Beating Ruby (18 page)

At last, I welcomed the viscous night engulfing me.

EIGHTEEN

The Tea

“He will destroy me like he destroyed all the other girls who ended up in his playroom. Yet I know I’ll sign his contract. Because it’s the only way this gorgeous, dark billionaire will be mine. I look him in the eyes, my jaw set.
“
‘We need to clarify a few terms.
’
”

“He crosses his arms over his $50,000 silk suit.

“I point at the first page. ‘What do you mean by
teabagging?
’
”

—P. G. Edwards,
Roped and Broken

I’m not proud of myself—when I finally cracked an eye open to stare at the ceiling, it was past noon. Way to go when the clock was ticking and we couldn’t afford to waste any time. I did feel better, and I hadn’t thrown up in spite of the nausea that often came as a bonus with my migraines. So, apart from the burning shame of waking up in March’s bed at lunchtime, things were great. I pushed aside his plain white comforter to sit up, and I looked around the sparsely furnished mezzanine overlooking the living room. I gathered that this was the fifteenth floor’s penthouse, right above his office. On the wall across from the mezzanine were the same type of windows I had seen downstairs, bathing the place in a dull light and showcasing the silhouettes of Central Park’s trees.

I carefully slid out of the bed. My feet grazed something soft on the wooden floor. There was a pair of white terry hotel slippers waiting for me next to my ballet flats, which he had removed—and cleaned, it seemed. I fought a smile. Housekeeping level: over 9000.

After some lengthy stretching, I padded down the stairs. Under the mezzanine was one of those sleek gray modern kitchens that look like it’s forbidden to eat in them. No sign of life on the stone counters; a long teak table; one chair—this particular detail tugged at my heart a little.

Across the room, and forming what I understood to be the bulk of March’s furniture, were a dark upholstered leather couch facing away from the kitchen and a couple of wooden shelves where he seemed to store books and an intriguing collection of colorful African tin cars. Other than that, I was more or less standing in the middle of two thousand square feet of nothing. Plain walls, no rugs, no photos, no paintings, not even a TV.

“Are you feeling better?”

I jumped at the sound of March’s voice behind me. I turned to find him standing in the penthouse’s doorway—which meant he had somehow known I was awake. I shuddered at the idea that the place might be riddled with cameras and he had seen me scratch my butt when getting up.

I gave him a thumbs-up and yawned. “Peachy.”

He held a paper bag in his hands. “You missed dinner, but I kept your blueberry muffin.”

Guarded, secretive, but ever thoughtful—March in a nutshell. My eyes performed a quick scan of his body. Clean jeans and a white shirt had replaced the clothes he had ruined during his fall from the tram. He had rolled his sleeves on his forearms with great care to form flat and even folds. No wrinkles anywhere, of course. Dammit, how did he even do that? I could still see faint bruises on the bridge of his nose and on his brow, but overall he seemed fine.

“Thank you for last night. I’m sorry I lost my temper like that. It’s been a difficult day,” I mumbled.

A gentle smile creased his dimples. “Don’t apologize. Would you like something to drink?”

I scratched my head. “Why not.”

“Tea?”

“Tea sounds good.”

Now that I was more or less focused, I noticed a patch of green near one of the windows. I sauntered across the room. “Is this Gerald?”

March nodded while filling a kettle with water.

Gerald.
The legendary roommate. Also an orange tree.

Back during our date in Tokyo, March had opened up to me about their twisted relationship and his constant horticultural efforts to perhaps, someday, get decent oranges, instead of the botanical insult I was currently beholding. Gracing the branches was a grand total of three greenish lumps whose shape suggested Gerald had been recently raped by a gingerroot. They were hardly bigger than tangerines, and one of them threatened to fall off any moment. I scanned the tree’s surroundings: from the soft carpet on which its pot rested, to the water spray bottles and Superthrive plant vitamins, March had tried everything to please his bitter friend, including the purchase of a small UV lamp, and music, if that mini speaker was any indication.

Maybe Gerald didn’t like Conway Twitty.

Behind me, I heard the faint clatter of cups being set on the kitchen’s island. I watched him pour boiling water into each of them with practiced gestures, and a wooden, smoky aroma soon filled the air.

“Lapsang souchong,” I said, joining him.

“Would you prefer something lighter?”

“No.” I leaned against the island and took one of the cups, holding it in my hands and breathing in the peculiar blend of smoked tea. “March. Are we gonna talk?”

He took a long sip of his tea, dark blue eyes never leaving me. After he was done, he deliberately placed his cup back on the counter. “How did you hear about I2000009?”

Oh.

The way I had envisioned it, I’d be the one asking the questions and grilling him until he fell to his knees and told me all the things I wanted to hear. Except now it was
my
heart racing, and I knew my ears were turning a guilty shade of burgundy, while I was almost certain color had otherwise drained from the rest of my face.

I had been just as unworthy of March’s trust as he had been of mine. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t told him back in Paris. Perhaps because it had made no sense at the time. We had been looking for Mr. Étienne, my mother’s “notary”—not really a licensed professional, but close enough, I guess—and found him in a strip club. Then guys had started shooting at us, so it wasn’t the best time to tell March. Then . . . then it had just become my secret, something warm that I cherished and kept jealously because it was all I had left from my mother.

My two fathers had wiped almost every single trace of her, but I had this—the secret my mother’s notary had whispered in my ear before being shot.

I2000009. I two million nine.

And I had no idea what it meant or what to do with it. Innumerable Internet searches and hours spent torturing my brain had brought no results—and here I was, in front of a cup of tea, hearing March basi
cally admit that he knew about it already.

“How
. . .
How did
you
learn about that? I never
discussed
it with you.”

On the counter, March’s fist clenched. “Indeed. If you intended to keep this s
ecret, you should have perhaps better protected your online activity. A shame for an engineer of your caliber, I must say.”

My first instinct was to ask him if he read my Facebook posts as well, or what he thought of my new shower gel—I knew he liked strawberries. Exploding and yelling that he was an overcontrolling douche doubled with a goddamn stalker wouldn’t help me out of that particular pinch, though. I took a deep breath and sustained his hard gaze. “I think my mom was trying to tell me something. She’s the one who gave that code to Étienne, and he whispered it to me at the Rose Paradise.”

“I suspected so.”

I went on excitedly. “She said in her letter that she’d made a huge mistake, but that Dries would never betray his brothers for her. So maybe this was her way of—”

“Hold on a second. Her
lette
r
? I thought Dries’s men had stolen it in Paris. How have you read it?”

Oh.
Yeah . . . That’s the detail I forgot to mention. Against the rules of every single rom-com ever written, it wasn’t March who had caught me on my way to Narita Airport to patch things up after our adventures in Tokyo and his dumping me. It was Dries.

There’s this old cliché dictating that whatever criminals do, they never do so for personal reasons, that they have this uncanny ability to compartmentalize all aspects of their lives. Richard Kuklinski posing with his kids in family pictures at the same time that he killed two hundred guys for the Mafia is a good example of that, and Dries undoubtedly fit the profile as well. Never mind that he had kidnapped me and tried to beat March to death fifteen hours prior. The incident being over and the battle lost—his own words—he saw no wrong in spending some time with his daughter.

It went sort of okay, and for all his parental shortcomings, Dries gave me two things that day that I would treasure for the rest of my life: a hug, and my mother’s last letter, which she had written before her death. The hug was everything you’d expect from a man more used to crushing people’s vertebrae than dispensing comfort to newly found family members. Awkward, a little emotional. Weird, I guess. The letter . . . honestly, I didn’t expect he’d hand it back to me. It was my mother’s good-bye, a short and pragmatic confession lifting a tiny bit of the veil under which her many secrets rested. A tale of love and regrets.

She made no mystery of her real job, although she remained—intentionally?—vague about the details of her résumé, and trusted my adoptive father would fill me in; he never did. That wound between us eventually healed, but for a while after the Cullinan affair, I felt like my dad had stolen something from me by hiding my mother’s past and emptying our apartment in Tokyo. He had almost erased her in a way.

The letter also contained explicit warnings against Dries. For reasons even he himself couldn’t seem to fathom, my mother had grown scared of him, and by the time we had arrived in Japan, she believed he might kill her—kill
us
. Every word on the crumpled paper had spoken of this urgency, this race against time. She had known something was coming, had meant to warn me, to make sure I’d be safe . . . before the inevitable.

That letter had left me with more questions than answers, had broken my heart and patched it up in the same moment. Changed me. Even more so than March had. I looked down at the dark amber swirling in my cup, unable to meet his gaze now that my own secrets were bubbling to the surface. “Dries gave me her letter.”

I peeked up to see his Adam’s apple move in his throat, but no sound came out. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen March’s eyes so wide.

I soldiered on. “After you left Tokyo, the morning before I took my flight, he followed me into a
combini
. He bought me ice cream, and we went to a park so we could talk . . . like father and daughter.”

March slammed his palms on the stone counter, making me jump. “Do you even realize what kind of risks you took?”

God
. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had heard him raise his voice like this. I took a swig of my tea, mostly to hide behind my cup. “It wasn’t so bad. We made peace.”

He ran his hand over his face. “Island, he’s the Lions’ vice commander; I don’t think that word bears the same meaning to him it does to you.”

“And he’s also my father,” I said in a warning tone.

“I’m sorry. I know how difficult this is for you.”

Upon hearing March say this, I thought of all the Kleenexes I had gone through after Tokyo, and a surge of anger rose inside me. “No, you don’t.” I breathed my temper out. “So, I2000009, what is it? I’m all ears.”

He sighed. “Island, I’m not allowed to tell you that. I have no idea how your mother learned about that number, but it could have been enough for her to lose her life.”

I inhaled sharply. “Is it related to the Lions? Are you saying that they killed her?”

Here came the two-billion-dollar question . . . After the Cullinan affair, I had spent quite a few sleepless nights shifting the pieces of the puzzle in my head over and over again. At first, the obvious explanation had been that my mother had been killed by her “employer”—the Board—as a punishment for having betrayed them and plotted to hand the diamond to Dries.

Problem was, those Board guys would have done anything to get their diamond back, and according to one of my mom’s accomplices, after changing her mind and making the decision to stay clear from Dries’s toxic influence, she had intended to return the stone to the Board. Except she had been killed before she could safely do so. So it wouldn’t have made any sense for them to eliminate her, at least not at the time; they still needed her.

Technically, the one to shoot her had been one of Dries’s men, a Lion, like him. But Dries had been adamant he hadn’t given the order, leading me to think that someone else had hired that sniper and made the guy circumvent his loyalty to his “brothers.” Until now, I hadn’t considered the possibility that this someone might have been another Lion,
who would have engineered my mother’s assassination against Dries’s orders. I mean, March had called Dries a vice commander, which confirmed my suspicion that he was a bigwig—a bigmane, if you prefer—in the organization. Also, here again, same conundrum: no Léa Chaptal, no diamond.

So, Board or Lions, whoever had decided to eliminate my mom hadn’t cared that the Cullinan might be lost forever. None of this, however, told me why she had chosen to bail on Dries, too, and wanted to make so certain that the Lions would never get a hold of the stone. Furthermore, why had she been so utterly convinced that Dries would never betray his brotherhood to protect her, when he himself hadn’t seemed so sure of that?