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Finally, I murmur, "Weakness or not, you are still mine, Cynthia. But I can be incredibly patient."
There is a banging on the front door. I know it's not Cynthia coming back, especially when I hear the door unlock.
"Robert." I walk into the living room and my friend immediately scrunches up his nose.
"This place reeks of se––"
"What do you want?" I ask pointedly.
"Is your lady friend in there?" He waggles his brows.
"No," I say, "and give me my keys back."
"My apartment is no longer safe." Robert grabs a beer from the refrigerator. "Somebody was in there."
I turn to look at him, my brows knitting. "What do you mean?"
He tosses a glove at me, and I pick it up. "This looks familiar."
"It should." Robert grimaces. "Remember those assassins that went after your healer?"
I stiffen. "You encountered them?"
"They killed the woman I hired to clean my apartment on the weekends. They must have thought I would be in the apartment and they came across her. I've spent the entire day dealing with this mess. Poor woman was raising her grandkids all by herself. I spent the afternoon looking into an adoptive family for them and the rest of the afternoon talking to my lawyer to make sure they would at least be financially looked after. It's the least I could do."
The bitterness in his voice makes me sigh. "You're a good man. Many would just consider those children collateral damage."
"Yeah." Robert takes a swig of his drink. “I used to be collateral damage.”
I give him a long look. “How about pizza and beer?”
“I’d feel better.” Robert grins at me.
As I get around to ordering the pizza, he glances at me. “So, I did some digging into that girl of yours.”
I immediately frown at him. “I didn’t tell you to do that.”
“Well, I’m a nosy bastard.” Robert smiles at me. “Want to know what I found?”
I lower my phone from my ear, giving him a quizzical look.
“Turns out, her parents were murdered around three years ago. Men in dark clothes came, slit their throats, and left. A neighborgirl witnessed the attack from her bedroom window. Get this. The men had their hands and faces covered. The husband struggled and managed to rip the mask off one of the men. Want to know what the girl saw under the mask?"
My gut clenches. "Scarring?"
"The kind that made her throw up. The whole face was burnt, even around the eyes."
"The same as the men who went after Lydia," I murmur, my voice hard.
"I had my men ask around about the children." Robert sets his beer down on his thigh, watching me. "Apparently, there were two kids. A son who was fifteen years older. He ran off with a girl from an affluent family. A month later, they gave the girl away to be sponsored by a rich family, which I guess was your family. The son would come around every now and then. He came for the funeral and sold all the house belongings and left."
"But the daughter never came."
Robert picks up his bottle and swirls the liquid around, "They lived in that house until they were killed. They had the same neighbors all these years. The girl never returned after she left, and the parents pretended she never existed. The day she left the house, they sold off everything she owned. Her room was stripped bare, and they began renting it out."
"So they erased her from their lives," I say softly, my hand curling into a fist. I meet my friend's gaze. "That doesn't sound like any sponsorship to me."
Robert doesn't have to reply for me to know that he agrees with me.
