“Monsieur de Morel?” Bastian looks up from the file. “I have a question for you about Slate’s assets?”
“You do, do you?”
Bastian pays his haughtiness no mind. “Can you explain the two payments that were made from Slate’s inheritance four years ago for the amount of 50,000 euros to aMarianne Shafir?”
Little bro would make a fucking great lawyer.
Rainier’s fists have loosened but not his fingers. All ten of them are gripping his armrests as though they were some whore’s thighs. “Marianne was an elderly professor at the university,who had health problems, costly ones. Eugenia and Oscar were very fond of her. They would have wanted to help her.” De Morel adds the last part as though to hammer in his donation’s legitimacy.
“Hmm.” Bastian slides his bottom lip between his slightly crooked teeth. I’ve offered him a full-ride to the orthodontist, but he insists it gives him character. “The state covers health care.”
“Not every kind of cancer treatment.”
“And you couldn’t pitch in?” Bastian sweeps a hand around the room. “With all due respect,youdon’t seem to be strapped for cash, Monsieur de Morel.”
De Morel rolls himself out from behind the desk. “Assets and cash are two very different things.”
“So, you’re saying you have no liquidities?” Bastian’s eyebrows ruffle behind his glasses.
“Yes.”
“So, you won’t mind gifting some of those assets to Slate to compensate for the money transferred out of his account?”
“Compensate?” Rainier’s eyes bulge. “He still has forty-two million euros in his name. And a house! Not to mention that once he has magic—”
“Slate?” Bastian turns to me. “Care to weigh in?”
I’m reeling from the number, but my priority remains ripping Rainier a new one. The vein on the side of his throat bloats and deflates, bloats and deflates. He may be a good father but he’s a shitty human.
I narrow my eyes. “Tell your daughter the truth, that you lied about me sleeping with women and screwing them over, toss in the Gauguin graphite sketch in the foyer, and I won’t press charges.” Cadence may one day see the light on her own, but for now, she’s still under his yoke.
“It’s not mine to give. It belongs to my daughter.Everythingbelongs to my daughter.”
I sense a bitterness there. As though he’d have preferred his wife to makehimbeneficiary. I have a serious itch to jab my finger on this sore spot—not to annoy the man, even thoughDieu saithow much I enjoy doing so—but to understand what sort of woman Cadence’s mother was. Did she transfer her estate to Cadence for tax reasons or because she didn’t trust her husband?
“Why don’t you ask her for the drawing?” There’s a gloating quality to that question, a smugness, a challenge.
He knows I won’t. “Just fucking fill her in on yourjackassness, and I’ll drop the subject of your 100K loan.”
“Jackassnessisn’t a word, Slate,” I hear Cadence say.
When I turn around, she’s standing right there, leaning against the doorjamb, lips pressed so tightly together microscopic lines bracket her mouth.
“You may not be an unscrupulous libertine, but you are a blackmailing ass.” A cyclone brews behind her lidded eyes. “Take the sketch. Draw up the papers, and I’ll sign them. But after that, you leave my father alone.”
Delight gusts off Rainier like smoke from the dragon. “Merci, ma chérie.”
She shoots her dad a glare that makes his shoulders twitch. “Slate may be a thief, but at least he isn’t a liar.”
De Morel goes whiter than his cozy sweater. “A . . . liar . . .?”
“You spread rumors about him. False rumors.”
Slowly, his bleached cheeks fill back with color, as though relieved, which is strange.
“Please apologize, Papa.”
De Morel sighs, but it sounds theatrical, like he’s putting on a show for his beloved daughter. “I apologize, Roland. I wasn’t aware the rumors I shared with Cadence were fabricated.”
