He didn’t move as Kyle scurried away, just stayed in a huddle, not daring to look me in the eye.

I put my foot on his back and lit up a cigarette. “You’re lucky it’s fucking Christmas, too.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Please. I’d have never done anything to hurt your son.”

I walked away enough to take a proper look at him. He can’t have been more than thirty years old.

“Get up,” I told him. “Don’t be any more pathetic than you need to be.”

He got to his feet slowly, and I got a better look at him in the glow of the manor lights. Yes, he couldn’t be older than thirty.

“How many kids do you have?”

“One. A girl. This will be our second.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jason Wise.”

I offered him a cigarette. “Not quite so wise, it seems.”

He took it with a relieved smile. “Thank you. No, seems not.” He paused, and there was something about him I liked, even though he’d just broken into my premises. That rarely happened for me. I rarely liked anyone. He managed a faint little laugh. “At least I don’t need to ask you what your name is. The whole world knows your name, hence I’m here trying to get pictures of you.”

“The Morelli family Christmas, the insider edition. Is that what you were planning on writing?”

“Something like that,” he said and accepted a light from me. “Doesn’t matter now, does it? Not now you’re probably planning on ruining me anyway.”

“I’d do a lot worse than ruin you if I wanted to.”

“Maybe I’ll be lucky and you’ll shoot me in the head. Merry Christmas, at least.”

Yes. The guy had a streak of audacity in him I liked. A flare of personality and drive I wanted to see in people but rarely did.

“How did you get in here?” I asked him.

He pointed to the edge of the lawn. “Over the wall. I saw a statue I could climb down and hoped I wouldn’t break a leg.”

“You must have scouted it out to do that.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been scouting it out for days, seeing when security were coming and going.”

“Interesting,” I said, because it was. His persistence and observational skills were very interesting.

The guy called Jason Wise took a drag of his cigarette. “Are you going to kill me then?”

I tipped my head. “I’m not sure yet. Still thinking on it.”

I couldn’t hold back a sly smile as he nodded. He was resigned to his fate, even though he was a cheeky journalist shit who’d been desperate for a step up in his career. Seems he’d known what he’d be risking and cared enough about his family enough to chance it.