His voice was cool but not brutal—yet. I scrambled for an explanation. “I—”
“Let’s look for it first,” Lucan said before I could find the right words, striding past Darius and scanning the room.Histone was outright icy, a sharp contrast to the way he’d spoken to me right before I’d wrapped my lips around his cock just an hour ago.
I assumed he meant the phone. There wasn’t much I could do to hide it. He stalked over to the bed and peered underneath it, but he didn’t grab the device like I’d expected. Felix went to the end table and opened the drawer there, and Darius checked the closet.
I stood up, frowning. “What are you looking for?”
“Oh, we got a report from some dork,” Felix said, only a slight edge in his breezy voice. It sounded like he, at least, wasn’t very concerned. “Saying you pilfered something from the family stash. Why you’d ever want to—”
Lucan had just lifted the mattress up from the frame. “It’s here,” he said, cutting Felix off.
The younger guy froze. “What?”
Lucan lifted up a figurine that’d been tucked under the mattress—a narrow, golden statuette of a woman with streaming hair and her hands pressed to her chest. He shot me an accusing look, his mouth twisting.
I blinked at the figurine. “I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that. I have no idea what that is or what it’s doing in here. It’s probably been there since before I took this room.”
Darius stepped closer, studying the figurine and then me. “Then why did one of our guys say he saw you carrying it into your room?”
“I don’t know!” I said. “But whoever it was, they were lying. What’s so special about that thing anyway?”
“Maybe you just saw something you could hawk for cash,” Lucan said in the same icy tone as before. “But this belonged to our mother.”
Oh, shit. I’d known Marcel kept a bunch of things belonging to his first wife—the guys’ mom—around the house. When we’d been teens, Felix had shown me a bookcase full of her old books and trinkets in Marcel’s lounge room. There wasn’t anything all that sentimental about it for their dad, who’d more than moved on as far as I’d been able to tell, but he felt the need to give his sons a sense of their entire family legacy.
The brothers hadn’t known their mother very well. Unlike all Marcel’s other wives since, she’d died rather than being ditched—a sudden, aggressive cancer when Darius had only been five. Felix had admitted to me once that he didn’t even remember her. He’d only been two when she passed on, after all. Her loss was a scar they all bore, and they’d have defended her memory fiercely if they needed to. Including her actual belongings.
I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “I swear I didn’t touch that. I had no idea it was in here. I’m not desperate for money—I already hawked a few pieces that were my late husband’s.”
“Then what’s it doing here?” Darius demanded.
“I have no idea. It’s not like the Hell Kickers are feeling all that friendly toward the Nobles right now. Maybe someone wants me gone.”
“The guy who tipped us off wasn’t part of any operations to do with the Nobles,” Lucan said. “And youwerejust talking to your brother, weren’t you?”
Triple shit. In my confusion, I’d almost forgotten the conversation they’d walked in on.
“And what’s so horrible about that?” I shot back. “I’m not allowed to try and figure out a way you all could make peace with him so that this war doesn’t go any further?” That wasn’t even a lie. That was essentially what I’d been trying to convince Ezra to do, in a roundabout way.
“He took your call,” Darius said ominously. “You had some secret phone ready to dial him up on?” He grabbed my regular phone off my bed and turned off the music. “And you were trying to cover up the fact that you were talking to him.” Rage and hurt shone together in his eyes. “Why did you really come here, Anthea?”
My heart wrenched. Everything I’d been juggling since I’d arrived was tumbling down, and suddenly I couldn’t bear to dig the hole any deeper.
These men deserved at least part of the truth. I wasn’t going to betray Ezra, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t betray myself.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what really did happen the night that deal went wrong,” I admitted, speaking quickly. “Investigating the people involved. I can’t believe my brother would turn on your family like that. And I’ve found proof that—”
Felix’s face had tightened. “You weren’t spying on us seven years ago, but you are now,” he cut in. “Fucking hell.”
“It’s my family. You’d do the same. I know the three ofyoudidn’t do anything wrong, or I wouldn’t have— I’m just making sure you have the full story—”
“I think we do now,” Darius growled. His fury was practically vibrating off him. He clenched his hands at his sides and then jabbed one finger toward the door. “Get out.”
I stared at him. “What?”
“Get. Out. Grab you shit and get the hell out of our sight. Your fucking ‘investigation’ ends here. Go running back to your brother if he’ll have you or figure out something for yourself, but we’re not keeping a rat in our home.”
My pulse stuttered. After everything he’d admitted to me—