through her hair splayed over my stomach. Her eyes were closed, and she was so close to that place where sleep would grab her when a question fell over her kiss swollen lips.
“Why do you hate me so much?”
My shoulders shook with silent laughter.
“I don’t. I think I just proved that point. Unless you need me to prove it again?”
A smile stretched her lips, exhaustion obvious in the line of it.
“I don’t think I can move again for a year.”
She shifted over the mattress, the weight of her breast against my side.
“It can’t just be from how I treated you, though. I don’t think you’d hate me so much for that.”
My fingers stilled, a painful memory wrapping its fingers over my throat. There was no point in lying anymore.
“My mother is dead because of you.”
At first I thought she’d fallen asleep before I could answer, her body so incredibly still. But then her lips parted again, her breath against my skin a wash of heat.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Brushing hair away from her face, I looked down to see her eyes tipping up to me.
“Your ball, the murders that took place, it’s because you -“
“I was going to be sold,” she said, interrupting me. “My mother took me away because of that, but she told me the man I was being given to is who killed all those people. It’s why she ran with me. Why she demanded I couldn’t come back here.”
Tension gripped my shoulders, confusion bleeding through every thought that raced through my head.
I cupped my hand beneath Lisbeth’s head to wake her up, refusing to let her slip into oblivion after dropping a confession in my lap that didn’t make sense.
She grumbled, but I shifted so that I could pull her up.
“Wake up,” I demanded.
Her eyes fluttered open, exhaustion keeping them unfocused.
“But I want to sleep.”
“You have all night for that. Tell me again what your mother told you.”
She did, the information choppy if anything given how tired she was, bits and pieces that made little sense, but they were enough to have me marching into Franklin’s office early the next morning.
Dropping my weight into the chair in front of his desk, I kicked my feet up onto the surface and locked eyes with the lying bastard who’d practically raised me.
His glare went to my feet first, a dangerous flicker of something behind his normally professional mask.
“You have three seconds to remove your boots from my desk, or-“
“You’ll what?” I asked, grinning.
Something in my voice must have tipped him off that not all was well in the Rose mansion that morning. Lifting his grey eyes to mine, he set his pen on the surface of the desk with a quiet click, sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers at his chin.
“What is this about, Callan?”
Rather than dancing around the issue, I cut straight to the heart of it.
“Who was Lisbeth being sold to?”
Genuine shock fractured the professional mask, his eyes rounding for just a second as color chased across his features.
Clearing his throat, he tugged at his tie, regaining control of himself before asking, “Who told you about that?”
“Does it matter? Just answer the fucking question. And when you’re done doing that, you can explain to me why I’m just now learning about this.”
My tone of voice was too calm, too ordinary. A danger that lurked in the shadows to sneak up from behind.
Careful to choose his words, Franklin kept his eyes locked to mine, his expression giving nothing away of his thoughts.
“Marcus sold his daughter to keep from being blackmailed.”
My lips thinned, the line of them razor sharp.
“I didn’t ask the reason. I want to know the person to whom she was being sold.”
“He died the night of her ball.”
Suddenly on my feet, I slammed my hands against his desk and leaned toward him.
“Tell me his fucking name.”
The air between us was charged with the haze of crimson violence. Franklin had less than a second to answer before I showed him why men feared to watch me walk into the pit. Thankfully, he was intelligent. He knew not to fuck with the pissed off bull that wanted nothing more than to bring the entire world down around him.
“Sergio-“
“Moritze,” I finished for him.
Grey eyes met mine. “A man who died that night along with the heads of practically every family Marcus did business with.”
I didn’t back away to give Franklin his space. There was more to the story he wasn’t telling me.
“Yet, Antonio still