Of All the Fake Heiresses I've Met, You're the Stupidest novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Put It Down

Erin's POV

The revolver was cold against the back of my neck.

Ronan stood in the doorway with his pistol low and his face gone blank.

I kept my eyes on him in the glass of the picture frame, because the glass was the only place I could see Chester's hands.

"Put the gun on the desk, boy," Chester said.

Ronan crossed the room and set it down on the blotter.

He slid it across to my side, an inch past the ledger, the way he had slid the rifle under the dinner table on Monday.

"Good boy," said Chester.

"You found it faster than I thought," he said to me. "I meant to show you at thirty."

"It says I was seven."

"You were."

"It says I was a good shot."

"You were the best I ever saw."

"Were they alive in the hold, Chester?"

His thumb tapped the thermos lid.

"Thirty-one on that run," he said. "Thirty by the dock."

The room went very quiet.

Thirty-one people, and I had never once asked what was in the hold.

"I did love you," Chester said. "That's the part you won't believe."

"I believe it," I said. "That is what is wrong with you."

He laughed, softly, against my hair.

"Listen to me now. The vote is at noon. Savannah is finished, I know that. But you are not. You walk in there and I put the Benedetti and the Orlov envoys behind you. You sit in the founder's chair. You run forty percent of the docks, and I pilot, same as always."

"And Sean?"

"Sean is sixty-one and has a bad heart. He will not be a problem for long."

"And the boy?"

"The boy killed nobody." Chester's voice went light. "You did. Ask him what he wants to do about that."

Ronan did not answer.

I watched him in the glass.

His hands were open at his sides, and he was looking at me and nowhere else.

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