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Elias was using it as a stress ball.
“How long has he been planning it?” Rainer said, narrowing his eyes. “Running away, that is?”
He paused when all eyes trained on him. “On some level, he’s been waiting for this shoe to drop ever since you told him about the phone.”
Elias ran a hand over his dark hair. “I wonder what the hell is on it.”
Garrett had a few guesses, but he refused to speculate. It would just make him rage out, and right now, this icy plane of thought was better. Letting yourself run too hot was how mistakes were made.
Murder should always be committed in cold blood.
“He did have a plan,” Garrett acknowledged, thinking back to Fletcher’s behavior over the past few months. “The moment Emma came back into my life, he must have realized he was on borrowed time.”
Ian made a rough sound in his throat. “He must have been shitting a brick.”
“Yeah. Till I gave the piece of shit the perfect excuse to havemedrive Emma away—all that idiocy about her being a corporate spy.”
He stilled, the ice in his veins growing even colder. “He had to have known about her amnesia. He knew the whole fucking time.”
“Shit,” Rainer muttered, his tone of surprise indicating this hadn’t occurred to him.
“He thought he was safe,” Elias said after a short sharp silence. “Years passed without any cops beating down his door. He must have kept tabs on the sheriff’s investigation, enough to know it hadn’t gone anywhere.”
“He had no way of knowing Emma wouldn’t recover her memoryonce she saw him again,” Rainer pointed out. “Why didn’t he bolt then? Why stay and risk discovery?”
“And leave his comfy life and all the money that came from working with Garrett?” Elias scoffed. He threw him a knowing look. “You carried that bastard for years. Without your wheeling and dealing, he would have been a mid-level accountant at some no-name law firm or worse.”
Garrett pressed his fingers to his temples. The pressure had stopped building, but he still felt the edges of his brain pushing against the inside of his skull.
And then something else occurred to him, making it snap.
“Did he know about Stella?” he rasped, his heart beating wildly out of control. “Did that fucker know Emma had my baby andnot tell me?”
The atmosphere in the room chilled even further as the men exchanged grim looks.
How had Fletcher looked him in the face every damn day at work all the while with that knowledge boiling in the back of his brain? How had the guilt not eaten him alive?
Garrett didn’t wait for an answer. He marched into his office and unlocked the bottom desk drawer.
He sat down in his leather chair and pulled out his gun safe. With swift, precise motions, he took out his Glock and began to break it down, methodically cleaning the individual components.
His friends followed him into the office. Ian took one look at him readying his weapon and closed the door behind him.
“Whoa, slow down.” Rainer was turning green. “You don’t know if any of that is true. You said it yourself—the only people who knew Emma had your baby were Mariana and that scuzzy ex of hers.”
Garrett took a deep breath, setting down the shammy he was using.
Rainer bent to flatten his hand on the desk. “I don’t think Fletcher even knew about you and Emma. You didn’t tellanyone.”
Garrett didn’t need that dagger to the heart at this particular moment. It wasn’t as if it didn’t already have its own designated space there, like a custom-made sheath.
Still hurt pulling it in and out though.
Ian cleared his throat. “I hate to give that fucker the benefit of the doubt, but I agree with Rainer. Fletcher is too much of a coward to hide something that huge from you. He wouldn’t have the balls.”
The others agreed, but Garrett resumed polishing, reassembling the gun with the speed and precision Mason, the Auric team leader, had taught him.
Rainer stared at him like he was a bomb about to go off. “No matter what he knew and when he knew it, Emma wouldn’t want you going to jail for killing Fletcher.”