news. “She’s terminal, babe. She’s about to kick the bucket, hard. Now, it might take two years, or it might take ten, but one day old granny is going to be out of the picture. And with your cousin jumped ship, that leaves one heir left.”
Nina swallowed. “You mean me?”
Calvin stepped closer and pulled a lock of hair away from her ear so that as he spoke, his hot breath pooled around her earlobe.
“Did you really think I was going to miss out on my share of seventeen billion dollars? Time to face facts, princess. You’re stuck with me. For life.”
For a moment, Nina thought Calvin might charge at her. But instead, he turned around, riffled through a few other papers on the desk, then turned back with one particular document and shoved it at her.
“You’re going to stay here. You’re going to be my wife. And you’re going to support my business until I get whatever the fuck I want and become one of you. Because if you don’t, I’ll drag you down to my level, Nina. Starting with that.”
He shoved the papers at her again, and Nina took them. As she paged through, an eerie chill descended over her shoulders like an invisible cape. Or maybe just a cage.
It looked like a deed to one of the houses listed on so many of those applications.
“What…what is this?”
“It’s a mortgage,” he said. “Five, actually.” His face turned sour. “Opened in the name of a corporation that you happen to own. The goddamn banks see my name, and they think I’m no one. They hear the name ‘de Vries,’ and suddenly every damn door is wide open.”
She flipped through the papers. On the front was a name: Pantheon, LLC. A company, apparently located in Delaware. But on every page that required initials or the full name of a representative, her name was written in.
She set the papers down. “These aren’t mine.”
“Tell that to a judge. I’m pretty sure that’s your signature.”
“But…but…” Nina shook her head. “But I had nothing to do with this. What did you do, forge these?”
“You should really make your mark something more notable, princess. This was embarrassingly easy.”
Nina felt like her lungs were freezing. She couldn’t breathe. “Calvin, I have nothing to do with this!”
“And yet,” Calvin said, grinding his teeth into a sly, bone-chilling smile that spread his face like fingers in bread dough, “you do.” He tapped a thick finger next to her name, which was far too legible in her neat, polished script. “Right there. If I get caught, you’ll be liable. They’ll connect you to the whole scheme. Smart, isn’t it?”
“But how—don’t you have to be present to purchase property?” She knew this only because she had just done it herself.
Calvin grinned, his teeth like razors. “You were. Don’t you remember?”
Nina swallowed. She didn’t understand how, but somehow, he had managed to buy five houses around what looked like Brooklyn under her name, without her being present. There was only one explanation—someone was faking her identity. Someone Calvin knew. Someone the powers than be would have believed was her as well.
As she looked around the office, she realized how easy it would have been for her husband to orchestrate such a thing. Since he was apparently trafficking in forged identifications, it wouldn’t have been hard to recreate hers.
“No,” she said. “No. I’m leaving. I’m talking to Grandmother. She’ll fix it—she’ll fix everything, and she will take care of you, just like she does everything. You just st-stay away from me. You can’t do this. You can’t do any of this!”
She turned to go, but his voice yanked her back.
“I think you have that wrong,” Calvin said. “Your grandmother doesn’t take care of her family. She takes care of the people she thinks hurt it.” He tipped his head. “I always wondered what her husband did to piss her off. And wasn’t your uncle a bit of a black sheep too before he died? I never found a sailing accident all that convincing, to be honest.”
Nina’s mind raced. This was preposterous. Her grandfather had passed years before her birth, and her uncle Jacob when she was just a girl. She had never questioned their deaths or what had happened…but could there be any truth to what Calvin suggested? She hated that she was even considering it.
“And then,” Calvin continued, “there’s the case of your cousin’s fiancée.”
Nina froze near the door, the bloody images she had seen of Eric’s love lying in a bathtub