House Rules - Chloe Neill Page 0,78

I followed behind obediently.

“Why are you redecorating?”

“It’s time. It’s been fifteen years, and I wanted to breathe life into this house.” She stopped and turned to look at me. “Did you hear that Robert is expecting again?”

Robert was my brother and the oldest of the Merit brood. “I didn’t. Congratulations to them. When’s the baby due?”

“June. It’s very exciting. And this house isn’t exactly grandchild-friendly, is it?” She put her hands on her hips and glanced around; she wasn’t wrong—the house wasn’t very grandchild-friendly. It was all concrete, monochromatic, and sharply angled. But it had been that way through the birth of my parents’ other grandchildren, and they hadn’t turned out any worse for it.

“If you say so,” I said, not arguing the point. “Is Dad around? I need to talk to him.”

“He is, and he’ll be glad to hear from you. We won’t be around forever, you know. You should consider giving him a chance.”

I’d given him plenty of chances, although they were generally before he’d tried to bribe Ethan. But that was neither here nor there.

“I just need to talk to him,” I said, willing to commit to nothing else.

We walked down the concrete-walled hallway and to my father’s office. My mother’s redesign had already found its way there.

The house had been a strict and sterile bastion of modernism; it had become the centerfold in an Italian design magazine. Pale carpet covered the concrete floor, and the office was lit by a chandelier of colored glass. Modern art canvases covered the walls. They were probably pieces my father had owned before my mother took charge of the room, but they looked completely different in this brighter, cheerier office.

My father, on the other hand, seemed unusually out of place.

Even at the late hour, he wore a black suit. He stood in the middle of the room, back bent over the undoubtedly expensive and custom putter in his hands. A few yards away, a crystal tumbler lay on the floor, poised to receive the ball.

He reviewed the lie and then, with a smooth motion, swung his outstretched arms in a perfect arc, sending the ball along the carpet to the hole at the end of his imaginary green. With a clink of glass, he sank the put.

It wasn’t until he’d bent over to pick the ball up and cupped it in his hand that he finally looked up at me.

“Look who’s here, Joshua.” My mother squeezed my shoulders, then plucked an errant coffee cup from my father’s desk and headed back for the door. “I’ll just let you two talk.”

“Merit,” my father said.

“Dad.”

He slipped the ball into his pocket. “What can I do for you?”

I was pleasantly surprised. He usually started off conversations with me with accusations or insults.

“I need a favor, actually.”

“Oh?” He placed his putter into a tall ceramic vase that stood in a corner of the room.

“There’s a warehouse in Little Italy. I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about it.”

His toys put away, my father sat down behind a giant desk that looked like it had been made of recycled bits of discarded wood.

“Why do you want to know?”

Cards on the table, I thought. “The owner or someone involved in the property might have something to do with the murder of vampires.”

“And you can’t find this information online?”

I shook my head. “Nothing at all.”

He regarded me skeptically. “I consider the assessor a friend, but I don’t especially wish to burn that bridge completely by using the information she gives me to accuse someone of murder.”

I pushed harder. “The clerk doesn’t need to know what we’re using the information for.”

“We,” he said. “You and Ethan?”

I nodded. My father and I hadn’t discussed Ethan—or anything else—since Ethan had come back.

“He’s alive and well, I understand.”

“He is.”

“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it.” He seemed honestly relieved. Since he’d put in motion the animosity between Ethan and Celina that had led to Ethan’s death, he’d probably felt responsible for it, at least in some deep place in his heart.

It wasn’t that I thought my father uncaring; he definitely cared, but he was so utterly absorbed in his own needs that he manipulated people like chess pieces to get what he wanted . . . even if he believed he was doing it for the good of others.

He looked up at me. “You and I haven’t talked. About what happened, I mean.”

“We’ve talked enough.” My stomach clenched nervously, as it often did when my father suggested we should “talk”