Page 83

“Yes. You have.”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

And, like everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life, this man is to blame.

Pushing away from the door, Adrian sidles past me. I expected him to grab me, to hold me close, to explain… but he doesn’t do any of that.

My heart leaps into my throat when he jabs the button to the fireplace, the flames starting small before growing steadily. I checked the grate. I checked the whole damn study. Peaches isn’t in there, but there’s still that moment when the fire comes to life that I brace myself for a yowl.

It doesn’t come. Instead, Adrian watches the fire for a few moments before turning around. He heads for the desk, moving to stand behind it instead of meeting me at the front.

He lays his hand on the back of his desk chair. “You’ve earned my heart, Loni. As black as you think it is, it’s yours.”

What if I can’t accept it?

A man who would interfere in my life even after I thought he was no longer a part of it?

A man who forced me into marrying him and now I’ll never be free of him?

I thought…

I thought?—

The fire crackles in Adrian’s study, but it does shit to warm me up. I’m cold all the way down to my bones, and this time, it has nothing to do with the powerful central air conditioner pumping into every room of this house. Oh, no. It’s therealization that Adrian is more indispensable to the Order than I ever thought.

He isn’t just a member. He works for them. He got rich off of them.

There will never be a moment when I’m more important than the society, even with this proof that he meddled in my life long before now. They own his loyalty, and me… I’m just the woman he got as a prize for a job well done.

I grab the folders again. I didn’t want the pages to mean what Ithoughtthey meant, but if he could control my life from a distance all these years, there’s no end to the criminality he could be involved with.

Honestly? Why am I so fucking surprised? He’s amurderer, a fact that I conveniently keep forgetting if only because I wanted to see Desmond dead.

But this?

“You’re laundering money for them, aren’t you?”

“For Maxwell and Dimmity?”

I swallow. “For them, sure. But mainly I meant the Order.”

“It’s yes either way.”

He doesn’t say it like it’s a confession. No. It’s simply a fact, and one that I took too long to notice.

I set the folders in my hand down harder than I mean to. Papers spill out onto the desk. I recognize them; having gone through this folder already, I know what they are. Ledgers. Bank statements, the ones on top clearly coded. Investment portfolios that funnel money through six or seven different shell companies so that they come out clean on the other side.

“All these accounts,” I tell him, jaw tight, voice shaky, “tied to hospitals, construction sites, campaign funds to the sheriff’s election last year?—”

“The Order owns Harmony Heights,” Adrian cuts in. “Someone has to keep it running. Keep Jack and the others from destroying it from the inside. I do what I have to.”

My heart pounds, hoping that I was wrong. That, like I once accused him of being, he isn’t the villain of this tale. That Adrian Heller can be myhero… “You do this to help the town? You go against the Order?”

His loyalty isn’t to the Owed? It’s to?—

“No,” he says, and our eyes finally meet. I don’t even realize that he was avoiding looking at me directly until I see the steely flint in his light green eyes. “I do this so that they can’t fuck with me. That theyoweme. I’m an Owed, right? I want every fucking person in this town to owe me, and when they do? I’ll know that I’m untouchable.” Fire flashes in the depths of his pupils. “And that makesyouuntouchable.”

I shake my head. “You’re profiting off of it.”