Page 10 of Cruel Riches

2

Nate

Slammingmy foot down on the accelerator, I tore away from the curb and raced down the street, wheels squealing as I made a sharp turn around the nearest corner.

Fuck.The girls almost caught me.

I was wearing dark sunglasses and a beanie, so they probably wouldn’t recognize me as the creeper outside their house if they saw me again, but still… it was stupid of me to park so close.

I hadn’t actually gone to the apartment with the intention of watching the girls. I’d been keeping an eye on Alexis Livingston for a while now, for various reasons, but today I decided to ramp things up, so I drove over to scope out the building and figure out a way inside that wouldn’t alert the security guy at the front desk.

I wanted to be able to sneak into Alexis’s bedroom later—after she’d moved into her dorm on the Blackthorne campus—so I could go through the stuff she left behind. I was also thinking about installing some sort of surveillance device so I could listen to conversations she had with her sister whenever she came back to visit. I had a plan for her dorm at Blackthorne, too.

When the girls caught me a minute ago, I wasn’t taking photos of them. I was taking photos of the building so I could remember exactly where all the security cameras were when it was dark later. I wasn’t expecting Sascha and Alexis to step out onto the balcony right at that moment.

My window was only down a few inches, but that eagle-eyed bitch Alexis happened to glance my way, and she immediately spotted me with my phone. Luckily, she thought I was just a random stranger who liked taking creepshots of girls.

As I turned onto Seewald Avenue, I breathed a sigh of relief. In spite of the near miss, today had gone quite well, because I’d managed to glean some interesting information.

While I was parked outside the apartment building earlier, I spotted some odd guests arriving—Edward and Deborah Paxton. I’d never met them, but I knew of them, and I’d seen them a few times at high-society events in Arcadia Bay. They weren’t in the same multi-billionaire league as others from the town, which kept them out of the most elite social circles, but they were still very wealthy and well-known. They owned two hospitals on the island, and they were often invited to speak at fundraising galas for disease foundations set up by my mother’s philanthropic society.

Overall, they were widely considered to be respectable people with pedigreed backgrounds.

When I saw them stepping into the same apartment building that Alexis and Sascha lived in, my antennae went up. It was a nice modern building in a fashionable part of Avalon City, but it didn’t seem like the sort of place a stiff Arcadia Bay couple in their seventies would want to rent or buy for any reason. It wasn’t the kind of place any of their upper-class friends would live in, either, so I immediately sensed that there was something strange about their presence.

I was right. A few minutes after the Paxtons went inside, I saw them through a third-floor window, heading into the Livingston apartment.

They weren’t there for long, and it was clear that their meeting with the girls didn’t go well. I briefly heard raised voices through a window that Alexis had opened moments before their arrival, presumably to let in the sea breeze, and while I couldn’t make out any words because of the distance, the tones were clearly bitter and heated.

After the Paxtons left the building, looking pissed as hell, I heard china smashing up in the apartment, followed by a furious screech. A moment later, the Livingston girls stepped out onto the balcony, red-faced and sullen.

Something had happened during that meeting, and no one was happy.

I managed to catch part of the conversation between the Paxtons as they stepped past my car to get to their own vehicle. They didn’t see me because I slid partway down in my seat when they crossed the street, and they seemed too angry to notice what was going on around them anyway.

“Stupid girls. They should’ve just taken the damn money,” Edward said to his wife as they passed.

My brows rose at that. Why would the Paxtons offer money to Alexis and Sascha?

“Well, like you said, they don’t need it,” Deborah replied with an irritated sniff. “They got that payout when their father died.”

Ah.

Somehow, they knew that the girls were really Alexandra and Sarah Covington. I thought I was the only one on the island who knew that shameful little secret.

“There must be something else we can do to convince them to leave,” Edward said.

“If they’re anything like our daughter, they’ll be too stubborn to listen to anything we say,” Deborah said in an icy tone. “And they are like her, aren’t they? You saw the older one. Practically a carbon copy of Susan when she was young. And the other one has that same churlish attitude that Susan always had.”

The realization hit me like a fist in the chest. Holy fuck. Edward and Deborah Paxton were Alexis and Sascha’s maternal grandparents.

No wonder they didn’t want the girls on the island. Their longstanding reputation would be shattered if everyone found out their son-in-law was the Blackthorne Butcher. So that was why they went to the apartment today. They were offering money to the girls to convince them to leave.

I couldn’t blame them for that.

I narrowed my eyes, wondering if, when, and how I could use this new piece of information. It was salacious as fuck, for sure, and if I were one of those douchey gossip column writers, I’d be hitting publish on my latest article right about now. I wasn’t one of those assholes, though, and I didn’t want to hurt the Paxtons or Sascha.

I only wanted to hurt Alexis.

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