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“What do you want?” I asked.
He smirked. “Why don’t you tell me?”
I reached for my Coach bag and moved to stand. “I don’t have time for this or you. I need to go.”
“Sit.”
His voice came out like a whip, soft but deadly. I glared back at him, wondering if he truly was insane.
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m sure by now you know who I am,” he answered. “Just as I know who you are, Gypsy Blue.”
I collapsed into the chair with weak knees. Nobody knew that name. Nobody but Birdie. For as long as I could remember I’d been handing out fake names like candy. I could easily be a Kelly, or Brittney, or Sarah. But never Gypsy.
“What do you want?” This time, the question was softer, and I hated that I’d shown him even a hint of vulnerability. But I had a feeling that it didn’t matter. This man was here to get what he wanted, one way or another.
“Your sister isn’t coming,” he said casually as he flagged down the waiter and ordered us both another drink.
It hurt to breathe, and I knew I was on the verge of panic, but I tried to stay calm. I had learned the hard way that dramatics got you nowhere.
“Where is she?”
“She’s safe,” Lucian said. “For now.”
“You motherfucker,” I hissed under my breath. “If you even think about hurting her—”
“I have no reason to hurt your sister.” He fixed his gaze on my eyes in a way that made me feel as though he could see into my soul. “However, a few powerful men in this city might feel differently.”
Mentally, the only detail I could grasp onto was that Birdie hadn’t been hurt. I was already making lists and planning our escape. I just needed to shake this guy first and get out of here. I would find her, and we would split. It didn’t matter what she’d done as long as she was safe.
I glanced around the room, suddenly aware that the patio had been cleared and no new guests had been seated. Even the waiters had disappeared after bringing our drinks. It was just the two of us now.
I leaned forward, adopting the position I often used to make men feel like I was gifting a piece of myself to them. “If it’s money you want, I have it. Just tell me where she is.”
Even though my breasts were on display in the tight red dress, Lucian’s eyes never strayed from my face. That was how I knew I was in trouble.
“I know you have money.” He plucked his glass from the table and swirled the amber liquid around the fat chunks of ice. “The money you’ve swindled from men all over this country. It appears that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree as far as your sister is concerned.”
My fingers went numb under the weight of his implication. “Birdie doesn’t do that.”
“How well can you really know a person when you’re never here?” Lucian cocked his head to the side. “You leave her alone while you’re gone. How would you know what she’s doing?”
I gave up the pretense of niceties and leaned back in my chair, shielding my body with my purse. “Because she tells me, and she wouldn’t lie to me.”
“Stop deluding yourself.” He scoffed. “Everyone lies. It’s human nature.”
“You would know,” I snarled. “Considering you defend the worst of humanity.”
His brow arched in surprise. “Isn’t that a little self-righteous coming from you, sweetheart?”
This conversation was going nowhere fast, and time wasn’t on my side. I needed to focus on disarming this bomb so I could get out of here. “Tell me what you think Birdie has done, and I will fix it.”
The darkness in his eyes melted away to a cocoa brown, and his voice betrayed a hint of humanity when he spoke. “You can’t fix everything for her.”
Those words scared me more than anything because they held so much weight. It was as if he knew our history, and I couldn’t accept that it was true. I didn’t want to.
Lucian bent down to retrieve a file from the briefcase beside his chair, and my heart palpitated when he slid it across the table. “It’s all in there.”
With trembling fingers, I opened the folder. I thought I was prepared for anything, but it was worse than I imagined. What he said was true, and this was the proof. Birdie had been stealing from men, but she was an amateur, and it was painfully obvious by these photos.
Shot after shot, she was proven a thief and a liar. Rings, watches, wallets, cash. They were all listed in the damages, and the total was in the hundreds of thousands. But it wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was that there were naked photos of her in this file. Photos of her seducing the men she stole from and doing exactly the thing I had been trying so hard to protect her from this whole time.
