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Niko shrugged, unimpressed by the man’s bravado. “We’re listening.”
“I was sixteen when my parents’ car slid off the road and ended up at the bottom of a ravine. I didn’t have any family, so I started roaming the streets.” Henri paused his story to take a deep drink of the beer. He burped loudly before he continued. “Eventually, I was arrested for shoplifting. The authorities gave me two options: I could go to jail or work for the nuns in their stables.”
“Doesn’t seem like a difficult choice,” Niko said.
“It wasn’t.”
“But?”
“But their charity meant I was stuck in the stables shoveling shit while I watched spoiled little bitches prance around like they were some sort of princesses.”
“Your gratitude is overwhelming,” Niko drawled, even as he silently acknowledged it couldn’t have been easy.
Not only had Henri been an orphan who’d been left without anyone to love or care about him, but he’d been tossed into a situation where he was in constant contact with kids who’d been blessed with the most privileged lives. Who wouldn’t be bitter? The question was whether his bitterness had driven him to murder.
Henri took another drink. “I was grateful for the chance to learn to speak English, and the opportunity to work with the horses. They brought me a comfort I never expected. They still do.” With a grimace, Henri glanced toward the dusty window that revealed a hazy outline of the stables. “At least when they’re not draining my bank balance. But the students were a pain in the ass.”
“So why stay?”
“At first I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“And then?”
Henri slouched in his seat, like a petulant child, not a grown man. Niko suspected that Henri had a chip on his shoulder that was slowly crushing him to death.
“I discovered that there were a few perks to working in the stables.”
“What sort of perks?”
“The students began asking me to locate items they couldn’t buy or have sent from home.”
Niko frowned. What was the man implying? Then, realization hit, and he rolled his eyes. It’d been a long time since he’d been in high school.
“Alcohol?” he demanded.
“Alcohol.” Henri gave a mocking toast with his beer can. “Cigarettes. Pot. Whatever they wanted.”
Niko had his own source in school for getting him things his parents had forbidden. And it’d cost a sizable chunk of his allowance.
“And you would charge a finder’s fee, I presume?”
“Of course.” Henri stared at Niko as if it was a ridiculous question. “It started to add up, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“To give me the money I needed to immigrate to America and start my own stables.”
“Ambitious.”
“The rich aren’t the only ones with dreams,” Henri snapped.
Niko resisted the urge to glance around the decaying house. It seemed doubtful that this had been his dream. At the moment he wasn’t willing to risk distracting Henri from his story. Eventually he was going to get to the point. At least Niko fervently hoped so.
“Continue,” he commanded.
Henri polished off the beer before he returned to his story. “I discovered over the years that I was more or less invisible.”
“Hardly invisible,” Rayne said in dry tones. “You were always hanging around when I visited the stables.”
