24. Lucy
CHAPTER 24
Lucy
Turning to the massive room with the couch, I tried to get a sense of who’d been here over the last twenty-four hours but again, I smelled nothing but industrial cleaner. Maybe no one really used this room and it was just for show or the occasional gathering.
Gideon had spent a lot of time in the office and Melinda still worked as a model. They might not spend a lot of time here at all.
There was nothing of interest in the pantry or the powder room so I headed upstairs, Liam a silent shadow behind me.
It was kind of weird he didn’t try to direct me or tell me I had to stick to the public rooms. Honestly, it made me nervous. If he had no intention of stopping me from say, rifling through Melinda’s underwear drawer or maybe her jewelry box, did that mean he’d pull rank if his sister-in-law freaked out?
Who ever really knew what Liam was planning? Certainly not me.
The stairs had framed pictures on the wall from Gideon and Melinda’s wedding, but even that went with the theme of white and cream. Gideon hadn’t worn a black tux, but a white one. It looked kind of stupid, honestly .
“The rest of us wore red,” Liam told me.
I stopped at the top of the stairs and looked down to see him staring at the portrait of his brother with his hands in his pockets.
“Melinda wanted to stand out and so she chose red evening wear as the dress code instead of black tie. She said it was a nod to our legacy, but all I could think was we looked like a sea of blood. Still, Gideon was happy so I didn’t say anything.”
Liam smiled up at me like nothing was wrong, but there was a flicker of grief in his eyes that made my chest hurt, like a boulder was crushing me into nothing but dust.
“When it’s my turn, I want to wear all red and make everyone else wear black.” Liam took the last few steps up until he was towering over me once more. “What about you?”
“Are you asking what I want to wear on my wedding day?” The concept was so ridiculous I actually scoffed. “You’re assuming I even want a wedding.”
“You don’t?”
I was going to have to edit the sound out of this video if he kept this up.
My phone took in the home theater as well as the massive game room with its own bar where Gideon and Melinda had probably hosted a few parties. Everything about this house was too big and too white. I hated it and the generic choices made for each room.
A personal gym with a sauna and a hot tub, the ridiculous game room that was bigger than some pubs I’d been to, and then the various guest rooms which implied people got drunk here and passed out in one of these beds that were the spitting image of a fancy hotel room.
Where was the master bedroom then? Didn’t people usually put this kind of recreational area on the ground floor, not the second floor?
Another set of stairs took us back down, but I hesitated when I saw a painting that took up almost the entire wall behind the bar. It caught my attention because it actually had some color that wasn’t white or cream.
“I have no plans to get married,” I told Liam as I went around the bar where there was anything and everything a bartender could ever want or need and stared at the painting of pomegranates in a white bowl, overflowing to cover the counter as well, seeds everywhere…
So much thick, red juice that it oozed out of the bowl and onto the counter, staining everything the same dark red as Liam’s eyes.
Without context, the painting looked like nothing more than a nod to the dual symbolism of pomegranates. It could even allude to the Hades myth as most people with even a basic education knew Hades gave Persephone pomegranate seeds to keep her in the underworld with him.
A pomegranate was a symbol of fertility, but it was also the fruit of the dead.
Most didn’t know this, but the first pomegranate tree grew from a pool of blood – the blood of Adonis who bled to death after he was gored by Ares who’d taken on the form of a boar.
The phone shook as I reached for the gilded, ornate frame. It looked so out of place here, but if Melinda and Gideon were serving drinks, it could have been a play on the Hades myth – like they were tempting anyone who dared drink here so they could trap them for all eternity.
“This is an original, isn’t it?” It definitely looked like one with all the texture of the oil paint drawing in the gaze to various different details. “My father had a copy of this. It was just a print done on canvas, but it was still very captivating.”
I pulled on the frame, testing a theory. At first it didn’t move, but a second tug and it swung forward, revealing a safe.
“It looks innocent, doesn’t it?” I didn’t bother trying to crack the safe. We didn’t have time for that and I was sure Liam could get what he needed to open it. “It’s nothing but fruit until you remember who the artist is. ”
I pushed the frame and the painting swung back into place with a soft click.
“Artemis Genecia was a Renaissance painter famous for her violent scenes.” I considered the red seeping from the pomegranates and wondered what the scene would look like if we were given the full picture. “Every painting is full of rage for what was done to her.”
Sexually abused by her teacher if I remembered correctly.
“My father used to be a blood splatter analyst.” I don’t know why I was telling Liam all this, but seeing this painting here after all these years was really fucking with my head. “He told me he hung this painting in his office because without the bigger picture, all this blood would be overlooked and violence would go unpunished.”
Not for the first time, I wondered what had happened to my father to make him like that. As an omega, he would have experienced the worst the world had to offer as well as the best. He’d found my mother after all and then had me.
Why weren’t we enough? Why had he killed her after so many years of happiness? Had she found out what he was up to or had he just snapped, no longer able to pretend everything was fine?
“Did your father have the bigger picture?” Liam asked from right behind me. I hadn’t expected him to be so close and it made me jump, yanking me out of the weird trance this painting always put me in.
“No, he didn’t. Rumor has it that she painted the death of Adonis and this is only a small corner of that painting, but no one’s been able to find it.” I headed for the stairs that would lead us back to the first floor, hating how much I wanted to rip that painting off the wall and take it with me. “My mother traveled a lot for work and she bought him that painting in Rome. She used to work security for the Lopez pack.”
Why did I keep telling him shit about my life that I hadn’t told anyone since Frankie helped me get my name changed? I couldn’t understand it, but maybe it was all this exposure to his pheromones.
There were a few people who had always been able to get me to open up and talk, but I hadn’t expected Liam to be one of them.
“Is your father the reason you decided to become a detective?” Liam came up beside me when we hit the main floor, his hand settling on my lower back like he could somehow sense how rattled I was.
“Yes, he is.” For a lot of reasons actually.
The bedrooms were on the right side of the house and I went down that dark hallway without once hesitating thanks to the large alpha at my side.
Even here where there should be a hint of pheromones, I still didn’t smell anything other than the cleaner.
Maybe she’d planned for me to come here and stripped this place of any scent, but this wasn’t something that could be done on a whim. It was almost like she cleaned the house of pheromones on a regular basis.
The guest rooms were untouched and immaculate, but the master bedroom looked a little more lived in despite being spotless. Perfume sat on a vanity and there was a silk robe hanging on the edge of a privacy screen.
It was weird that I couldn’t smell a single thing when Melinda should have been sleeping here last night. Even a deep cleaning couldn’t catch everything. She might have filters installed, but I had the distinct impression she didn’t really use this room.
On the way back to the drawing room, I paused at the doorway of one of the guest rooms. It was laid out a lot like the luxurious master bedroom – like this was where someone important would stay.
There was nothing in here to tell me my hunch was right, but I took a step in anyways, curious to see if I was right.
Ignoring the rest of the room, I went straight into the attached bathroom and started going through the cupboard under the sink. Towels and extra toiletries for whoever might stay there. Nothing but what one might expect for a guest room modeled after a hotel.
But even the most meticulous cleaner could miss something.
I pulled my tweezers out of my left pocket along with the small baggy and grabbed the hair from the comb. It could be nothing, but my gut was telling me this whole fucking place was too clean, which meant she was hiding something.
The best way to hide something— someone , would be erasing their existence. If she was having an affair, it would be stupid to bring whoever it was here with all the security, but the rules in the Valor prenup were overly specific.
Her allowance would increase with each Valor child, not necessarily her spouse’s. They’d already be inside the estate and it wouldn’t be suspicious for them to come and go. No one would think twice about seeing them together either.
An affair outside of the house would garner too much attention since she was a world-renowned model married to Gideon, the heir to Valor Enterprises. I wouldn’t have thought she’d be the type to have an affair, but this house was just too empty. Even Liam’s house in the city had felt lived in despite the décor.
Eyeing the single strand of hair under the bright light of the bathroom, I felt weirdly relieved to see it was brown, not blond. It wasn’t dark enough to belong to Cassius either.
“Do you want me to ask Melinda if I can have that painting?”
I looked up in surprise, embarrassed I’d forgotten he was even here. My body hadn’t though. I was way too calm given the situation.
“Why would you want that painting?”
Liam grabbed my wrist and pulled me up, searching my eyes with a look so intense I had no fucking idea what he was thinking. “So I could give it to you. Why else would I ask for it? ”
My jaw dropped. How could he say something like that with such a serious expression on his face? It was absolutely ridiculous how far he was taking this whole girlfriend/boyfriend act. “You want to give me a priceless painting? Why?”
He took the tweezers from me and carefully placed the hair in the baggy before tucking both in his pocket. “Maybe I’m hoping you’ll consider dating me for real.”
I wanted to laugh, but even that felt like too much. If I laughed, it would mean I’d heard what he’d said. So, I turned and walked out of the bathroom, turning off the video recording on my phone and tucking the device into my skirt pocket.
Yes, I really wanted that fucking painting, but I shouldn’t ever possess it. I was already too consumed by whatever sickness my father had planted inside me. The pomegranate seeds lived in my stomach, and one day they would grow and grow until they burst out of my mouth to fertilize the tree with my blood and bones.
The fruit of the dead would blossom from that tree and I didn’t want to find out what it tasted like, because if I ate even a single seed, I’d be damned for all eternity.
Maybe it was a bit of an overreaction to something as innocent as a painting, but I knew the answers to my father’s sickness were hidden in the seeds of the fruit and I wasn’t sure I could survive knowing what had made him kill all those people when I’d barely survived everything he’d taught me.
That painting was a curse, but it was also a blessing – a contradiction just like the subject itself.