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“The first is proof that you and I are the sole owners of the Rias estate. The second is the debt your family owes mine. The twenty grand hasn’t been deducted.” He explained in a businesslike tone, confirming what I’d feebly hoped wasn’t true.
The food I’d just eaten soured in my stomach. An image of the duffel bag Eva had left behind flashed through my mind. She couldn’t have been that fucking stupid as to steal from this man. God, what was she thinking?
“How did you––I don’t understand. Who gave you half ownership of the house?”
“Look at the signature. Your father gave it to me. He gave me you, too,” he tacked on, almost absentmindedly.
With a scowl, I set my attention back to the documents.
Sure enough, my father’s full name was scrawled on both.
“Papá would never do this. He hated you,” I vehemently objected.
His poker face was too perfected for me to know if my last statement bothered him. I imagined it didn’t.
“Yet, I was the one he came to for help. And as you can see right in front of your face, he willingly signed both.”
He remained completely undeterred, pouring himself a glass of Ambrose liquor from a diamond encrusted decanter, and continuing to eat his breakfast.
I stared down at the papers, noting that they were dated a year and a half prior to my father’s death, adding another sleuth of questions to my ever growing pile.
Both had a notary stamp and witness signatures of people I didn’t know, but I wasn’t a stranger to how these things worked.
The circular watermark was nothing more than a decoration. Everything always came down to principle: if you owed someone money, you either paid up, or dealt with the blowback, and giving your word was the equivalent of pawning your soul.
It seemed that was exactly what my father had done. Something about this situation was disturbingly off. There was a sinister aura about the whole thing warning me away. Every answer led to another hidden skeleton in the Rias family crypt that needed to be pieced back together.
“How did this happen?” I mumbled to myself, leaning back in my chair. A dull throb began in the back of my skull. My list of problems was seriously getting out of hand.
I felt as if I were on the verge of falling in a black hole that was steadily getting deeper and darker.
Suddenly, the papers were gone. Before I could protest, Mateo was out of his chair and flinging the entire folder into the hungry flames swaying in the fireplace.
I sucked in a sharp breath and rushed around the table. “No! Why would you do that?” I reached for them on auto-pilot. They may have just been copies, but they were the only ones I had. Mateo would never give me the originals.
“Goddamnit, Ley,” he grumbled. He grabbed hold of my wrists and pulled me away from the fiery embers I was dangerously close to letting burn my flesh.
“You had no right! Why did you do that?”
“Because I don’t give a shit about the money, the estate, or your dysfunctional pity party of a family. I care about you.”
I stood in denial, my gaze darting back to where the last bit of the folder was curling in on itself and turning to ash.
I felt like I’d just lost something important, a link to my father. A clue to what was going on. It made no sense. I couldn’t pinpoint why I even felt this way. My behavior was bordering on irrational, but I couldn’t get a hold of myself.
“You truly think I do not care for you, Elena?” Mateo asked in a scathing tone, forcing my attention back to him with an unspoken command.
“I asked you a question.” He slipped an arm around my back and turned so I was flat against the wall beside the fireplace, caging me in with his hands on either side of my head.
“Answer me,” he coolly demanded, his eyes boring into mine.
The abrupt change in his demeanor was so swift, I could almost believe he’d just been swapped with a doppelgänger when I wasn’t paying attention.
“I-I—”
“Don’t stutter when you speak. It makes you look nervous and I can practically smell your fear.”
My anger flared. “You don’t give a damn about me, Mateo. Just like I don’t give a damn about this fucking game you want to play.”
