She sat up and looked him in the eye, unable to hide her astonishment. “Okay, whoa. Slow that roll. Your familiar stole money from you after he’d been with you all these years?” No wonder he had trust issues.
Rick’s eyes became hard, simmering with anger. “He did. This was his place, by the way. I had it built for him when I began making serious money. It was my gift to him for taking a kid and turning his life around—giving him a place to call home. Yash called this his sanctuary—his bliss. A place he could go when he needed silence and solace, a place to reflect. And he shit all over it.”
Huh. Poppy heard the words, but she was having trouble placing stock in them…and that didn’t make a lick of sense. She didn’t know Yash from Adam.
“Why did he steal money from you? What was his motive after all those years?”
Rick shrugged his shoulders, the anger in his eyes tinged with sadness. “I have no clue, but it’s irrefutable. I found it all on a thumb drive. He’d almost left it right out in the open—it was as though he’d wanted me to find it. I’m assuming he thought he wouldn’t be caught. Cleared all his personal effects out of here except the one thing that damned him.”
“And you didn’t think maybe the thumb drive was a plant? Because it was so obvious?”
“I did at first. Believe me, I didn’t just automatically assume Yash was a lowlife. We’d spent too many years together not to give him the benefit of the doubt. But then I couldn’t figure out who’d do something like that. Incriminate Yash? Frame him? There was never a single bit of evidence to suggest it was anyone but him. So maybe he just got careless. Or maybe didn’t give a damn whether I found the thumb drive or not. And still, if he was framed, where the hell did he go?”
So a man who’d spent all of Rick’s life with him, quite out of the blue, steals his money and blows the Popsicle stand without looking back? Had he pretended for all these years to care for Rick?
But the proof was all there, according to Rick.
“So the assumption is he just up and left?” That was incomprehensible to her. She couldn’t wrap her mind around that kind of betrayal. If Calamity had done nothing else, she’d impressed upon her loyalty to your assigned warlock—forever.
“Yep. Gone for good,” was Rick’s response, wooden and dead.
Tears stung her eyes—tears for a little boy caught up in his father’s madness and an evil warlock’s lust for a woman he shouldn’t have been able to have. Tears for his loss of someone who’d saved him and just as surely had dropped him like a brick from the top of the Empire State Building.
“Jesus… I’m flabbergasted. I…I don’t know what to say. What do you say to that kind of betrayal? But I understand now. I get it, and I’m really sorry I pushed.”
As suddenly as he’d begun, Rick was done. Patting her thigh in conciliatory fashion, he slid to the edge of the couch. “It’s over now, there’s nothing that can be done about it anyway. Yash is in the wind and the money went with him. We’ve recuperated. I’m going to go see if there’s something I can do to help January. I won’t let anything happen to you, Poppy. I promise.”
With that, he was gone.
But she was left with a million questions. But there was one thing she was very clear about—he had a right to rebuke magic in his life. He’d been burned in the worst possible tragedy, and she felt every ounce of his rage, his grief, his unrelenting sense of betrayal by the people in his life who were supposed to protect him.
A tear slid down her cheek as she watched him mingle with the women, pouring himself a cup of coffee and draping a casual arm over Carl’s shoulder. A tear of desolation for a little boy who’d lost everything and regained his worth by making piles of money and never letting anyone in.
Poppy swiped at the tear in frustration. For now, she had to set aside the grief she somehow intuitively shared with Rick. She had a bigger problem on her plate—her life.
Something or someone wanted her dead, was the general consensus. Whether by proxy or she was the aura’s target, remained unclear. Either way, her life was in danger, and she didn’t know how to stop it.
Tucking her legs beneath her, gazing at the mess of the shed, she wondered about Yash and his about-face betrayal. She wanted to pry, but it was clear Rick didn’t want to offer much more at this point.
Yet, there was a part of him unwilling to let Yash go—unwilling to believe his betrayal was real. She felt that, too. Felt it hard, deep and sure.
How did she find out what really happened to Yash?
Avis? Would he have more objective insight? The very thought repulsed her.
She’d like an explanation for that, too. Why did Avis make her want to drive a stake through his eyeball?
Tucking that emotion away, Poppy attempted a rational approach—get in touch with Avis and grill the dick until he was puking the information she needed. She didn’t want to go behind Rick’s back, but there wasn’t anyone she was aware of closer to him than Avis.
So that settled that.
Not to self. Make a date with a dick.
Chapter 14