Page 81 of Blind Luck

“Like she’s a prisoner?”

“I keep wanting to ask if she’s okay. Blink once for yes, twice for no, that kind of thing.”

I thought back to my research. “I knew he was married, but I figured it was one of those mutually beneficial arrangements. She gets a credit card, he gets respectability.”

“No, I don’t think so. She dresses in fancy clothes, and she sure is beautiful, but she’s also younger than him, and he orders her around like a servant.”

Now that we were headed in the right direction, I’d found more pictures of Jace, although last year he’d sported a goatee and now he was clean-shaven. Selene Fuller was a delicate blonde, always with a big smile on her face and her arm looped through his. I pulled up a picture on my phone while Kelsey spoke. Dusk angled the phone so she could see.

“Oh, man. That smile seem fake to you?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

The photo had been taken at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. One of Selene’s hands rested on Jace’s arm while the other gripped her purse so tightly her knuckles had turned white, and she was subtly leaning away from him. She might not even realise she was doing it—the habit was probably ingrained—but one thing was certain: she sure wasn’t brimming with happiness.

Dusk looked at me. I looked at Dusk. And I knew, I justknewwhat she was thinking, because I was thinking it too.

What was the best way to get revenge on a materialistic prick like Jace Fuller?

Liberate his most prized possession.

His wife.

CHAPTER 27

ARI

Once we explained the plan to Kelsey, she readily agreed. We’d given her a panic button, and Dusk had brought a camera/mic comms unit built into a tulip-shaped brooch. Kelsey was using the brooch to pin her blouse closed at the neck. She could talk to us, but she didn’t feel comfortable wearing an earpiece in case Jace spotted it, so if we wanted to communicate with her, we had to send a text message. She also had a can of pepper spray—we’d made sure of that.

Now we just had to wait.

On Monday morning, Dusk and I sat in front of her laptop, watching. Selene Fuller was in the apartment, dressed in a shift dress and heels, perfectly made up even though she showed no signs of going out anywhere. An illusion of happiness. She’d brought Kelsey coffee and home-baked cookies before slipping away, leaving her to talk architecture with Jace in his office. He’d swallowed the story about her memory issues on Friday night and accepted her apology for running out on him with a wave of his hand.

“Forget about it,” he said.

No chance of that.

We’d spent yesterday researching the wider Fuller family as well as brainstorming ways to teach them a lesson. I wanted to honeytrap Jace and gain irrefutable evidence of him drugging a woman’s drink. Dusk said she knew just the girl for that, but what about the rest of the family? Erin thought we should release mice in the Neptune and report them to the health department. Dusk joked about controlled demolition. At least, I hoped she was joking.

“Did you see the bruise?” Kelsey whispered when Jace left the office to take a phone call. There was a full-size mockup of the golf course complex on a table beside his desk. “Her left eye is bruised. She’s tried to cover it with make-up, but you can still see it.”

We hadn’t, but when Dusk rewound the footage and zoomed in, there was a definite purplish tinge.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if he took his anger out on Selene after Erin and Rusty foiled his plans for Kelsey on Friday night,” she said. “When Kelsey left with someone else, Jace would have seen that as a rejection, and that rejection would have sent him into a rage. That’s how narcissists work.”

There was a bitterness in her voice I hadn’t heard before. Did she speak from experience?

“You think Jace is a narcissist?”

“The signs are there.”

“You’re familiar with the signs? Hell, you didn’t date a narcissist, did you?”

Dusk didn’t look at me. “I watched my dad ruin two good women.”

“I’m so sorry. Your father sounds like a real asshole.”

“He was. We got him a headstone that says ‘In a better place now.’”

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