Page 79 of Sinful Palace

Willow let out a morose sigh. “I know, but he’s her child. So it’s her choice in the end.”

“I guess. That’s seriously coldblooded, though.” I sat down again, frown deepening.

Willow started picking at a thread on the charcoal gray blanket in front of her, eyes shimmering. “Can you tell me something?”

“Of course.”

She swallowed audibly. “I know I was angry at Dad. Beyond angry. I hated him for what he did. But I….” She paused to sniff back the tears. “I wish I could’ve talked to him one last time before this happened. Talked to him properly, I mean. Is that totally insane?”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “No. It’s not insane at all,” I said, squeezing her arm. “Do you want me to take you down there?”

Her forehead creased. “Where?”

“To the morgue. I know it’ll be horrible to see him like that, but it’s still him. It might help if you say goodbye to him in person.”

She sniffed again. “I can’t do that.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to?”

She sucked in a deep breath. “I mean I literally can’t. They cremated his body already.”

My brows shot up. “What?”

“They said he looked too bad for family members to see. All bloated and blue from the river. They did the autopsy, took some samples to test against us at some point just to make sure it’s definitely him, and then they cremated him.”

I held up a palm. “So no one actually saw his body apart from the so-called cops and medical examiner?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re telling me that your mother, the fucking president of the United States, wasn’t able to see her husband’s body before they permanently disposed of it?”

“Yes,” she said softly, looking down again.

I glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s half past five now, and you said his body was found at six this morning. So the authorities cremated him in under twelve hours without letting a single family member come in to identify him. Don’t you think that’s the most suspicious fucking shit you’ve ever heard?”

“He wasn’t identifiable,” Willow mumbled. “Like I said, they took DNA samples, and they’re going to test them against a sample from me later to confirm the ID. But that’s just a formality. They know it’s him.”

I narrowed my eyes. Willow was obviously in a deep state of shock, still trying to process everything that had happened, so she hadn’t yet registered how messed up the explanation for the premature cremation was. I’d never heard anything so fucking shady in my life.

Quinn Rhoades had to be in terrible shock as well. That would explain why she hadn’t questioned the decision for her husband’s body to be destroyed almost immediately. Either that or something deeply sinister was happening and she knew all about it.

Tears splashed down Willow’s cheeks again, and her face crumpled. “It’s all my fault. I should’ve known,” she said, lifting one hand to wipe under her eyes.

“Should’ve known what?”

“That my dad was going to do this,” she said. “When I was standing next to him on the parade float the other day, he said some stuff.”

I tilted my head to one side. “Like what?”

She bit her bottom lip. “You know how he’s been trying to get me to talk to him so he can tell me how sorry he is?”

“Yeah.”

“He said the same stuff at the parade, but this time there was more. He said he was going to make things right. Fix everything. I had no idea he meant he was going to….” She trailed off and rubbed her red-rimmed eyes again. “I had no idea he was going to kill himself. But that must be what he meant. That was his idea of fixing everything. I should’ve known, but I didn’t. I basically told him to fuck off, and that was one of the last things I ever said to him.”

A penny rolled in from the back of my mind, ready to drop. I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”

She looked up at me. “What?”

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