Page 13 of Justice for Francesca

“Fuck, Trip. That’s not good.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s been…?”

“Opening weekend was the last time I escorted her anywhere. I broke it off three days later. Well… such as it was.”

“I knew you were breaking it off, but then I had to fly to New York, and I put it out of my brain. My guess is she didn’t take it well?”

Tripoli shook his head. “Accused me of using her for the opening as a publicity draw.” He rolled his eyes. “Nothing to draw from since she rejected her family except for name-dropping purposes. It was more like I didn’t want her crashing the party, creating a scene because she was still pissed at me. It was just easier to hold onto her a few extra days than deal with that drama. There was so much to do here; it was easy to put it off.”

Cosmos whistled. “I’m guessing there’s more to it than that if you’re even bringing it up.”

“Sequeira?” Lobo asked. “The name is familiar.”

Tripoli sighed. “Mila is… was… the Sequeira principessa.”

Now it was Steel’s turn to whistle. “You dated a principessa? That takes balls,hermano.”

Cosmos sneered. “Oh, it gets better.”

Tripoli supplied the information he knew Cosmos would just belt out if he didn’t explain. “Mila owned ten percent of Elysium.”

“Which means,” Cosmos explained, “the Sequeira Syndicate now owns ten percent of the club.”

Tripoli raised a hand to halt the man’s conjectures. “We don’t know that yet. She may have had a will and left it to someone.”

Lobo argued, “Still tainted with her owning it. What were you thinking?”

“He wasn’t,” Cosmos snorted. “Or he was, just with the wrong head.”

“Cosmos, for the love of Christ, shut up about that.”

“Pictures in the papers looked like you two were awfully cozy.”

“Most of those were when I first met her, and we were conducting business regarding the property. You, as well as anyone, know that a photograph captures a split second in time. What people see is their own perception of that split second based on the angle, perspective, and interpretations of visual elements present in the photograph.”

Lobo chuckled. “Today’s guest lecturer, art professor Dr. Ethan Evans, presents his master class on ‘How to Deflect Your Sexual History Through Photographs.’”

Steel tacked on, “Also known as ‘Why the Paparazzi Still Suck.’”

Rolling his eyes again, Tripoli waved off the taunting. “Laugh all you want, assholes. I never slept with her. Even Cosmos knows I made it clear what I was looking for—her as a liaison to the seller of the London property. Ten percent of Elysium was her price for it. I figured she’d get bored with it after a while, and I’d be able to buy it back.”

“Does the FBI know about the connection?” Cosmos asked.

Tripoli tipped his head back against his chair, swiveling his chair right to left. “I doubt it, or it would have come up in the first round of questioning today. It’ll take about five minutes to discover it once they start looking.”

The room was silent. Tripoli noticed the shared look between Cosmos, Lobo, and Steel. He wondered which one of them would lose the silent battle of who got to ask the ultimate question.

“And Fleur?”

Tripoli was not ready to answer this question, so he attempted to distance her from him. “Special Agent McCabe?”

“Don’t play fuckin’ dumb with us, Trip. Act as unaffected as you want, but I know you. When she showed up at The Library, you staked your claim without even laying a hand on her,” Cosmos reminded him.

“Yeah, and after. You never left her when we had her in our infirmary. And you barely left her when she was in the hospital.” Lobo clearly knew the answer already and used the comments as a way to needle him.

“She was my responsibility. I got distracted, and she walked out in the parking lot alone and got taken,” Tripoli reasoned. “It was my fault.”

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