Leira has gone completely off script, not that there was one to begin with, at least as far as she’s concerned.
But it could work in my favor in more ways than one. I won’t deny that hearing the truth about my mother is too tempting to pass up. As painful as it will be, at least I can finally close that door on the part of my subconscious that has been eating away at me since Sister Clara first told me she wouldn’t be coming back.
The gun is potentially good. Richard’s unpredictable temperament even better. But the inflated ego, so quick to bruise, is what I was counting on.
We’re alone again.
“Leira, don’t do this,” I protest once again, just for show, but my insistence is weak, letting everyone in the room think that I secretly want to know.
“Nonsense,” Richard says, leaning back in his seat to grin at me. “She has a point; you have a right to know.”
The fact that he’s savoring this, getting joy out of watching me die inside as I listen to him tell me about her death makes me want to kill him the same way that he killed that man twenty years ago. My eyes fall to the globe once again.
Richard turns his attention back to Leira. “You have a deal. Tell me.”
“You first,” she says.
Richard laughs. “Do you think I’m stupid? You go first.”
“You have all the leverage here.”
“You’re right, I do.”
“You also have the desire to tell.”
“Right again.”
Leira’s mouth tightens and her brow creases with worry. Her eyes dart to mine and I radiate the signal to her: tell him.
I’ve got this covered.
Richard Coleman is not walking out of this room.
She blinks once and snaps her attention back to him. “Okay. My father gave me your name and an address. 147 Pathfinder lane in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.”
Richard’s gaze narrows as he absorbs that. I read him, trying to understand if that means anything to him at all. When he nods to himself, almost imperceptibly, I realize it does.
He settles back in his chair and rakes a hand through his hair. The movement is so similar to my own habit of frustration it sickens me.
“That son of a bitch,” Richard mutters to himself. His eyes snap up to mine, as though remembering I’m there, then a cruel smile forms. “I suppose I now owe you the truth, don’t I?”
“Quid pro quo,” Leira says.
“You should stop talking now that you’re no longer of use to me, girly,” he says, keeping his eyes trained on me.
I can’t wait to kill him.
“Very well,” he says with a heavy exhale, as though he’s just decided on what to have for dinner. He looks at the gun in his hand and then back to me. “There is a certain poetry in killing you with the same gun that I killed your mother with.”
I feel like the bullet has already struck me, right in the gut. Any attempt I’ve had on maintaining a mask of indifference falters.
“It was right here in this room, in fact,” Richard says, looking around. “Well, at my former apartment, at any rate.”
I’m still recovering and force myself to focus. Despite the fact that my mother was also never allowed in his office, I can almost feel her presence spurring me on, bringing back all my determination, and then some.
“She came to me and tried to make a deal.” Richard laughs. “A deal, can you believe that? With me? I’m the king of making deals. That’s how I convinced the first contact in that Luxembourg bank to start laundering money. Find a person’s pain point, and you’ve got them by the balls.”
He grins with cruel contempt and slides his eyes to Leira and back to me as though to make that point.
“It was almost ruined by that idiot David Reinhardt,” he seethes, before collecting his cool once again. “But I dealt with him.”
My eyes inadvertently dart to the globe again, noting in particular the spoke at the top that was once buried in David’s right eye socket after my father slammed his face into it.
Richard laughs as he follows my gaze. “Fortunately, blood washes off it quite easily. Not so much my shirt at the time.”
“I’m guessing the carpet as well,” I say, looking down to note that the oriental rug is the one missing piece from his old office.
“Yes, a far more expensive loss to me than my traitor bitch of a wife and meddling son,” Richard says in a terse voice. “So yes, when she came back, telling me that my son had been in the room at the time and seen everything, I knew I had to kill her. She thought keeping you hidden would keep you safe.”
His jaw tightens with anger as he continues. “I have to admit, it did take me longer to find you than I expected. She never talked much about her family, but I knew there was a father. I started there only to find a dead end. Which meant casting a wider net. I figured she would take you back to Spain, so I had every orphanage searched. By the time I found you in that Catholic orphanage, it had been six months and you were already adopted.”
He chuckles softly to himself. “The Maríns. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect couple to raise my own son, the kind of people who understand the value of money…and constantly want more of it. Lucky for them, you hadn’t told them anything, for some reason.”
I think back to Sister Clara’s warning. Don’t ever say a word. I suppose she has three lives saved thanks to her. She’s most definitely earned her place in heaven.
“Don’t get me wrong, I did seriously consider ridding myself of the headache and doing away with you, all the same. Unfortunately, people tend to pay close attention when a six-year-old dies. Besides, if I killed
