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“That’s two introductions you owe me,” Casper prompted.
“Mia, this is my brother Casper. Casper, the mouthy one in the chair is Mia Smith,” he stated evenly. “And the not-mouthy one beside me is Honey.” His voice softened. “She’s been trained to deal with PTSD.”
“Mia or the dog?”
He glared at his brother. “The dog, of course!”
“Then you should keep her,” Casper said instantly.
“I wasn’t stressed until you got here,” Darius defended.
“Oh, I think we both know that isn’t true,” his brother drawled. “It’s good to meet you, Mia.” He gave an exaggerated nod of his head. “You too, Honey.” He petted the dog on the neck before straightening. “And you’re right, Mia, I do have a few things I need to talk to Darius about.”
“If any of them involve what happened this morning then I need to hear those things too. Do not look at him for permission,” she instructed firmly when Casper turned toward Darius.
Casper snorted. “The last time I asked Darius for permission to do anything was…oh, let me see—never!”
Some of Mia’s tension visibly eased from her shoulders. “Despite Darius treating me like one, I’m not a child.”
“He treats you like a child?” Casper murmured skeptically. “Strange, I would have thought it would be the opposite.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, because it’s really the last thing he wants to do?”
It really was, but Darius could do without his brother drawing attention to the fact. That mocking glint in Casper’s eyes said he knew exactly what he was doing.
Bastard!
“I still have a right to know if you have any information about the events of this morning,” Mia continued before Darius resorted to giving another growl.
He accepted she had a point, and he could see by Casper’s expression that his brother thought so too.
Mia just brought out every single one of Darius’s protective instincts. It incited a need inside him to ensure nothing and no one ever hurt her.
“Go ahead,” he encouraged his brother with a nod.
CHAPTEREIGHT
“Good decision,” Mia told him, knowing she would have lost it completely if Darius had continued with his Mia-is-too-young-and-fragile-to-know-the-truth attitude.
She might be short, her build tiny when compared to these two men, and her childhood had also been far from perfect. But that didn’t make her physically or emotionally fragile or weak. The opposite, in fact.
She’d recognized Casper immediately from having looked at the Kingston Security website.
Aged thirty-five, he was the youngest of the seven family members who owned the prestigious company. His dark hair was styled overlong, his eyes a warm brown, and he had fashionably trimmed stubble on his jaw. He was currently wearing a casual T-shirt and jeans, rather than the formal suit he’d been wearing in the company photograph.
Mia also knew he was the technical expert of the company.
“So, I’ve been downstairs with the forensics team for the past hour,” Casper told them briskly. “I’ve left them to it for now, but we’ve been able to complete a preliminary check on Fletcher’s apartment. You were right, Darius, they were able to find small traces of blood on the wooden floor outside the oblong space where the rug had been. I’ve checked Fletcher’s medical records, and it matches his blood type. They’ll need to do a DNA test to make sure it’s actually his blood, but I think the law of probability says it is.”
“Maybe he cut his finger before he left for work,” Mia suggested hopefully.
Casper gave her a sympathetic glance. “He didn’t.”
“But how can you be so sure?”
“Because we found more evidence of blood in one of the main elevators, more outside the front door, and some on the pavement. Too much for it to be a cut finger,” he said apologetically. “There’s no more blood beyond where the men left their van parked outside the front of the building this morning. Which points to the rug having been so saturated with blood, it couldn’t absorb any more,” he added with a grimace.
Mia wasn’t sure whether she was relieved, because this proved she’d been right, or horrified, because in all probability this meant that Giles Fletcher really was dead.
She felt a shiver down her spine at the realization that everything Casper was telling them confirmed that she had definitely seen Giles’s dead body this morning.
