Page 409 of Filthy Elites

He might be able to sort out what I’d just heard. Maybe we all should talk. It’d been all of us together when the crap had gone down seven years ago. Both of my brothers had as much of a stake in this as I did, really.

“Find Felix,” I said. “We need to toss the ball around out back.”

Lucan arched an eyebrow, but he headed off to round up our little brother anyway. I went into my bedroom and retrieved the football we’d doctored with glow-in-the-dark strips for this purpose.

As a kid, I’d always found it easiest to hash things out with my brothers when we were in the backyard throwing the ball around. It brought a rhythm to the conversation, a sense of connection and collaboration, and focusing on the catching and tossing stopped anyone from getting too worked up about the topics of conversation.

As those topics had gotten more serious, we’d stopped going out during the day when you never knew which underlings would be hanging around out there too. But at night, we were pretty much guaranteed to have the space to ourselves. And catching the ball based mostly on sound and little streaks of light brought an extra challenge to the exercise.

Apparently Felix hadn’t been difficult to find. He and Lucan were already standing by the back door when I reached it, Lucan looking thoughtfully alert as usual and Felix bemused.

“Really?” he said, nodding to the football. “When are you going to grow out of that?”

I glowered at him. “It works. Now come on before I have you catch it with your face.”

As expected at nine o’clock at night, the backyard was empty. The only light was cast by the security lamp over the back deck mingling with the glow in the windows on our house and the one next door. We walked across the patio and past the old elm tree to the open area near the garage. Lucan, ever cautious, peeked into the garage itself to confirm that no one was going to be eavesdropping from in there.

I was fine with his wariness. This wasn’t exactly business-business, but it wasn’t a conversation I wanted publicized either.

I turned the football in my hands as we spread out in a vague triangle and tossed it to Felix without warning, as repayment for being mouthy. He snorted, catching it easily, and flicked it on toward Lucan. “What’s this about?” he asked.

“Anthea,” I said, and felt the vibe in the yard turn tense with just those three syllables.

“What’s she done now?” Felix muttered in a way that made me wonder what she’d already done to him that I didn’t know about. Hopefully he hadn’t made the mistake of trying to stick his dick in her mouth.

I caught the ball when Lucan heaved it my way and paused for a second to gather my words. Then I tossed it onward. “I had a little chat with her tonight. She said some things… It’s making me want to be sure of what happened the last time she was here.”

“Which things in particular?” Lucan asked.

“Holly said she caught Anthea going through Dad’s papers, right? Taking pictures of them and stuff. Did we ever come across any other indication that she was out to undermine the family? I don’t remember anyone else mentioning catching her at anything like that. Or any incidents based on whatever information she might have passed on from spying.”

Lucan shrugged. “She was careful about it. The only reason we know is because Holly caught her. I assumed Dad took into account what Anthea was likely to have seen and adjusted whatever plans he needed to so that there was no chance anyone could interfere with key operations.”

I could only vaguely decipher Felix’s expression in the dimness, but his voice came out rough enough to show his discomfort. “Dad doesn’t know. Hedidn’tknow.”

Lucan’s head jerked around, his toss to me going wide in his shock. I lunged to the side to grab the ball out of the air before it thumped into the fence.

“What do you mean?” Lucan demanded. “Of course Dad knew. Holly probably told him before she even told us. She was his wife.”

“Well, we know what a rare and exalted position that is,” Felix said dryly, and then sobered up. “I tried to talk to him about Anthea this afternoon. He’s suspicious of her motives for coming here rightnow, sure, but only because of the timing with the recent dust-up with the Nobles. He obviously didn’t have any idea that she’d been up to no good in the past.”

I frowned, an uneasy weight settling in my gut. “How could henotknow? Why would Holly have told us and not him? She knew it was a problem.”

Lucan had knit his brow with a deep enough furrow that it was visible in the darkness. “She might have figuredwe’dtell him. Safer to let us do it in case he reacted badly.”

“How were we supposed to know we needed to? She never asked us to.” My frown tightened into a scowl. Our stepmom at the time hadn’t struck me as all that nervous when she’d informed us that she’d sent Anthea packing after catching her intruding in Dad’s office.

I brought up the memory of Holly’s sharply pretty face framed by that long hair she’d dyed such a pale blond it’d nearly been white. I’d been so pissed off to find out that Anthea had been using us, that she must have been playing seductress to distract us and get easier access to our private rooms, that I hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to Holly’s reaction. But I had the vague impression of her seeming triumphant, like she was pleased with herself for catching the spy.

Wouldn’t she have wanted to brag to Dad about how she’d helped him, if that was the case? She’d always been wheedling him to tell her more about his business operations so she could offer advice, wanting him to involve her more in all areas of his life. I was pretty sure her hassling him about that stuff was half of the reason he’d divorced her. The other half being that she’d aged out of his preferred range.

“Is itpossiblethat she exaggerated what she saw?” I said slowly, giving the ball a slow fling Felix’s way. “She got excited enough to threaten Anthea into leaving and crow about it to us, but when it came to telling Dad, she realized that making that kind of accusation about one of his close friends’ daughters might be a step too far if she wasn’t totally sure what’d gone down?”

“She did like to puff herself up,” Felix remarked. “I could picture that.”

“I definitely wouldn’t say itisn’tpossible,” Lucan said. “But if that’s what happened, if Holly accused Anthea and she wasn’t really doing anything wrong, why didn’t Anthea complain to her dad about it and get Abram to sort everything out with Dad? The fact that she kept quiet about it suggests she had something to feel guilty about.”

He had a point, but I couldn’t shake my growing apprehension. “We don’t know what Holly said to her when she kicked her out. And we do know that Abram was kind of a prick. Anthea might not have felt comfortable admitting to him that his friend’s wife even thought she’d violated their trust.”

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