Page 32 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
“I found Gideon Winthrop.” Fika dropped a hand to his distressed jeans—a fucking fifty-something-year-old in distressed jeans—and toyed with the frayed strands at the knees. “He seems happy and thriving. He sends his daughter postcards through email often. He has new friends, new neighbors, and even a new Golden Retriever. They know of his past, yet they still befriended him. In return, he treats them well. I’ve never seen a man smile more. He’s discovered his own paradise, Nash.”
I wanted to raze it all to the ground.
Destroy his daughter.
Steal his money.
Break his friends.
Tear down his neighbors.
Kidnap the damned Golden Retriever.
If he owned it, I wanted to watch him suffer as I took it from him.
“That’s all good and dandy, but I didn’t pay you to give me the Hallmark summary of Gideon’s life.” I poured each of us a glass of Bowmore 1957 and slid one Fika’s way, knowing he craved it but couldn’t accept it thanks to the diet his doctor had him on. “I asked you to find him for me. Where. Is. He?”
He eyed the liquor, his hand twitching before he dug it into his Slim-Jim-thin thigh. “I can’t tell you that, kid.”
I’d turn thirty-three years old this year, and he still saw me as the twenty-five-year-old who had come to him sprouting wild accusations about the Winthrops.
Unbelievable.
“Why.”
A demand, not a question.
It slid past clenched teeth into stale air. I tapped the table, drawing his attention to a pack of cigarettes I’d left there for the sole purpose of keeping Fika off balance. I’d never smoked a day in my life, but they tempted me as I pictured the way they’d rile him up.
Seething didn’t begin to describe me. If I were a volcano, I’d be spewing lava, an ash cloud the size of the moon hovering above us as I burnt Fika to a crisp. I settled for pulling the ten-thousand dollars from my desk and tossing the money into my fireplace with the precision of someone who’d spent his teenage years throwing shit out of windows and running for it when husbands came home too early.
I had a hotel being built in Haling Cove, a contract to negotiate in Singapore, and four suppliers to fire by sunrise. Stopping by my house in Eastridge for a meeting with Fika sat low on my to-do list, and my time was too damned valuable to be jerked around by a corrupt ex-cop in a Jonas Brothers wig who had forgotten his place.
Fika leapt for the money, but the flames swallowed it, bright sparks shooting past the mantel at us. He whimpered as it burned, withering away to nothing but smoke and ashes.
Meaningless.
“I feel sad for you, kid.” When the last bill metamorphosed to dust, Fika turned to me and sat on the leather ottoman beside the fire, shaking his head like I was his son and my existence disappointed him. “Do you know what Fika means? It means to have a coffee, but it’s more than that. It’s a way of life. Stop. Have coffee. Enjoy your own company. Enjoy the company of others. You can’t appreciate what you have now if you’re fixated on what was taken from you in the past.”
I stood, pushing my chair with the backs of my thighs as I remembered the fourth sign I shouldn’t have trusted Fika. He answered to a moral compass skewed by his idiotic perspectives. He was, after all, the type of madman who played Christmas music year-round and, worse, sang out loud with the songs.
“Before you quote another CBD-laced fortune cookie, Hank Prescott isn’t the kind of man who can be forgotten.” I opened my office door and stared Fika down until he got the hint and left, sans the fifty-thousand dollars he would have received had he delivered Gideon Winthrop’s location as promised. “Learn your place.”
Slamming the door just as he exited so he felt the bite of the wood, I gathered documents into a briefcase for my trip to Haling Cove and considered the obvious. Emery knew where Gideon lived. Gideon and Virginia had separated soon after news of the scandal broke, but Gideon still sent messages to his daughter.
Stripping a man of his wealth, dignity, and happiness was an art form, and like all art forms, it required a great deal of patience and suffering. I had the patience, but I refused to suffer any more.
Emery Winthrop, on the other hand, made perfect collateral damage.
I could break her spirit in half and not feel a lick of guilt.
Sin number one.
She’d known about her dad’s extracurricular activities. I’d overheard her parents discussing it the night Reed almost went to jail.
Reed had run to the cottage, and Emery had hidden in her room, but I’d found myself against the tiger sculpture’s ass again, leaning behind Dionysus, listening in on Virgini
a, Gideon, and Able Small Dick Cartwright’s dad argue.
