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“Know what?”
“That her father killed Mum.”
I want to say yes. It would make my anger feel more justified. It would make hating her and cutting her out of my life easier. I want it to be true.
“No, I don’t think so. I haven’t even told her.”
There’s a long stretch of silence on the other end. It’s at this moment that I realise how much I would have preferred if this conversation was happening face to face. Graham releases a sigh on the other end.
I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“You need to talk to her about it,” Graham says.
I don’t think I’ve heard him correctly. “What?”
“You need to talk to your fiancée about what you’ve found out. It’s not just your problem. It’s hers too, now.” Graham’s words sound like I’m hearing them underwater. “There’s no rulebook on how to handle something like this, but it starts with a civil conversation.”
“I don’t want to talk to her about it. I’m barely getting through talking to you about it.”
There’s a scoff. “So, you’d rather just be fucking angry?”
Yes.
The word appears in my thoughts suddenly. Yes, I would rather be angry. It’s safer. It’s what I’m used to. It’s more familiar than the unknown of dealing with what my relationship with Alize has become.
“She had nothing to do with what her father did.”
“Why the fuck does it sound like you’re on her side?” I snap. The conversation is turning into something else fast. If I had known this is what he would say, I wouldn’t have answered. He’s dousing the flame of my rage with water when all I really need is some accelerant to do what I know I should do.
“There are no fucking sides in this thing, Alex,” Graham growls. “It’s a delicate but fucked up situation. Alize and her father are two separate people, and it doesn’t seem like you’re doing a good job of separating them.” He goes quiet again, but I can feel the strain on the other end of the phone, enveloping me like a dark cloud. “Did you hurt her?”
His question is like a slap in the face. “What the fuck kind of a question is that?”
“It’s a yes or no question.”
“No,” I snap. “I love her, Graham, and that’s my fucking problem. But every time I look at her now that I’ve found out the truth, I see the bastard that pulled the trigger on Mum in the greenhouse, not the woman I fell in love with.”
For all the calmness in his voice as he wrung the information out of me, there’s little sympathy from him now. “Mum wouldn’t want you to be mad at her. She knows better than anyone that children shouldn’t suffer for the sins of their parents. Channel your hatred into doing something that actually matters.”
My eyes feel wet, and I dry them with the back of my hands. Graham continues speaking, and the anger that I expected all along starts to leech into his words.
“Now that we know it’s him, we need to do our research so that when we strike, we can kill him the first time. Cleanly.” He starts to sound more like the sociopathic killer I know he is and less like the level-headed older brother of a few minutes earlier.
That word, research, triggers a memory. Something Lev said to me on the yacht that I didn’t really pay much attention to because I didn’t thinkLe Bourreauwould end up meaning so much to me.
“He’s a killer for hire,” I say into the handset, sitting up straighter in my seat. “They call himLe Bourreau,the butcher.”
“Like an assassin?”
I swallow thickly around the lump in my throat. “Yes. Someone must’ve hired him to kill her.” I really don’t even like thinking about this.
Graham is more dismissive than I had hoped. “First, we need to find him.” The idea that someone hired this man to kill Mum doesn’t bug him as much as it does me. “I can be on the next plane over and—”
“Woah,” I interrupt him. “Slow down. Have you lost your mind? The old man bashed my fucking head in for daring to disobey him, what the fuck do you think he’ll have his men do to you if you come back here?” Wasn’t the plan to create a life for yourself away from all this?”
For the first time, I sense Graham’s trepidation. “Maybe I want to come back.”
What?
