Page 22 of My Cruel Salvation

My smile is a little sad as I brush my lips over his. “Mr. Saint, it was my sincere pleasure.” I pull back and make a show of looking him up and down. He’s in jeans and a gray tee and he looks more or less like a mythical god. “Baseball cap,” I say. “You’re too good-looking and too recognizable. And I don’t think either one of us wants any more press.”

“I didn’t bring a cap,” he says. In response, I rummage in my closet, find a souvenir cap I’d bought when Roger had taken me to a Yankees game, and toss it his way. “Now feed me,” I say. “Or I won’t have any energy left to continue improving your mood.”

“That’s all the encouragement I need.”

My go-to diner is just around the corner, but it’s a gorgeous fall Saturday, and we opt to take our bagels and coffee to-go, then head into the park.

“Surely no one will notice us,” I say. “It’s not as if all of those publicity hounds at the theater last night are expecting you to go strolling through Morningside Park.”

“We’ll be safe,” he agrees. “We have eyes on us, remember.”

I frown. “Do we?” Devlin had told me that Ronan assigned security. “I don’t see anyone.”

Devlin chuckles. “That’s because my people are good at their job.”

I smirk. “Fair point.”

“And even if we didn’t have security, and the publicity hounds are pulling out their cameras…”

“What?” I ask, when he trails off.

He lifts a shoulder as he grins. “Fuck them.”

My hands are full, so I resist the urge to high-five him. Instead, I manage a hip bump. “I like the way you think.”

“Here,” he says, pointing to a bench near a tiny play area for toddlers.

I settle on it, then use the space between us as a tabletop and shift on the bench to face him.

“You always knew this would happen one day, didn’t you?” I ask as I unwrap my bagel and schmear.

“Not with any certainty. But I’m also not surprised.”

“I suppose the upside is that you’re no longer in hiding.”

He nods slowly, his eyes narrowing. “But…”

“The but is obvious,” I say. “Somebody pushed you out into the light. Somebody tipped off the press.”

“They did. But who?”

“Well, that’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? What Ronan’s now trying to figure out.” We’d avoided all talk of who pulled the trigger on this story last night, but now I’m ready to start mining for answers. He’s already started, of course, and from what he said earlier, Ronan is all over the investigation.

“Who could it be other than Blackstone?” About ten years older than Devlin, Joseph Blackstone had also grown up on The Wolf’s compound. Now, he’s got his own criminal enterprise going, one that he operates out of the Chicago area, and he’s managed to evade prosecution because he’s a clever bastard. He’d landed on Devlin’s radar when an investigation into security breaches at the Devlin Saint Foundation led back to Blackstone’s network.

Add to that the little fact that Blackstone and that bitch Anna were both friends and lovers and possibly enemies at various times. It’s hard to be certain since she’s now dead, something I am extremely happy about. She knew Blackstone from their years together at The Wolf’s compound. More recently, she’d apparently enlisted Blackstone’s help in her efforts to kill me because, in her eyes, I’d stolen what was supposed to be hers—Devlin.

Bottom line? Though we can’t yet be certain, everything adds up to Blackstone being very much not in the Good Guy column of the checklist.

I wipe cream cheese off the corner of my mouth as I gaze across the park. A mom in jeans is pushing a little boy with bouncy curls on a swing set. Further on, a jogger in red slows on the path as he passes the playscape, then speeds up again.

I take another bite, swallow, then turn my attention back to Devlin. “I assume you have Ronan looking even harder at Blackstone than before?”

“I do,” he says. “And this morning he mentioned that word on the street is that Joseph recently took over Harvey White’s operation. Apparently it wasn’t an amicable takeover.”

I’d glanced toward the jogger, but that pulls my full attention back to Devlin. “Should I know who that is?”

“One of my father’s former lieutenants. Anna and I knew him well in Nevada. He carved out a niche for himself after dear old Dad was assassinated. And he wasn’t happy that so much of my father’s empire went to Alejandro. Who, until yesterday, had gone into the wind after being discharged from the military.”