Page 60 of Sinful Palace

“I know. When you first brought it up, it seemed ridiculous to me,” he replied. “I’ve always known he’s heavily involved with the Order, but he never hid that from me, and there’s also the fact that he’s my father. I thought I would’ve noticed if there was something off about him. If he was hiding a huge secret like that. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Why?”

He hesitated and wrinkled his nose. “He keeps acting shady and lying to me about shit, and now he’s obviously fucking spying on us. Makes me wonder what else I’ve missed about him. Like sure, maybe he’s just in the Order council, but maybe not. Maybe he’s been leading the society all along, and I’ve just been blind to all the signs. On the other hand, if that’s the case, how the hell could I be that fucking ignorant?”

I gritted my teeth. “Family members can easily hide big secrets, no matter how well you think you know them,” I said. “Trust me, I know that all too well after what my dad did to me. Sometimes there aren’t any signs at all.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. But I don’t know. I’m just not sure if I can fully picture him being Q.”

“Why?”

“He’s a pretty shitty liar, and I assume the big supreme leader needs to be amazing at that sort of stuff, so no one ever suspects who he is.”

“What else has he lied about lately?” I asked. “Apart from eavesdropping outside our room, I mean.”

“I asked him about the Order leak a few weeks ago, and he lied to me then. I don’t know what he was lying about, exactly, but I could tell he was doing it. I figured he was just protecting himself and the rest of the council because they suspected it could be an inside job and they didn’t want to admit it yet. Now I’m wondering if he knew exactly what was going on, and if he was just covering his own ass because he’s secretly in charge of it all.”

I chewed on my bottom lip, mulling it over. “Are you sure he was lying?”

“Trust me, he was definitely hiding something. It was written all over his face.” He paused and frowned. “That’s the biggest thing that doesn’t make sense to me if he’s actually Q. Like I said before, Q has to be a really good liar, right?”

I frowned. “Maybe your dad only pretends to be a bad liar to throw you off.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Logan scratched his jaw again, frown deepening. “I’m still not sure. He’s always been a fucking weird guy, but I would’ve never suspected him until this shit started happening.”

“What sort of weird stuff has he done in the past?”

He waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not relevant.”

“It might be.”

“How?”

I lifted one shoulder. “You’re so used to him and all his crap that you might think it’s not relevant to him possibly being Q, but if you see it from another perspective, you might change your mind and realize there’s more to it.”

“I doubt it.”

“Try me,” I insisted. “Tell me every weird thing you can think of.”

“I honestly don’t see how it’ll help.”

I sighed. “Logan, I really want to find out what we’re dealing with here, and if your dad is Q, we won’t be going into it totally blind. We’ll know at least one thing. That could make a huge difference.”

“All right. Fine,” he said grudgingly. He sat down and rubbed the top of his brows. “He’s always had this obsession with trying to make me just like him, even though we’ve never been all that close. That’s the main weird thing, I guess.”

Slowly grooming him to be the next Order leader, perhaps,I thought with a frown.

Logan continued before I could say anything. “He was always much closer to my sister, which was strange in itself, because he doesn’t seem to like most women,” he said. “He barely tolerates my mom, and he’s pretty abusive to the girls he has affairs with. In a sexual way, I mean.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, knitting my brows. I wouldn’t have a clue what either of my parents preferred to do in bed, and I intended on keeping it that way forever.

“He brought me here when I was fourteen,” he said. “Told me I had to learn how to treat women before they figured out how to manipulate me.”

“What happened then?”

He looked away. “He wanted me to fuck one of the girls. I couldn’t, so he slapped me and shoved me aside so he could show me how it’s done. Then he brought me back the next year to make me prove that I’d learned.”

My eyes went wide with shock, and a pang of sympathy mixed with horror bit at my guts. That story explained a lot about him and the way he’d turned out.

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