.”
She glanced down at her phone when it vibrated. “He’s on his way up. Let me do the talking.”
“Fine.”
“Say as little as possible.”
“No shit.”
“I mean it. I will do all the talking,” she repeated slowly, like I’d given her a reason not to trust me in the past.
She’d stopped trusting me the week we’d met when I fired a supplier without pay and suggested he take his shriveled-up dick and shove it into a pussy that didn’t belong to the now-ex-wife of one of my board members.
The lawsuit hadn’t been pretty, but that’s why I paid Delilah double what she would earn anywhere else. She won cases no one else could. Better—she rarely had to step foot in court because she performed miracles before the cases ever reached the steps of Lady Justice.
I mocked a zipper across my lips and pretended to feed the key to her rat. “Maybe you can get your rat to bite him and give him rabies.”
“He’s not a rat.” She picked Rosco up, held him close to her chest, and followed me into the living room, where Cayden from the design department had set up a mini-office for me two days ago. A mahogany desk and a high-back leather chair. “Rosco is a hairless Chinese Crested Dog. A four-thousand-dollar dog, for the record.”
“I could blow four grand on a flea-infested crack den in North Korea, and it’d be a better investment.”
She pressed a kiss to her pet rat’s temple and whispered, “Don’t listen to the bad man, Rosco.”
