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He grimaced. “Sorry.”
“But yeah,” I admitted.
“What do you need, princess?”
“I need you to dig around, send word to every lowlife piece of scum in the city. Eric Holmes. That’s his name. What do they know about Eric Holmes?”
My dad’s eyes narrowed and he cocked his head. “Eric Holmes, you say?”
“You know him?” My heart was in my throat.
“He’s the one who got the dirt that put Sherry away.”
“Yes!”
“Why did he do that?” Dad seemed to have got an idea in his head.
“I thought… he’d done it for Caelan… to get the bitch off our backs.”
“Nah.” The sceptical look in his dark eyes made me afraid. “Now, there is an Eric Holmes I know of and it’s got to be one and the same. His real name is Eric Herasckow. White hair, silver eyes, tats all over his arms. A bit of a street fighter in his youth, so I heard.”
“Shit, that’s him… that’s him!” I bit my nails.
“Well, then. His father Lem was one of the worst types of people you could ever meet. Worse than me. And that’s saying something.” He looked down his nose and I shrugged. “Back in the Eighties when we were both young, and before we were either of us married, Lem was on the run from the communists, and was working for the much more liberal Russian mafia in London. I got rid of a few motors for them. Well, less got rid of, more redistributed.”
“Jesus, it’s a small world.”
Dad’s eyes danced as he made his recollection. “Lem had a reputation for being bloodthirsty and evil all right. I saw his work once. He left a bloke cut into ribbons for having turned up five minutes late for a meeting.” The corner of my father’s eye twitched. “I wouldn’t trust the son of such a man as far as I could throw him. No son of such a man could ever possibly love anyone. Not truly.”
I covered my face with my hands and wanted to cry. How had I let such a man into our lives? In truth, I hadn’t. Caelan had. Or had he? Had this all been, as Caelan had anticipated from the beginning, just a cunning ploy for Eric to inveigle and break us apart?
“He got the dirt on Sherry for one reason, I believe,” said Dad, his eyes alight with a sort of morbid wonder.
“Not sure I want to know.”
When Dad went quiet, I looked at him, sat there holding my sleeping baby in the crook of his thick arm, like he’d never known sickness or sadness his whole life. Still as strong as ever, though I knew from the yellowing beginning to form in his eyes that that wasn’t true. Not anymore. He looked down at the baby, too and then he said softly, “He did it because that’s what people do when they need a way in. They want you to owe them one. That’s what every good grifter, conman and lowlife is brought up knowing before anything else. Make them owe you favours here, there and everywhere.”
I pursed my lips. “What are we going to do about Sherry?”
“Caelan and I have it under control,” he said with an arrogant wink. “Trust us.”
When this conversation had taken place—if indeed it had and Dad wasn’t just gobbing off to reassure me—I didn’t know.
But Caelan had saved me plenty of times before. He’d keep saving me. I just had to have faith.
“Don’t let that man anywhere near you. Ever again. Do you hear me?” said Blake Rathbone.
Not my father. Not someone who loved me. But Blake Rathbone was saying that. A former professional criminal was warning me of potential danger. And I’d be dumb not to heed that warning.
“If you say so, Dad.”
“I say so.”
Three hours was nowhere near enough. However, we didn’t spend any of it going over old ground; but sought to keep to the good stuff. Like Logan, the house renovations. My job. I didn’t go into the doubts, unknowns or uncertainties that plagued me. Apart from Eric, of course. Meanwhile he told me a bit about his new wife and how happy the girls were. I tried to ask about his health but he quickly steered the conversation away.
When it was time for him to go, the guys came out of the kitchen and into the hallway to say their goodbyes. I saw there was a black car waiting right outside the gate out front. He would be spirited away back to the Ritz, and in the morning, be taken back to Florida. Caelan had wangled it all.
My father kissed my cheek, then the top of Logan’s head, shooing us back into the living room. “Go in there and let us guys have a chat out here.”
