AllFreeNovel
Share Us
5
Three years ago:
“You needto lay this thing to bed,now.”
In the backseat of my Bentley, I narrow my gaze through the tinted window at the passing gray countryside.
“Shouldn’t you be on a plane to a non-extradition country right now?”
It’s a low, barbed retort. And by Braddock’s clipped silence, I know it’s hit as cruelly as it was intended in the moment.
I frown. “Youareon a plane, yes?”
He pauses another second.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
My gaze swivels from the window to the seat of the car next to me. My old friend’s very name is plastered across the front page of theLondon Financial Times, where he’s being accused of massive financial crimes rivaling Bernie Madoff.
They’re saying he’s been using the massive wealth he manages through his hedge fund as his personal piggy bank, after half a billion pounds of his client’s money seems to have vanished.
All utter bullshit.
It’s not that men like Braddock or myself aren’tcapableof doing what he’s being accused of doing. I mean as Thomas loved to say, there is both king and villain in all of us.
Braddock is certainlycapableof pocketing a fortune and walking away. It’s just that I know he’s not nearly stupid enough to steal five-hundred million pounds. But again, not because it’s against the law.
Because he’s worthinfinitelymore simply running the hedge fund as is, without robbing it blind. The man is worth close to four billion. It makes absolutely no goddamn sense for him to steal a fraction of that, and to do it in such a completely obvious way that it’s immediately noticed.
Someone’s fucking him over. But until he figures out who, and how, he’s leaving his entire life behind, today. The full weight of that reality isn’t even truly hitting me—that my old friend is literally fleeing the country to places unknown.
And yet here is, lecturing me about my own shit.
“She’s getting out today, isn’t she?”
I nod, my gaze turning back to the window, to the passing English countryside.
“It’s her birthday.”
He growls.
“You had no fucking right to stick her in—”
“I hadeverygoddamn right,” I grunt. “She stabbed me, Braddock.”
“You lived.”
My jaw grits. “Tell me, when’s the last time you’ve been stabbed?”
“Oh fuck off, Noel,” he hisses. “I understand what she did was bad, but Jesus Christ. She’d just lost her mother, and you’re hardly the warm fuzzy type.”
“It’s not and has never been my job to be her shoulder to cry—”
“It’s your bloody job toprotect Thomas’s family!” He roars into the phone. “How’s that going for you, Ransom?!”
My eyes narrow.
