Treachery

“I take it by the look on your face and the dozen or so attorneys currently trembling in their offices, that it didn’t go well with Luca.”

Eyes trained on the cityscape beyond my window, I flick a pen through my fingers and grind my teeth. Given how much I’ve been doing that today, I’ll probably need dentures by the end of the week when the enamel crumbles to dust under the strain.

Gabriel sits at my back, silent for a few minutes to let me answer. When I say nothing, he clears his throat and asks, “I know you’re in a bad mood...”

Bad? I almost laugh at that. There is no word for the mood I’m in. Nothing can describe the level of rage I feel at the moment for the situation that has gotten out of control.

“...but I need to ask these questions in case I have issues to fix.”

I don’t like how careful his voice is. Gabriel never walks on eggshells around me. Never worries about pushing my buttons even when I’m about to murder someone.

“First question: Where is Lacey? I’ve looked all over the office for her, and nobody has seen her today.”

My voice is a low growl when I answer, “I sent her home.”

“With or without a job?”

The pen snaps in half in my hand, blue ink bursting over my skin, which only pisses me off more.

Swiveling my seat, I toss the broken plastic onto my desk and stare across at a pair of worried green eyes.

“I sent her a text giving her the day off because I’m having seriously shitty luck with the women I actually want in my life at the moment. The last thing I fucking need is for Lacey to quit because I chewed her a new asshole over something stupid.”

Shoulders relaxing, Gabriel sits back in his seat and crosses an ankle over a knee.

“It’s good to see you’re still thinking somewhat logically. We’d never find anybody to replace her.”

“I’m not that bad.”

He cocks a brow. “You managed to scare off seventeen assistants in the course of six months when we first started the firm. Some of them filing worker’s compensation claims for the therapy visits they required after working for you. Lacey has been a godsend.”

Grabbing the box of tissues off my desk, I attempt to wipe the ink from my hand, only managing to smear it in the process.

“Tell me what happened with Luca.”

“I told her everything. Well, almost everything. By the time I was done explaining what I did with Clayton, she didn’t stick around long enough to find out why.”

He scratches his jaw and stretches his arm over the backrest of the seat next to him. “But she stayed in the house?”

Clenching my blue hand to keep from smearing ink over everything I touch, I glare at him.

“Yeah, she stayed. She marched up to her prison room, as she calls it, and didn’t come out again. I knocked on the door an hour later and attempted to walk inside. She threw something at my head, and I decided she needed a little more time to calm down. I tried again this morning by offering her breakfast and she told me to fuck off, and that I can either shove the food up my ass or choke on it and die. My choice.”

His hand moves over his mouth, most likely to hide a grin.

“But at least she’s talking to you. That’s progress.”

I glare at him.

“So when you decided to come into the office, it was because-“

“I thought it was safer to be here than at home. At least until I can fix this.”

Gabriel laughs at that, and I resist the urge to storm over there to beat his ass.

Still smirking, he attempts to control his laughter - failing miserably, I might add - and stares back at me.

“I’m sorry. I’ve just never seen you run away from an opponent before. Especially a woman.”

“I didn’t say I ran away. I came here because it’s safer. For her. If Luca decides to leave her room and so much as hate-stares me, I don’t think I can be trusted not to shake the shit out of her and make her listen to reason. I need to calm the fuck down before I deal with her.”

His shit-eating grin doesn’t disappear. If anything, Gabriel looks like he’s about ten seconds away from needing a Thorazine drip and a straitjacket because he’s lost his fucking mind.

The fucker is trying and failing at controlling his facial expressions. Something that never happens with him.

“Why are you staring at me like that?”

He shrugs. Barks out a laugh. Gains control of himself again and then schools his expression.

“It’s nothing. I just happen to find the two of you insanely amusing.”

“Fuck off. I wouldn’t even be in this position if it weren’t for you and your bullshit advice to tell the truth. I knew it was a bad idea, and yet my dumb ass went along with it. Now Luca won’t speak to me, and we’re nowhere closer to getting the servers and ending this problem with our fathers.”

“Did you tell her the full truth?”

My eyes snap to his. “She doesn’t need to know that shit, Gabriel. Nobody does. Especially not the twins.”

Our eyes lock across the desk, the humor in his expression entirely gone now that the other deal I made three years ago is floating between us.

“I think Luca can be trusted to keep that information private. No, she won’t be happy to know she was offered up as a sacrificial lamb, but if she knows why you had no other choice, she might understand you better. We both know you did everything that you could. That you were fucking cornered. The decisions you made saved lives, and she needs to be given the opportunity to see that.”

I shake my head at that. Kick my feet up to the desk. Pull them the fuck down, and then shoot out of my chair to pace the room.

It’s impossible to stay still. Everything is spi

Revealing the truth to Luca was a stupid move. We should have just made something up again. Figured out some way to convince her to give us the damn servers so we can save her life. If I’d left it at that, she probably would have.

Yes, it would be another lie. But not completely. Ending our fathers will end the threat against her. All the other bullshit is inconsequential.

“William already broke the terms of that deal by contacting Damon.”

“And you reminded him of the terms.”

Spi

Gabriel shifts his position in his seat. “Because Warbucks called me when you didn’t take your father’s call. They’re not happy about what you did.”

“Fuck them. William had it coming. He’s lucky I didn’t do worse.”

The sad truth is that the twins are only alive today because of me. Not that their father would have killed them personally, but wherever the hell he was taking them was destroying them slowly. Just remembering the condition I found them in the last time he took them for a family trip has my hands fisting at my sides.

If the place he took them to didn’t kill them, they would have ended up getting themselves killed in another way. Their anger was causing them to do stupid shit without giving the last fuck about whether they’d live to tell about it.

I used Luca as a way to cut off communication between the twins and their dad, put her on a leash with the threat that I would release it again if William so much as breathed in the twins’ direction.

The fact that my threat even worked surprised me, but I’d shown them I was serious by how far I went with keeping Luca under control.