Page 108 of Curvy Quirky Omega

Scrolling through the information, I found what I was looking for.

Ophelia died when she was only twenty-two years old and the autopsy report showed that she was pregnant. With enough blood thinners in her system that a single gun-shot wound made her bleed out almost instantly.

I went back to my mother’s file and saw her blood alcohol level had been suspiciously high at the time of death which only made suicide seem more likely, but the deep cut on the inside of her thigh where the femoral artery was had zero signs of hesitation which was uncommon in suicides.

Either my mother wanted to end her life more than anything, or she’d been murdered. It was just enough to tack her death on to all the others that my father was involved in.

Maybe he didn’t kill her, but if he did…

I covered my eyes with my hand, wondering why Francisco had never said anything about this to me. He never once brought up my mother either despite how many years she’d worked for him.

My phone rang, the vibration loud in the silence even with the rain hitting the glass. I picked it up and answered without looking to see who it was, still not sure how I was supposed to feel about all this.

“What are you doing in my files, pumpkin?”

Speak of the devil. “If you know I’m in your network, then you also know what I’m doing.”

Francisco sighed loudly, sounding exasperated. “Of course I know, but I told you to just ask. Why are you trying to be sneaky about it?”

“Why haven’t you gotten rid of all my backdoors?” I didn’t want to talk about why I was looking through his shit. It was just…too much.

What if he confirmed my suspicions? What then? And if he did, why the fuck didn’t he defend my father? If he’d had Francisco as his lawyer then he could have gotten off for self-defense, or at the very least he would be serving less time.

“Lucy…” Francisco didn’t sigh, but I could feel his exhaustion. “Why are you looking into your mother’s death after all these years?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense,” I snapped, slamming my laptop closed. “He had clear motives for all the other victims, but her? My father may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. She also doesn’t fit his MO. At least, not on the surface, but if you look a little bit deeper…”

“Ask me what you want to know directly,” Francisco ordered, his tone stern and as close to his alpha command as possible without crossing the line. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, just ask me instead of making assumptions.”

Did I really want to know?

I glanced at the window, watching all the water slide down the glass. It looked pretty with the neon lights from the building across the street and I almost didn’t want winter to end.

I braced myself and forced myself to ask, “Was Annabelle Thomas abusing her power as an alpha to take advantage of Ophelia?”

“I don’t know if she was abusing her power, but their age gap was problematic. I suspect there might have been some grooming,” Francisco admitted. “But Annabelle was the only bodyguard Ophelia truly felt safe with.”

What a roundabout way to say it was complicated.

Even though Ophelia was ten years older than me, she was still thirteen years younger than my mom. “And the baby?”

“Lucy…”

“Francisco.”

He sighed again. “I didn’t put the genetic test in her file for this reason, but yes…Annabelle Thomas was the sire.”

Tears pricked my eyes and a thousand tiny things I never understood finally made sense.

A baby…a half-sibling. My sibling. Frankie’s cousin.

“Why didn’t you defend my father?” I picked at a thread on my sweatpants and tried to sort my feelings, but there were too many of them and they all conflicted.

Maybe if I had his answer…

“He didn’t want me to,” Francisco admitted. “I offered after I went through his phone and saw…well…it prompted me to go through Ophelia’s phone too, and then Annabelle’s. I knew he could get off with a self-defense plea, but he didn’t want that.”

“Why not?” I didn’t think it was possible to feel abandoned and betrayed by the same person for the same thing all over again, but it looked like I’d been wrong.

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