Page 116 of My Beautiful Sin

She nodded, and he was satisfied. They’d run through worst-case drills enough. He trusted her to keep her hand on the fuse—but not to light it until absolutely necessary.

“I’ve got your back,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “You always have.”

“Right. Well.” She pushed up off the sofa. “I’ll go check in with Paul then get back to my desk.”

“One more thing,” he said, standing as well. “Did you ever hear of a man named Cyrus Mulroy? You have,” he added, since the answer was clear enough from her wide, surprised eyes.

“Why on earth do you want to know about that scum?”

“What do you know about him?”

“He contacted Peter about using his business to move Peter’s drugs.”

“And you know this because you were working with Peter?”

She tilted her head, her eyes narrowing. “I knew because I was fucking him, which you already know. But I wasn’t ever working with him. I was already walking the line with your father by sleeping with him, but I could justify that if I had to. Pillow talk, right? But getting in bed that way with Peter? The Wolf would have cut me to ribbons.”

All true. And for the first time he wondered if she’d been sleeping with Peter on his father’s orders or simply because she’d wanted the thrill of sleeping with an older, powerful man high in The Wolf’s organization.

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Cyrus talked to the police.”

“What? Now?”

“After Peter’s death. One of the early interviews. Said they did business together. What do you know about that?”

“Nothing,” she said. “His business was porn. As far as I know, that wasn’t something Peter was into.”

“So he was lying?”

“I don’t know, Devlin. This is all news to me. But Mulroy did buy drugs from Peter on occasion.”

“My info is that he wasn’t a user or a distributor.”

Anna shrugged. “Maybe it was for the girls he filmed. Maybe he considered that doing business.”

He nodded. That made sense.

“Why is this coming up now?”

“Ellie’s arranging an interview with Mulroy, and I want to know what he’s going to tell her.”

“Just about the drugs, I assume. What else is there?”

“That’s always the question, isn’t it?” The question, however, was rhetorical, and he pushed it away with a wave. “That’s all. We’re done here.”

She nodded, then started toward the door again, but she paused after only a few steps, then turned back to face him. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but maybe this is for the best. You and Ellie, I mean. She’s never going to see the world the way you do. The way all of us who believe in you do.”

She turned then, and left the room, leaving him to watch as the doors closed behind her.

She might be right, he knew, but that didn’t mean he would give up on Ellie. On them. He wouldn’t.

But maybe he needed to look at the world in a different way. Maybe at the end of the day, he and Ellie needed to find their own common perspective with which to view the world.

Chapter Thirty-Nine