21. Rhaim

21

RHAIM

I already didn't like Freddie Junior.

He embodied the three things I couldn't stand in a man: he was stupid, he was lazy, and he thought he was better than me. The last could be tolerated, as I knew it wasn't true—I was well aware that my pride was the least useful tool in my arsenal. Pride made you spend good money after bad, pride made you greedy, and pride would inevitably lead you to the proverbial fall—I'd seen it happen often enough.

But even worse than that, he reminded me of his goddamned father, and I was done with Freddie Senior's shit. Corvo had spent enough money bailing him out solely because he was Nero's brother. Until he'd been banished to Corvo's Asian branch, the man swanned about town like he'd had some hand in making Corvo what it was, living both off of Corvo's reputation and its dime. He was a few years younger than Nero and he'd lived his entire life like the last man on a canoe, content to do fuck all and coast on everyone else's furious paddling, knowing no one had time to turn around and catch him pretending to use an oar.

When I came in and saw Junior standing so close to Lia and her looking both wounded and surprised—with the shoulder of her sweater frayed like she'd been mauled? If I hadn't realized it was an aesthetic choice in time, Junior would've been about twenty seconds away from learning the hard way if he could fly.

And then him laughing at her?

Because of something I had made her do?

I was still considering tearing him limb from limb as I paced in savage lines across my office, behind the safety of my closed door.

Of course Nero hadn't managed to keep his mouth shut about my punishment of her. I was sure he'd been complaining about me at the time, not mocking Lia, but he should have been smart enough to know that he'd been loading up whomever was listening to him with ammo against his little girl.

Would Nero mind if anyone else hurt her? He was ready to hand her off—hell, he'd practically already given her to me.

I just wasn't allowed to keep her.

And knowing that was why I'd had to have a long heart-to-heart—and heart-to-dick—with myself after last night's round of ill-advised flirting once I was certain she'd left the building.

When I'd taken Lia's wrist to see her tattoo, I'd just wanted an excuse to touch her. What I hadn't expected was to find her pulse racing beneath it, going a mile a minute.

Scared that I was going to tell her father?

I didn't think so.

But considering other reasons why her pulse might race around me were too ludicrous for me, a forty-five-year-old man and confidant to her father, to bear.

So I'd decided that this morning when I came in I would tell her everything, in excruciating and hopefully humiliating detail—that I knew about her past, her private investigator, and her silly books, and that she needed to cut it the fuck out and grow up already. I needed to step on her interest in me like it was a dropped cigarette, snuffing it out entirely.

She would crumple, maybe cry, and I would feel like an asshole, but that was something I was used to. She might deny it to try to save face, but that was fine too, at least then things I'd said would be out in the open—and I knew I was right.

I was an adult—and unfortunately I had to act like one.

Which was also why I had to prepare for all the eventualities—like how she might actually stick around afterward and make things awkward for me. That's why I'd bundled up everything in regards to the distillery and given her limited access to files.

I just hadn't expected to roll in and see Freddie Junior taunting her was all—and afterwards, I couldn't find it in myself to hurt her.

Did I want to? Yes. In so many ways.

Would I get to someday? Every fucking minute brought me closer. Which was why I needed to tell her I knew everything, so she could go ahead and leave out of embarrassed shame now, rather than run away in fear later when she got to meet the real man beneath the suits.

I wasn't a literal beast, but I had done beastly things.

I liked being covered in other people's blood.

And I knew what the true cost of my predilections were—anything nice or normal in my life was bound to be destroyed by me, eventually.

I couldn't help it.

It was in my very nature.

But the difference between me and her father and cousin was that everything I did was with utter plan and purpose—because there was hurting, and then there was breaking irrevocably, and dashing her hopes in front of that cretin would've damaged her for all time.

The fuck if I would give Freddie Jr. that leverage over her—and the fuck if I would see that particular flavor of pain reflected in her eyes because of me.

I just needed to bide my time was all.

I wrenched my attention away from the door separating our two offices and tried to focus on my own work, not thinking about when my turn might actually be.

I had occasion to walk past her more than once during the day, to get food or attend other people's meetings in the building, and not once did she lift her head from her paperwork, or look away from her screen.

She had a considerable attention span, I'd give her that.

And she went home on time without telling me. I noticed when I eventually came out to get my own delivered dinner—she'd taken the entire stack of papers home with her, which made the proprietary information-controlling parts of my soul queasy, but it'd serve me right for trusting her with it, if they didn't all make it back.

I shouldn't have doubted. The next day, she beat me into the office again—arriving sometime after I'd gone down to the gym, but in her desk before I returned—and now the unruly pile of paperwork I'd given her was in neatly sorted, possibly in color-coded stacks, inside binders and with tabs, while she was still working busily behind it.

I wondered if the presentation she was surely going to give me later would include important highlighted lines like "Depreciation and Amortization Costs" surrounded by neatly drawn little hearts.

I went into my own office, looked at my own calendar with a sigh, and cancelled everything myself from three o'clock on personally, because I knew there was no way I was getting out of being hoist on my own petard.

And then there was a point in time when she seen that I'd done so, and had put a meeting with herself in there for three-thirty.

I dearly hoped we were not flirting via Outlook.