AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I close the door and walk away.
At home, I settle in on my couch and start sorting through Kaisin’s phone content, searching his call logs and messages first for anything with Lex’s name. There’s nothing. Well, next to nothing. There is one text from Lex, asking Kaisin if he has a wine opener. That was Thanksgiving six years ago. Other than that, there aren’t any messages or calls between the two before or after, which is strange considering they’re family.
I check the emails, too, just in case. Only eleven emails appear. That’s it. In all the time Lex has worked at Debrosse Group, she’s only emailed back and forth with the CFO less than a dozen times. Excluding the two coming together to plan my bachelor party, they haven’t had any sit-downs in the time I’ve been there either. I’ve made it my business to make sure.
Judging by how little communication Kaisin and Lex have with each other, it’s safe to say nothing’s ever happened between them, but they do work together, so why don’t they interact at all?
Next, I scour all correspondence with Kordin. An hour into it with no obvious red flags, I move on, checking every folder in Kaisin’s email, starting at the top andslowlymaking my way down because this motherfucker puts everything in its own folder. He has a few labelled RENO followed by two more letters, and after combing the first one, I realize they’re initials of whoever submitted the bills for renovations. RENO-LD is obviously Lex’s, but when I open it, the contents are completely different from the other one. They’re emails sent from Kaisin to himself and the bodies are empty. The only thing keeping them from being completely blank is the single attachment each one has. The attachments are just like the other invoices in that they’re for work on different properties the Debrosse Group manages. They range from simple repairs to elaborate upgrades, all invoiced to Lenox Debrosse. But one look at them and I can spot the major difference—they’re fake. Even if I hadn’t been to some of these properties myself and seen the state they’re in, I’d know these invoices were forged. For one, they’re all printed. They weren’t emailed to Lex, then forwarded on from her to the CFO for review. They were printed, then Kaisin scanned them himself—by the looks of the backgrounds and sloppy cropping, he just used his phone to take the pictures—before emailing each one to his own account. I’m sure some companies are still doing paper invoices, but every one of them? That’d be a huge fucking coincidence. It’s not like I could check either because there’s not a single company name to be found. Invoices almost always have a logo somewhere on them, just not always in the same spot, but the ones Lex submitted to Kaisin have a blacked-out square at the top left corner—onlyever in the top left corner—indicating there was a logo there before someone took a marker to it.
What are the odds every company Lex hired does their invoices the exact same way? Slim to fucking none.
It’s Lex scamming Debrosse Investment Properties Group, not Kordin. Of course it’s Lex. Once a fox, always a motherfucking fox.
What’s the real reason she wanted Kordin’s laptop then? So she could frame him? Or did he discover what she’s been doing, making her scramble to cover her own tracks?
Does she even want a divorce? It wouldn’t make sense for her to. She’d lose her opportunity to keep embezzling funds from her husband’s company.
Some of these invoices go back eight years, around the time she married Kordin, so she’s been playing him all along, just like she plays everyone, including me.
And Kaisin…he approves everything she submits to him because he’s in love with her, which she knows.
She knows…
Except she acted like she didn’t know the day I told her.
She’s a con artist. Her entire life is an act.
All of it though? Even the story about her mom? That, at least, I thought was true. I felt it. The way Lex talked about her, the raw fucking pain in her voice. How could she fake that?
But according to these records, Lex has conned millions of dollars out of the Debrosse Group, giving her more than enough money to buy a new house for her mom. She could afford anything—brand-new identities for both of them to start over, a new grave for her dad.
Was that grave her dad’s? I never even looked him up. I just…trusted her.
Goddamn it.
Just like every other encounter with Lex, I’m left with too many questions and not enough answers. Even if I bring this to her, would she answer me? Honestly? Because lies roll off her tongue as effortlessly as they roll off mine. But my lies are to protect the people I care about from Cyrus…
Shit. Cyrus. If he gets ahold of this information, who knows what he’ll do with it. With the ability to send her to prison, he could make Lex do anything, literally fucking anything for the rest of her goddamn life.
I thumb the black band on my finger, twisting it around and around.
What if it’s not all bullshit?
Opening up a new tab, I type “Aleksander Obuchowski” in the search bar. Luckily, not many results pop up, only a handful of newspaper articles from the same year that gravestone listed as his death. The story Lex told me Cyrus came up with is all laid out, detail by detail, along with a picture of the house Aleksander lived, and ultimately died, in. Each article lists Cyrus Andeno and his wife—Yetta Obuchowski—as the victims he shot and almost killed before turning the gun on himself. Only one article even mentions Aleksander and Yetta having a daughter, but doesn’t use her name, I’m assuming because she was a minor at the time.
I search both parents’ names plus “Lenox Obuchowski,” but nothing comes up, so then I do their names and “baby girl,” and get a birth announcement from twenty-six years ago. Aleksandra Obuchowski, born April first. No wonder she doesn’t joke; she was born on April Fools and probably got teased for it in the same way that kids get teased for every little thing.
So she changed her identity. She shapeshifted. Because she chose to? Or because someone made the choice for her?
Kaisin visited The Playground before Kordin did. If Cyrus crossed paths with baby Debrosse, all it would’ve taken was the smallest amount of prompting to get him blabbing about his brother and his real estate firm.
Shit. Kordin was targeted from the beginning, manipulated by Lex via her orders from Cyrus.
And now he wants Lex to return. Whether because the arrangement was only supposed to be temporary or Lex got greedy and has been skimming off the top, keeping some of the money for herself. Whatever the reason, Cyrus is calling his fox back.
But she’s not listening.
She’s too smart for that. She’s…using me. She’s been using me. Even when I didn’t, she knew exactly why I was forced to take a job with her husband’s company, and she’s been jerking me around, telling me sob stories to make me care, make mefallfor her.
