The Butcher Fiancé, My Saving Angel novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Midnight Terms

She plays Quincy the recording, revokes Kenneth's proxy and gives him the vote on her thirty percent, and his photograph names the man who held her.

The penthouse was dark except for one lamp.

Quincy Crane stood at the window with his back to me.

"You came alone."

"You said to."

"People who are told to do things rarely do them."

I held out my phone.

"Listen."

He took it without a word and pressed play.

Kenneth's voice filled the room, soft and amused.

*Paying those animals to wreck Suzette.*

Quincy did not move for forty seconds.

When it ended, he set the phone on the glass table very gently.

"Again," he said.

I played it again.

On the second pass his jaw tightened at the words *cord blood*.

"Your baby is a donor," he said.

"My baby is mine."

"Yes." He turned around. "Tell me what you want."

"Everything he has."

He almost smiled.

"Why now?" I said. "You've waited five years. Why did you wait?"

"Because I had no one inside."

He walked to the bar and poured two glasses of water.

"Kenneth destroyed my father's company when he was twenty-two. A forged audit, a leaked memo, a bank that suddenly called every loan. My father hanged himself in the garage eight months later."

He said it flat.

"I have spent twenty years learning how Kenneth works," he said. "He never touches anything himself. Somebody else carries the envelope."

"His assistant."

He pushed a glass toward me.

"I own nine percent of Stockwell Holdings. Kenneth holds forty-one. You hold thirty."

"He votes mine by proxy."

"Because you signed it."

"Because he said it was a wedding gift, and I never read it."

I pulled a folded paper from my clutch.

I had written it in the back of the car, on my knee, in my own handwriting, and signed it twice.

"I revoke his proxy," I said. "I give you the vote on my thirty percent."

Quincy read it slowly.

"You understand what this does. At the board vote, I'm forty against forty-one."

"Plus Preston's twelve."

"Preston signs whatever Kenneth puts in front of him."

"Then we turn Preston."

"You'd say that about the man who left you."

"I'd say it about anyone who can vote."

He looked at me properly then, for the first time.

"I need something else from you first," he said.

He opened a drawer and slid a photograph across the glass.

A man in a brown jacket stood in an alley, taking an envelope from a man in a gray suit.

I knew the gray suit.

It was Kenneth's assistant, five years younger, with the same polite smile.

"That's the man who took you," Quincy said. "I've had it for two years. I couldn't prove whose money was in the envelope."

I looked at the brown jacket.

Three days of that jacket.

I had never been allowed to see his face, but I knew the frayed cuff of the sleeve against my mouth.

My whole body went cold.

I made a sound.

It was small and ugly, and I could not stop it.

Quincy was across the room before I finished it, and he stopped a foot away, with both hands open and nowhere near me.

"I should have warned you," he said.

"Don't apologize for what he did."

"I'm not apologizing for him. I'm apologizing for the order I showed it in."

I breathed in through my nose.

"Is that enough?" I said. "The photo and the tape."

"For a judge, no. A good lawyer will say the tape is fake and the man in the photo is anyone." His voice was grim. "But it's enough to start. We need paper. Wires. A name."

"Then we get them."

"We?"

"I live in his house," I said. "I have his study, his phone habits, his doctor, his schedule, his hand on my back every night. You have an army and nothing inside the walls."

He did not answer for a long moment.

"You'd have to stay," he said.

"Yes."

"You'd have to smile at him and let him call you darling."

"I've done it for five years."

"This time you'd know."

"I know."

He put the photograph face down on the table.

"Here are my terms," he said. "You go home. You give him nothing. You act the grateful wife until the board meets, and every document you can photograph goes to me."

"And the baby?"

"Nobody touches your baby. That is not a term. That is a fact."

I picked up my coat.

He held it for me, and his hands were careful at my shoulders.

He took my wrist, wrote a number across my palm with a pen, and closed my fingers over it.

"Memorize it," he said. "Then wash it off."

At the door he said, "Open your clutch."

"What?"

He took it from me and ran his thumb along the lining.

His thumb stopped.

He slit the seam with a pen knife, and a flat black disc the size of a coin dropped into his palm.

"Kenneth knows exactly where you've been tonight," he said.

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