Page 23 of Clever Deceit

Yes, the way Madison was acting right now told me that was true as well. Her hands were curled into fists and held against her chest, her eyes turned down to the floor. She was practically curling into herself, trying to protect the soft inner part of her soul. All because Lily had brought Tony's name into the conversation.

I knew that reaction.

I had that reaction anytime something happened that triggered the parts of me that were still frightened. I curled into a ball at loud crashes. Completely panicked when there were flashes of light that I hadn't expected. Anything that reminded me of months on end in the Middle East, surrounded by bombs and fires and people who were constantly trying to kill us.

And that, I realized, was our way in.

“The memory of him is that bad, huh?” I asked quietly.

Madison's eyes came up to mine, wide and dark, and I could see that I'd guessed right. The question was whether she was going to take my peace offering or not.

“Yes,” she whispered. “He used to come home drunk, after I was asleep, and attack me in bed. Try to choke me, claiming I'd been out doing things with other guys. It got to the point that I locked the door at night when I went to bed if he wasn't home yet. But then he'd just break it down.”

Oh fuck...

I put my hand on hers and squeezed softly. “And that sort of thing never leaves you. You feel it all the time, right? Just waiting under the surface.”

She nodded. “How do you know that?”

“I have it too. I was in the Middle East as a soldier, and when I tell you that I can't sit through a thunderstorm because of how much it reminds me of the bombing we went through, I'm not joking.”

“He's not,” Lily said. “I've found him cowering in the basement during a thunderstorm.”

I sent her a look of disdain that was so overblown it couldn't be missed. “I wasn't cowering, Lily.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “Oh no? What would you call it, then?”

I sat with that a moment, thinking. “Hiding.”

“Right. Because that's so much better than 'cowering.'“

At this point, Madison was laughing at the two of us—as I thought we'd both planned—and she gradually uncurled herself and looked from me to Lily and back. “What do you do when you remember what he did to you?” she asked Lily.

Lily leaned forward and took Madison's other hand. “I get sad for a little. And then I get scared for a little bit more. And finally I move on to knowing that I deserved better and that revenge is the best medicine anyone ever made for a man like that. He beat me up when I couldn't do anything about it. Now that I can do something about it, I'm going to turn it right back around on him. I'm going to get my revenge. Would you like to join me?”

Madison paused, frowning...and then suddenly nodded.

And then she started talking.

It turned out Tony had been setting up a shell business when he was with her and that she'd overheard some of his conversations with his dad when they were registering it. They'd talked about how they needed to hide money that they were getting from people they shouldn't be getting it from. That they needed a way to 'wash' the money.

“He was going to use that new company to move money around without anyone else being able to track it,” she finished. “But we broke up before I could find out anything else.”

Look, I wasn't an accountant or a lawyer, but that sounded an awful lot like money laundering and fraud. Not to mention them getting money they didn't want tracked.

And like I'd told Lily, everything was trackable. You just had to know where to look.

“Do you know what that company was called?” I asked quietly.

Madison tipped her head, thinking. “I think it was Mark Something. Mark Up? Marked Up? Something that they probably thought was clever but really wasn't.”

I grinned at her, took out my phone, and typed a message to myself with the name of the company.

She was right. They'd probably thought they were being clever. But they were wrong.

CHAPTER 12

LILY