He moves into the apartment and stands in the middle of my living room, hands shoved in his pockets, and I close the door behind him and lean against it because I need something solid at my back.
“I called my dad,” I say. “After you left. I called him and told him I found an email in Art’s office about me being fired. About someone moving me here.”
“What did he say?”
“He cut me off. Wouldn’t let me read it, wouldn’t let me say names. He just—” My voice cracks, and I press my fingers against my eyes until the burning stops. “He told me he loved me to the moon.”
“Okay…”
I drop my hands, my palms slapping my thighs. “You don’t get it. Heneversays that. It’salways and in all ways. Never ‘to the moon.’ He was talking to me in code.”
“Like a spy?”
“No. Like a defense attorney who’s telling me he’s in danger without incriminating himself on a potentially tapped phone.”
Lance’s brows shoot up. “You got all that from the moon?”
“More or less.”
He moves to the couch and sits, elbows on his knees, scrubbing both hands over his face. When he drops them, he stares at the floor for a long time.
“He’s scared,” I whisper. “My dad is the most unshakableperson I’ve ever known, and he’s scared. And I don’t know why. He was trying to tell me something without saying it. Like someone might be listening.”
“Your dad’s an attorney,” he says.
“Yes, thank you, Captain Obvious. I literally just told you that.”
“No. He’s an attorney for Brutus Myrddin.”
The room goes sideways. “What?”
“The people who run the fights.” He looks up at me. “Your dad is their counsel.”
The denial rises automatically, but it crashes into everything I’ve just found out. “So you’re insinuating my fatherknewI’d be moving into a town with an underground fighting ring?”
“No, Genevieve. I’m saying if an email was written about blacklisting you in Boston and about getting youhere, then maybe they’re using you as collateral in case he does something they don’t like.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “So, they blackball me in Boston, either convince Art to get me to move here, or just hope that’s what happens, and now I’m here…” I shake my head. “Why, though? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Because you’re the person he loves. What better way to make sure he stays in line than holding you over his head?”
“Is that what they do to you?”
He tenses his jaw and looks away. “We’re not talking about me.”
“We could be.”
“Art knows you’re in trouble.”
My chest caves in.“What?”
“He knows your dad’s connected.” Lance rubs his chin.“That’s howIknow. Whether he knows the full scope… I don’t think so. I don’t think he’d do that.”
“But you don’t know.”
His gaze meets mine. “But I don’t know.”
I slide down the counter until I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, my back against the cabinets. Just me and the peeling linoleum and the sensation that the ground is dissolving beneath me.
