Chapter 21 #2
My fingers unlocked from the fist in the next moment, and I shook out each of my fingers for a couple of seconds before I said, “What it’s sounding like is that you knew you were going to get an insurance payout.
One that was going to shoot your net worth sky high.
Tell me, did you torture her knowing that eventually she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore? ”
Cain didn’t say that he did, but I could see the knowledge in his eyes.
He hadn’t killed her. Probably never intended on it. But forcing her hand so that she thought that was her only way out? Making her life so miserable that she thought her only way out of that life was to leave it prematurely? Kill herself before she could be killed?
Had he done this before?
Because it sure the fuck was sounding like it.
Was that how he made his billions? Dating some chick, getting a life insurance policy on her, then making her hate her life and him so that she offed herself?
“How many times have you played this trick on someone else?” I asked. “Gotten them to fall in love with you, then gotten them to play into your hand? How much of your money did you make on this little scheme of yours?”
He pushed off the Tesla Cybertruck that he was driving and opened the door. He dropped inside, but he leveled me with a look that clearly said that he was smart and wouldn’t fall for my questions.
Before he closed the door, though, he said, “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
With that parting comment, he started his outer space sounding truck up and roared off—as well as a Tesla Cybertruck could roar, anyway.
I watched him leave until his taillights disappeared around the corner of the square and then reached into my pocket for my phone.
Apollo answered on the second ring. “I’m already working on it.”
“You saw?” I asked.
Of course he did.
“I’m in my truck parked two cars down from where you’re standing,” he explained.
Apollo’s truck window rolled down in the next instant, and I heard him through the phone as well as in person.
“He’s loaded,” he said. “Invested in quite a few companies. But all of that money came in starting eight years ago when his first wife passed away from a heart attack.”
I gritted my teeth. “Wonder if he started with her, or just saw the benefits of having someone die with a life insurance policy?”
He shrugged. “I was going to come in, but I’m more amused with this right now. Have Hopps make me a burger and deliver it to the cabin. My girl’s not with me this time.”
I gave him a chin jerk and went back inside Hopps, finding Magnolia’s eyes immediately as I crossed the threshold.
She raised her brows up at me, but didn’t get up.
I shook my head, letting her know that it wasn’t a big enough issue that we needed to do anything about it now, and went back to my seat.
“That the douchebag?” Huxley asked.
When Hux had gotten there, I didn’t know, but I nodded anyway. “That’s him.”
“I see the resemblance,” he said as he looked at Iris, who barely acknowledged my return to the table. “Gonna be hard to hide that.”
“It wouldn’t be hard if he would go back home.”
“Then why not give him the life insurance payout and call it a day? It’s not like you’re hurting for money, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t look like you’re ever going to leave her,” Hux asked.
He was right, of course.
Or he would’ve been right if it wasn’t as much money as it was.
I explained the situation that had risen after the talk with Cain, and the table went silent.
“I have a million-dollar policy on myself,” Romeo said.
“And that was the highest policy that my company allows. How the hell do you get a two-hundred-million-dollar policy? And on someone that, and don’t take offense to this, Beau, because it’s not meant to be offensive, is a practical nobody.
She had no high net worth. No properties.
No job that made her and her family millions. How are they getting these policies?”
“You forgot to give Hopps my order.” Apollo pushed me to the side, forcing me to take the seat that Iris was in and pull her into my lap. She did nothing but lean into my chest as she continued to watch her show. “Also, I have the answer to that. Look.”
I looked, but saw a bunch of nothing that I could make sense of.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
Several of the closer club members also looked on and saw nothing.
“This is his brother.” Apollo pulled up a photo of Cain and his family smiling.
“The one on the left is Cain’s twin brother, Able.
He works at this insurance company.” He switched what was pulled up on the screen.
“And wouldn’t you know it, this is the same company that gave him the two-hundred-million-dollar policy on his dead fiancée. His fourth dead fiancée.”
I closed my eyes and groaned. “Great. There are two of them that we now have to worry about.”
I whistled and Magnolia looked up.
Jerking my head to get her to come my way, she reluctantly got up and started dragging her feet.
I would’ve laughed at her reluctance to do so had this not been serious.