Rhodes threw up his hands. “Fine, you win—here it is. That night, I did go up to the third floor, but I did it so that no one would see me take the servants’ staircase down to the second.”
He said it so readily, my breath stopped.
“Hera, help me, Rhodes,” I croaked. “What did you do?”
“Not that,” he cried. “Baby, please, believe me.Not that.”
“So why did you sneak around your own house just to contrive your way into a room you had no business being in? Please tell me the innocent reason for that behavior.”
“It wasn’t innocent.” Rhodes’s face was etched out of stone. “Your mother was blackmailing me. I went in there to find the proof she was keeping on me, and destroy it.”
If anything could’ve dropped my jaw to the floor like a character in a Saturday morning cartoon, Rhodes just said it. “You—”
“Daddy, what’s blackmail?”
We swung around, landing on Lily’s smiling, curious expression. We’d both forgotten she was there.
“It’s uh... It’s when you get bad news in the mail.”
“Oh no, Daddy, are you okay?”
He smiled soft. “I’m just fine, baby girl, but I need to talk to Mommy alone after all.”
“No, don’t—”
“Take your iPad into the living room.” Rhodes spoke over me. “We’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”
“Okay.” She hopped off her stool and scampered off, leaving her auntie high and dry.
Rhodes was less than fazed at my glare. “You want to have this conversation? We’ll have it, but not in front of Lily.”
“Why wouldn’t you want to spin more fairy tales in front of Lily? Kids love fairy tales.”
“It’s not a lie, Sue.”
“Of course, it’s a lie!” I hissed. “There’s no way my mother was blackmailing you. She can’t have been because you told me that the investigators turned up nothing! You’ve never done anything wrong, so how could my mother blackmail you? Huh? Huh!”
Rhodes fell back against the counter, shoulders slumping. The look of him said it all.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I was caught off guard when you brought it up. I’m just so fucking tired of this mistake haunting me!”
“The truth,” I demanded. The ground beef, salt, and pepper were next in the pot. I stabbed more than stirred it as I stared him down. “Now.”
“Okay, okay. This is the truth. When we came up with GloryBoi, we couldn’t get the money we needed to get it off the ground, or pay out the initial winning bets,” he began. “Micah’s parents had no money to give us. Alex’s parents wouldn’t let him have early access to his trust fund, and my family wasn’t going anywhere near a gambling app. Not after what my dad’s addiction did to our family,” he said. “So we heisted a ten-million-dollar diamond necklace, fenced it through some shady contacts I knew courtesy of my dad, and then we invented an anonymous angel investor.”
I blinked. “I beg your pardon? Did you just say heist?”
He cringed. “I did, but I’m using it loosely. I’m Rhodes Newbury of the Chicago Newburys,” he mocked, rolling his eyes. “My name and family connections have gotten me into the wealthiest homes in New York, Lantana, and Chicago. Back when we were at Columbia, I rolled with a particularly douchy group of rich fuck boys.
“We partied at each other’s places every weekend, and there was one guy—Max Thompson—who couldn’t resist bringing out the family jewels while he made a drunken fool of himself. The necklace was just hanging there around his neck while he snored on the pool table,” Rhodes cried. “Micah said we should just take it, and Alex distracted everyone so we could. I was so desperate to make GloryBoi work and save my dad from himself, that I would’ve done anything—and that’s what I did. Anything.”
I nodded slowly, taking it in. “What happened when Thompson woke up and the necklace was gone?”
“He didn’t even realize it was. He was so drunk off his ass, he didn’t remember taking it out of his parents’ room. It was a full three weeks later that anyone noticed it was missing, and in that time so many people had been in and out of that apartment, the police couldn’t pin it on anyone.” He scoffed. “And Thompson for damn sure didn’t tell anyone that he regularlyhelped himself to the family jewels, so they just put in an insurance claim and moved on.”
“And my mom dug all of this up?” Belief colored my voice. “When not even the police, the Thompsons, or anyone else figured out you three were behind it? Omma magically did.”
He gave me a look. “There was nothing magical about it. Did you forget she sicced a forensic accountant on us? That guy went deep into our finances, and I mean so deep that he hacked us.”
