Page 26 of Violent Little Thing

If they knew what was good for them, they’d agree with everything Court said.

“What is there to plan?” Seraphina asked.

Court leveled a look at her. “Let’s talk about your participation in anything,” Court drawled. “Let’s talk about how you sabotaged your own team, and paid off referees, and almost lost us a playoff spot.”

The board shifted in their seats.

That wasn’t proven. Benedict signed.

“It was.” Court pulled out a stack of receipts. “These are payoff amounts going from the business account to each referee she paid off’s account.”

Silence.

“And here is some visual proof of her meeting with said referees.” Court opened a folder and pushed it into the middle of the table. “Oh, and effective immediately, any spending on your part will have to go through the board. If you want to make a purchase with the business account? You have to send it to a vote.”

Silence.

“Are we agreed that any and all spending that comes out of Seraphina or Benedict’s accounts linked to the business are to be pre-approved from now on?”

“Yes.”

That yes was repeated by four more yeses.

“Good,” Court said. “From now on, she will not be flying with the Cowgirls, either. As for the Condors? That needs to be approved on a weekly basis.”

Pretty much, she’d never get to go on the team plane, Court just wasn’t willing to fight that particular fight yet.

Seraphina sat there and fumed.

“Also.” He pulled out a spreadsheet. “This is a list of all expenses that I could quickly pull together that Seraphina spent in the last year. A thousand dollars on ‘miscellaneous.’ Four grand on a driver through NYC. Eight grand on champagne for a meeting between owners…”

The list went on for a long time.

Almost ten minutes of Court reading off everything that I was able to uncover in just a couple of hours of research.

My favorite one had been twenty-five thousand dollars on renting a movie theater out for “personal use.”

But when I’d done a little digging, it’d just been her wanting to watch a movie by herself.

“Out of just this small amount that we found, that’s over a million dollars in spending on stuff that was not only not for the team, but also for her personal use only.”

“And you’re Mr. Goody Two-Shoes?” Seraphina fumed, and I knew that she was about to deal a blow to Court. “You killed your wife and child while drunk. How is that any different from what I did? You’re great publicity for both teams. We’ve already had a dozen requests for interviews with the owners in the last twenty-four hours since the news hit.”

If anyone had a right to be mad about drunk drivers, it was me.

I’d been in a drunk driving accident.

Lost my best friend to the same accident.

By the fucking joke of a woman who was literally sitting across the table, acting like she was better than everyone else in the room. News flash, she wasn’t. She was the lowest of the low, and if there was a place in this world for her, it would be in the gutter where the shit flowed freely.

However, I knew the difference between drunk driving intentionally, and whatever the hell Court’s accident had been. From what I’d learned—because I’d been pissed as hell at one point when I’d learned he’d killed his wife due to drunk driving and looked into him—Court hadn’t been drunk at all. Far from it. He’d been impaired, but it’d been his own body betraying him while he did something that I did every single day.

He’d eaten carbs, and those carbs had turned into alcohol, and then he’d driven.

From what I’d found while researching the information about the disease that he had, Auto Brewery Syndrome was out of your control. Plus, with him being a professional athlete, it was unlikely that he’d ever noticed that he had the syndrome with how clean that he ate.

Court’s accident hadn’t been intentional at all. Nor had it been under his control.