Page 17 of Broken Souls

Not one iota of her emotions runs through me.

Does she have any for me at all?

“How are you supposed to get in touch with him?” I ask.

“He gave me two weeks.”

“That deadline passed.”

“Yeah…” she says slowly. “Yeah, it did.”

Yet there has been no repercussion… Almost as if he does not care about the ledger. Or if he does not exist at all...

Silence descends, taut and heavy and fucked crushing in its presence. I want her to give me a reason to trust her, to say something that answers all the questions now in my mind. To prove to me that she isn’t a mole. Hasn’t just made things up to get close to me, to get the ledger I’ve just tossed onto the table between us.

“If he’s watching your phone, taking a picture of it might suffice,” I say, no longer comfortable with her taking it out of this office, even if it is a fake.

“Yeah…” she says with a small nod as she digs her phone out of her purse. “We’ll see if they get in touch.” She snaps a picture. “They’ll probably want to see a few pages of the inside.”

“Have a spread in mind?”

She glances up at me with her head still pointed at the book. “Have any allies in there you don’t like?”

The tension in my chest eases a little at the sly smile she gives me. “Everyone. I’m not the biggest fan of people.”

She laughs, and my muscles relax just a bit more. I open the book to a random page that doesn’t incriminate any of my brothers or my mother. The chances of the person being able to decrypt my code is low. The chances of them using this information in any way whatsoever is even lower given the entire book is filled with false information. The crimes in it might be real, but everything is just slightly tweaked so nothing in it can be matched to any evidence.

The book might say I killed John and buried his body in the garden of Client A (as we run a legitimate landscaping business just for that), but in reality, I was down in Miami when Talon killed him and chucked his body in the sea.

I flip through to another page, this one dealing with the names of the people we’re blackmailing – politicians, CEOs, celebrities, anyone with cash or weight. We have lured them to the hotels we run so we can document their affairs, their drug taking, their purchasing of whores. We also take their DNA to use at crime scenes or in my brother’s soul magic, making them our bitch forever.

She slips the phone into her purse, and I pick up the book to put it back in the safe. As I turn though, she stops me. “If itissomeone who lives here, they might ask me to take more photos when they know you’re not home. Just as solid proof I actually have it.”

“Then stall.”

“Do you not trust me with it?” she asks outright, and I turn, the book in my hands.

“I won’t risk my brothers’ lives for anyone.”

“You’re not risking anything with a fake though, are you?”

I still. Not even my family knows the ledger is a lie.

“I know how paranoid you are, Varius,” she says softly. “You wouldn’t have let me take incriminating photos even of your enemies.”

“I would to save you.”

Her mouth drops open slightly.

Turning, I toss the ledger into the safe, then shut its door and hang the abstract painting back over it. I step around the desk to head for the hall. She moves into my path.

“You know I love you, right?” Micha asks as she tilts her head up to hold my gaze; she’s much shorter than me, the top of her head only reaching to my chest.

I want to say yes, but the word stays stuck in my throat. I try to feel something, anything through our bond. But still there is nothing.

I nod. But I don’t know if that’s a lie.

Stepping around her, my chest tight, I leave her alone in my office.