153|Cooler Head

When Austin returned to Piper's posh, air-conditioned office, she still looked a little green around the gills.

"Austin, can we talk about this, please?"

"Sure, where would you like to start?" he asked, reaching for his gun and twirling it in his hands. It wasn't loaded. He'd removed the magazine before she came in, but she didn't need to know that.

"Iris…at first, she was furious about being forced to marry you."

"I guess that gave her license to fuck my brother and one of my closest friends within what—days, weeks of fucking me?" Austin snorted.

The rumours about Iris' infidelity had haunted their relationship almost from the beginning. Whispers about Orlando's paternity, too, had filled the hallways of his childhood home in Clarence Estate.

But because Orlando was a baby when Iris died and didn't look like either of them at the time, he never paid much attention to the chatter. But now, as she grew older, she was starting to resemble Iris a lot more. She had no traces of him except