Page 52 of Broken Queen
“Is this about the note?”
I leaned forward. The note?
Zira knows what happened to Gabby.
Was he the one who sent it, then?
“What note?” I asked, playing dumb.
“I wrote that note,” he said. “You must have seen it. I told the landscaper to put it where you’d find it. You’re my late wife’s brother.”
So he called Gabby his late wife, as if he still respected her. I wanted to break his neck for being a fake son of a bitch.
“Zira doesn’t know anything,” I said, my canines dripping with sadism. “But apparently, you do. Brother.”
“Do you want to know what happened to your sister?”
I grabbed my brass knuckles, smashing into his head. His skull cracked with the metal, and he groaned like a dying animal.
“Spit it out, motherfucker,” I said.
“I want to know too,” he wheezed. “Zira was the only one who was there when she died.”
I chuckled to myself. He was spouting off lies like he knew something, trying to get under my skin. All Ernest knew was that I had been hanging around Zira, and he saw her as the key to getting closer to Daddy Bloom.
But a twinge of doubt simmered in my chest. There was something else going on here, and it didn’t sit right with me.
Still, I carried on like his words didn’t mean shit. “Nice try,” I muttered. “Lies like that aren’t going to save your life.”
“Listen to me. If you get rid of Zira, you will have more power over the Marked Blooms Syndicate. Right now, Bloom knows you’re her puppet. He knows she’s manipulating you. But he trusts you to keep her in line. Don’t you get it? That’s all you are to him. A babysitter.”
I shook my head. Bloom had control over his daughter; he hung the board in front of her like a treat for a circus monkey. He didn’t need Logan or me to do that for him.
Or maybe there was something to what Ernest was saying. Blooms didn’t get their hands dirty; Zira had said that herself. Maybe this was how Bloom was avoiding getting involved with his daughter.
“Zira is a loose thread for all of us,” Ernest continued. “It’s a shame, a damn shame that Gore didn’t have any male heirs, but his spawn must be kept in check. If not, she’ll destroy everything.”
I thought about Zira’s fantasies of blowing up the building, burning everyone alive inside of it. His fears weren’t that far off.
“It will end poorly,” he stammered. “Even for you, my friend.”
I gripped the brass knuckles again, readying my fists. “We’re not friends,” I snarled.
“You can trust me more than you can trust her. She’s using you,” he said, desperation in his voice. He bucked on the floor as if he could get out of his bindings if he flailed hard enough, but it was useless. He was a bug, trapped under a glass cup. “You’re nothing more than a pawn for her to play with. One day, she’ll have someone kill you too.”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” I said. I punched him in the eye, the metal breaking his skin, a black bruise swelling over his nose and cheek. “She’d never kill me,” I said. “I’d kill her first.”
“And you should, before it’s too late.”
I grabbed a knife out of the nightstand and rammed it into his leg, in a non-lethal place so that he’d feel it everywhere. He wailed, his face reddening. I twisted the blade and his mouth contorted in agony. I smiled, but then let go. I had to keep him vibrant enough until Zira arrived.
My phone was lying on the bedspread. I needed to call her, but something kept me from picking up that phone.
Was there any truth to what Ernest was saying?
“I was good to your sister,” he cried. “I never laid a hand on her. I just had to teach her a lesson. She was stealing money from me. Giving that money to you. You have to understand that I needed her to stay in line. If I let it go on, she’d get more greedy. I just wanted to teach her a lesson!”
A cold sweat erupted all over my skin. “You sacrificed her to the Syndicate, you piece of shit.”
