Blaze (Virtues & Lies 3)

“Probably guilt,” he states, looking down at Grace wistfully.

“Probably.” I shrug. What does it matter? Kindness is kindness.

“It’s sort of weird how looking at her makes you think of all this shit differently.” He looks at Casper, a furrowed look darkening his features. “Lucy Stanton isn’t my business. But my grandad is, and there’s only one person who knows where he is.”

“My dad?”

“Yeah.”

r /> “How do you know?” Casper’s thumb continues working my back.

“My grandad was the money man, Charles was the facilitator. Francis is certain that someone high up in the Defence Department is working with them. The guy that got to Christopher…he was Secret Intelligence.”

“How do you know that?” Casper asks him.

“When you took off, we combed through your house.” He grimaces at me, looking a bit sheepish. “Charles had a drive in his safe that had a fuck tonne of documents. One of them was a file on the guy. Freddie’s still trying to unencrypt the majority of the information on there.”

“There’s nothing to hint at where Kingsley is? Or even where they’re keeping their hostages? I’m assuming Lucy isn’t the only one they still have. What would make her any more important than the rest of them?”

“Casper, man, this shit is fucking twisted. Beyond. My dad…” He swallows, looking at me as though he’s trying to gauge the right way to refer to Lucian in front of me.

“Your dad?” I smile, urging him to continue.

“He thought if he started selling off the properties and the assets that it would draw him out, but there’s been nothing. The money they’ve embezzled from the Russians…I think they’re using it to cover their tracks. It’s what’s keeping them hidden because it’s fucking untraceable.”

“What are you saying?” I ask, going over everything in my head because it’s all pretty new to me.

“I’m saying I want him dead.” He looks up at me, apologetically almost.

“Don’t be sorry. It’s what he deserves.”

“You want him dead, but?” Casper straightens in his chair, his arms wrapping around my waist.

“But he dies, and we lose the only thing we have that we can use to our advantage. He’ll break. We can break him. Make him talk.”

“You want to torture him?”

The notion should bother me, and maybe deep down there is a flicker of pain. But then I look at Grace, and I just want to make this world better for her.

“We have two options. Three actually. But I don’t like the idea of making a deal with the devil we’re trying to exorcize.” He looks between the two of us. Really slowly and carefully, he moves Grace so that she’s curled up to his chest.

Leo doesn’t make a single move to give her back yet, which fills me with warmth and hope that we’ll be okay.

“We can torture him,” he continues, “and eventually he would either break or die. It could take nothing, or it could take too long. I sat in the cell with him last night. He doesn’t care. He knows that he’s dead if he talks and dead if he doesn’t.”

“So, he won’t break.”

“He would, but the question is when. With Freddie the way he is at the minute, we don’t have time to be fucking around with potential lies.”

“What then?” Casper asks brusquely.

Leo looks up at me, and I know what he’s going to say. “If you let him go, we might not find him ever again.”

“We’re not letting him walk away.”

“Do you remember when you sat with me at the hospital?” Leo smiles at me.

“Yes.”