Page 52 of The Princess and the P.I.

I mean, what did you actually do?

Of all the barbs Fiona could’ve thrown, that one hit dead center.

He was already staggering after her father’s uppercut: What can you protect?

And Fiona just KO’d him. The proof was that three nights later, he was lying in bed watching the ceiling fan spin and thinking why the hell had he done all of this? Had he helped her case in any way?

She was hurt; he understood that. Which meant he’d succeeded. Fiona was never going to walk away if he asked nicely. Now, at least, he could close this case in peace. He couldn’t operate in fear.

“And then what?”

Tameka’s voice slithered from the dark. She was lying backward, with her head at the foot of the bed, braids streaming toward the floor, toes wiggling playfully near his face.

“You run back and tell her you were just joking?” she cooed. “A man don’t gotta tell me but once he don’t want me.”

Maurice jerked upright. Had he fallen asleep? Tameka was gone.

“Pathetic.”

Sara sauntered in next, wineglass overfull with red wine in hand. Her silhouette flickered wrong, and her skin was waxy in the half-light. She watched him with hollowed-out eyes.

“Why are you still in bed?” she asked, bored. “Three a.m., and you haven’t even finished combing through the CCTV footage.”

Maurice wiped his face with trembling hands. He was losing it. Restlessness, guilt gnawing like rats at his mind. Sleep deprivation stitched hallucinations into waking life until they became seamless, inescapable.

“I know you don’t care about me,” Sara whispered. “But at least help Fiona.”

“I care about you too,” he rasped.

“Please.” Sara tilted her head, her smile dead. “Nobody ever gave a damn about me. And right when I started giving a damn about myself—” She snapped her fingers. “Poof. Gone.”

She climbed onto the bed slowly, her limbs moving like rusted machinery. Her pale feet brushed his legs, cold as stone.

He couldn’t blink her away. She stretched out languidly, her wineglass tilting, spilling—

“You’re not going to finish in time. You’re too slow, too tired, you’re missing shit. What was the name of that company buying up shares…pink something? What does that remind you of? Why does it remind you of your sister? Think, you asshole! You have too many questions.”

She was right. They always were.

“You think they want you dead,” she said.

“They do want me dead. I’m getting too close to the church.”

“You’re such a self-centered diva. What if they want Fiona? And you’ve set her loose with her hypocritical-ass dad.”

She laughed again.

“You don’t even know who I was blackmailing,” she said.

“What was my insurance ?

“Who did I force to help me kill Robert Thorpe?”

Sara extended her neck, brushing his face. “Get out of the damned bed.”

Maurice lurched back, crashing into the nightstand. He was gasping for air, his head pounding, eyes screwed shut, and when he looked again, the bed was empty.

Just sheets—cold, twisted, untouched.

But the smell of wine still lingered.

He had lost complete control of this case, and it would cost him. Another Tameka and another person he couldn’t protect. He was twenty-three all over again, limping out of an old hotel room in Jersey after getting beat down trying to protect his little sister.

He was losing control, and the reality of it had him reaching for his inhaler. If he couldn’t protect the people who needed it the most, why was he still in this?

He paced his apartment like a panther. He had to think.

First, the break-in.

He’d been too quick to leave the scene.

There was no love lost between Fiona’s father and Maurice—hell, between Fiona’s sister and Maurice—but would they set up a fake break-in to scare Fiona into obedience?

The only person it terrified was him.

Maurice flinched at the gnawing suspicion that he might not have the full picture.

If the break-in was a setup, Maurice had played right into it.

Maurice pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes against the vivid images of Fiona from the play party flashing like social media posts.

The moment his fingers slid inside of her.

Wide-eyed surprise, wonder, fear, excitement.

The way she had looked around the suite.

Wide-eyed surprise, wonder, fear, excitement.

He irrationally decided that that was his expression—that wild mix of emotions playing across her face in that order belonged to him .

He wanted to be the reason she made that face forever.

Her soft mouth, her shock of pressed jet-black hair, her beautiful face.

Cat. Ears. Maurice had seen only Fiona that night at Club Dominie.

She filled the room. His whole field of vision, like the world, had narrowed down to just her hands.

And the way she touched him, a man, like he was breakable.

Like he was fragile and precious and human.

He could never recover from her.

—

Maurice had been in his office since four a.m. He couldn’t sleep, and he was terrified that he might never sleep again without Fiona’s honey-coated voice in his ear, without the soft rise of her body underneath his palms.

He listened to tape and reread reports. But he was starting to panic. How long could a man live without sleep? Could he go back to pills? Dark dreamless nights and gnawing need in the back of his head for chemical release?

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

He wanted his head to be filled with anything other than Fiona. The case was so fucked, and nothing was clicking.

Mark had ample motive and opportunity.

The key centralizing event in his life was the sale of the company. Sara’s little book bombshell announcement stopped the sale.

Mark stops Sara. Boom. Boom.

Just build your pattern. Pin it and start over. If he built a quilt after this case, it would be a charm quilt, a chaotic but ultimately beautiful amalgamation of secrets, hidden connections, and lies.

Maurice liked Mark for this. He did.

Honestly, not quite enough. A small part of him wondered if the real reason he couldn’t bring himself to zero in on Mark as the killer was because Fiona had been so dead ass about him from the beginning. Which made it…what? Ego? Insecurity? Possibly. Probably.

But that wasn’t all.

There was something about Mark—like he was emotionally out of breath and frayed around the edges. Maurice could see it in his poor impulse control—the punch to the nose, the brick through the window. This murder was a surgery, but Mark wasn’t a scalpel.

But blunt instruments could kill too.

Messy.

Complicated.

The sun streaked across the sky, and once again sleep had evaded him.

He made a cup of coffee, staring blearily into the sunrise. Day three. No breakthroughs.

November fourth.

No new knowledge.

November thirtieth was the pretrial evidence submission.

Fiona was going to jail.

These same thoughts over and over like the bottom third of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

He had bailed her out and given her hope. That was the most unforgivable thing.

The arrival of Fiona’s sister at his office was unexpected and, frankly, unwelcome.

Esi sauntered into the room as if she owned the place.

She still had little crusties around her eyes, and her jet-black wig was hard and stiff, like she was married to a wealthy white man somewhere.

Her dress was red and skintight, and her hip bones protruded when she walked toward him.

She either had a late night or got dressed with an agenda.

Maurice was instantly on guard. “Where is Fiona?”

His office felt more cramped than usual as Esi stepped closer. The coffee he’d left untouched hours ago had gone cold on the desk. He forced himself to maintain eye contact when Esi perched on the corner of his desk, but every inch of him tensed.

The look in Esi’s eye was…not benign. “Somewhere praying away the sins of last week, I presume.” She laughed, and her breath smelled of toothpaste—definitely an agenda.

“Esi, what do you need?”

“Do you know Fiona and I had a little Nancy Drew–Scooby-Doo act when we were little? The Sister Sleuths. I was the one who wanted to solve crimes.”

“Well, you’ve done very well for yourself anyway. A doctor and all that. Look—” he offered, rolling back in his seat to regain a shred of personal space.

“I think I’m safe in assuming whatever itch you had for Fiona is definitely over.” She sat on the edge of his desk, her long brown legs crossed in front of him. Maurice shook his head in disbelief. The Addais were not a subtle family.

“Does Fiona know you’re here?” Maurice asked.

Esi cackled. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I have to get back to the case, so…”

Maurice walked her toward the door, and she pulled her arm away.

“Always so dismissive.”

“Appropriately so.”

“I emailed you years ago about the church.” Her voice shook just slightly. A little slip in her armor. “Did you know that? Do you remember what you said to me?”

“No,” Maurice said quietly.

“Let me remind you—because I can never forget it. You said”—Esi shifted, a tremor in her posture—“?‘So you’re being hurt at the church? Leave the church.’?”

Maurice winced.

“I thought you were so cool. This was before Tameka, before the senator’s kid. You helped a veteran track down his Purple Heart. Do you remember that case?”

Maurice did. His chest tightened. The Tameka case had started not long after that veteran story—he’d been drowning in leads, the entire city’s media on his back. He felt on top of the world.

“I don’t know what kind of response I expected.” She laughed, the sound a little fragile. “But not that. I thought about you a lot more than you ever thought about me over the years. How cruel and dismissive you could be…and when Fiona said she was working with you…I couldn’t believe it.”

At the mention of Fiona, Maurice’s focus snapped to her. He had done what he had to do. No need to rehash the past.