Page 99 of Velvet Vaughn

“It’s Brad,” he began. “Curtis, Brad Hatton killed Vic Shaw. And Danica Webb. And Tim.”

Nothing moved in Curtis’s face. Not a flicker or widening eyes. Nothing at all. For one disorienting second Leo thought the words hadn’t penetrated, that he’d need to say them again louder before they registered. Maybe the medication he’d been prescribed hadn’t let the news fully sink in.

“He confessed to it himself,” Leo continued when the silence stretched too long to bear. “Vic found out about a betting scheme, or he was part of it and had a change of heart. I’m not sure of the specifics, but athletes were throwing games, and money was being moved through the agency for years. He was going to expose it, so Brad met him in that hotel room and gave him something that killed him. Danica Webb started talking, so he silenced her too. And Tim.” Leo’s words caught, the memory of the wake, the courtyard, and Curtis collapsing crashing over him all at once. “Tim wanted a bigger cut, so Brad staged a heart attack instead.”

Curtis sat with his hands folded, listening with the stillness of absorbing testimony rather than devastating news, his eyes fixed on Leo’s face the entire time. His unnatural calm set every nerve in Leo’s body ringing an alarm he couldn’t yet name.

“He’s dead,” Leo finished. “Brad. He confessed to us tonight, and then he ran across the highway and got hit by a semi. It’s over, Curtis. The FBI is currently searching their houses, seizing everything. This is going to be all over the news later this morning, if it’s not already.”

Curtis didn’t respond. He sat with an expression Leo had never once seen in six years. It was entirely wrong for a man who’d just been told his friend had murdered three people.

Then Curtis shook his head slowly, and when he spoke, his voice had gone hushed in a way that made the hair on Leo’s arms stand straight up.

“I tried to keep you out of this from the beginning, son.” Curtis’s tone carried nothing but sorrow, warm and paternal. The exact voice he’d used a hundred times to console Leo through a bad contract or a losing season. “I want you to know that. Whatever happens next, I want you to know I never wanted this for you. I cared for you as if you were my own.”

“What?” Leo’s stomach lurched. “Curtis, what are you talking about?”

The office doors opened before Curtis could answer. Two beefy men stepped through, wearing plain, forgettable clothes that told Leo everything he needed to know about what came next.

“Curtis.” His pulse spiked, every instinct he’d ever had screaming at him to run. “What is this?”

Curtis watched, hands still folded, as the first man crossed the room and swung.

The blow caught Leo by surprise, landing against his jaw and slamming him back into the chair before he’d fully registered the threat. Adrenaline flooded through him a half second too late to stop the second hit from landing square in his ribs. He threw himself sideways, driving an elbow into the nearest man’s throat, and felt cartilage give under the impact. He fought with everything he had, but there were two of them, and his bad arm screamed in protest every time he tried to use it.

Leo got one clean punch in and felt a nose give under his knuckles. He tasted his own blood filling his mouth from a split lip, and then a fist connected with his temple hard enough to send the room sideways. He went down onto the hardwood, and they were on him fast after that. One of the men drove an elbow into his wounded arm, and Leo nearly threw up from the pain as stars burst across his vision. The stitches had definitely ripped open. They took advantage of the second he froze, grinding a knee into his spine and wrenching his wrists behind his back. Something cinched tight around them, biting into his skin.

“Curtis.” Leo forced his head up to look into his eyes, needing to see his face and for this to somehow not be what it so clearly was.

Curtis rose from his chair and came around the desk, unhurried, and crouched down to Leo’s level with genuine, aching regret. It was the expression he’d worn telling Leo about Tim Hargrove’s death. That same face had looked at Leo across a hundred desks and dinner tables and never once, not for a single second, appeared to be anything other than a man who loved him.

And Leo understood, with a horror that went bone-deep and ice-cold, that he’d spent six years unable to see the monster wearing his second father’s face.

#

Remi had gone philosophical somewhere around the second dose of pain medication. Propped against his pillow, his glassy focus apparently decided the ceiling tiles deserved a lot more scrutiny than anyone had previously given them.

He squinted upward. “You ever notice how hospital tile always has those little holes in it? Hundreds of them. Some poor engineer actually had to design that. I mean, they sat down and thought, what this room needs is exactly this many holes, no more, no less.”

“Acoustic dampening,” Anja murmured, not looking up from her phone. “It absorbs sound.”

“See, that’s the kind of thing you just know.” Remi shook his head slowly, marveling at her. “I’ve been shot, stabbed, and blown up more times than I can count on both hands, and you’re the one who knows about the holes.”

“You’re very high right now.”

“Believe me, I’m aware.” There was no trace of embarrassment as he settled deeper into the pillow. “Doesn’t make me wrong about the holes.”

Anja managed a smile, though it didn’t reach far. Her whole body hummed with the aftershock of three words tossed off with effortless certainty, and Leo ignoring how he’d just cracked open a drawer she’d spent five months purposely keeping shut. She hadn’t said it back. She’d stood there gaping, the doors sliding closed, with nothing coming out. Now he was thirty minutes away in Frontenac, telling his boss that his best friend was a murderer while she was stuck in a hospital room waiting on a discharge nurse down the hall moving at the speed of a glacier.

“Where’d you go?” Remi’s voice had lost some of its dreamy edge.

“Nowhere.” She glanced at the door. “Wondering where your discharge papers are.”

“Liar.” This time she didn’t have the energy to argue. “You’ve got a look.”

“I do not.”

“You do.” Remi’s grin came out slow and a little crooked around the drugs, but his eyes stayed sharp enough to unsettle her. “What’d he do?”