“Okay.”
She looks at me with concern in her eyes. “There are some lies that can hurt worse than murder.”
I open my mouth, but she holds up a hand. “Let me finish,” she insists. “Guys like you and Kir think the worst thing you can do to a person is the obvious thing. The big, loud, irreversible thing. Right? Pain. Torture. Death.”
“… Something like that.”
“Yeah. I know. I’ve watched men in this family tell that little self-delusion for a long time now.” She shakes her head. “It’s wrong, though. Because the things you can do to a body are over fast. Lies, though… Lies live forever. You can’t outrun them. Whatever you’re doing, or planning, or saying to this…this ‘collateral’…It’ll haunt her forever. She’ll wake up every morning for the rest of her days and try to figure out which things are true and which aren’t worth a damn. And she won’t be able to tell one from the other. That not-being-able-to is going to eat her alive.”
“Jillian—”
“I’m still not done.” She clears her throat. “I’m not telling you this to talk you out of it. I’m not your priest and I don’t know your debt. Kir owes Lukas things I’ll never understand, and I’m not in the business of telling men in this family they shouldn’t pay their debts. That’d be hypocritical of me, and also exhausting, not to mention a waste of my time.”
“Then what are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you not to lie to yourself about what you’re doing.” She sets her mug down. “If you’re going to put this collateral in a cage and throw away the key, do it with your eyes open. The lie is the thing you’ll have to carry. Not just her, but you, too.Forever. So decide, sooner rather than later, whether you can carry it. And then go do the job, or don’t.”
She reaches across the counter and puts her hand over mine. It’s warm from the mug. Her engagement ring glitters in the kitchen light.
“For what it’s worth,” she adds, “I’m sorry. Whoever she is.”
She squeezes once, then lets go, and picks up her tea again like nothing happened.
I stand up. “Tell Kir I came by.”
I leave my mug on the counter, untouched. She walks me to the door. With every step we take, I feel more and more certain.
Collateral damage.That’s what Cass is. That’s what she has to be.
“Drive safe,” Jillian says. She closes the door.
I stand on the stoop for a second in the dull gray morning. The brass lion looks back at me, mute and snarling.
Then I go back to the office. At my desk, I open the folder again, and I start to plan.
16
CASS
The burner shows up the next day.
I almost miss it. I’m walking past the entry table in the foyer on my way to the kitchen, balancing the dry cleaning over one arm and a bag of groceries on the other, when I clock the new addition to the little dish where Raymond drops his keys.
There, tucked at the bottom under his tangled key ring, is a sleek little black flip phone, no bigger than a credit card folded in half.
I almost drop everything I’m carrying.
I shouldn’t even be looking in that dish. Touching anything Raymond touches is normally a fast-track ticket to a sore jaw. But there it sits, plain as day, like it’s been there for years.
He’ll plant it somewhere only you would look,Matvei told me.
Apparently, the Blue-Eyed Bastard’s definition of “only you would look” is a little more daring than mine. I kinda get the feeling that he’s messing with me.
I snag it up and quickly tuck it into the waistband of my leggings. Then I drop the groceries on the counter and zoom straight to my bedroom.
In my walk-in closet, behind a hatbox on the top shelf, there’s a hollow space where the drywall meets the trim. I discovered it about a year into our marriage and I’ve used it for a handful of small contraband over the years: a paperback I didn’t want him to know I was reading, a tube of lip gloss in a shade he hated, the burner laptop I used to dig into Khaza in the first place.
I slip the phone into the gap and push the hatbox back into place.
