Page 74 of Passion and Payback

“An addict? What the hell?”

“Mmm, told me she caught you playing World of Warcraft again.”

“Oh, that,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “I picked it up again about half a year ago to see how things were going since I hadn’t played in a few years. Turned out she didn’t need to be worried. The game was absolute shit, and from what I hear, it hasn’t got much better. Might do Classic, though, I’ll think about it.”

“God save us all if you decide to,” I said with a heavy sigh. The game had sucked chunks of his life at college. At first, it seemed like a good way to socialize with people safely that didn’t involve going to parties or getting wasted all the time. Only for me to come back on leave one time and realize he was barely managing to focus on his schoolwork, saved only by his brains rather than hard work, and had lost himself almost completely to it. “Because I don’t know if they have an anonymous group for gamer addicts.”

“Kai? It’s the twenty-twenties. Ofcourse,they have addict groups for that.”

“Duly noted. I’ll give them a look.”

“Stop,” he said with a grunt, swatting at me. “I’m not playing it, so quit. I’ll find a different MMO to get hooked on. I hear Final Fantasy is still doing great.”

“Hunter?”

He laughed, wrapping his hand around mine. “I’m not going to get hooked. I have a lot more going on in my life now that doesn’t leave me time to spend hours a day on a game, alright?”

“Good.”

“Are you ready to hear what I found?”

“You’re always finding things. Your research skills are impressive. I’ve told you that.”

“Yeah, but I found something we can actually use. Our in.”

“Our in? On all of them?”

“No,” he said, pulling up one of the many files he’d been keeping on the small thumb drive. “This one.”

“Damon,” I said softly as the man’s smug, smiling face filled the screen. Damon was the corporate lawyer. From what Hunter had dug up, the man was exceptionally good at making sure any business who wanted to get away with something, he was the man to call. He was still young, but his methods and efficacy were hard to argue with.

All three men were still connected, which didn’t require much digging on Hunter’s part to discover. Their friendship had been noticed and tracked since they’d gone to school together as boys. They’d even gone to Yale together before returning to Port Dale to keep up the family businesses and ‘give back to the city they loved.’

What they’d really done was take advantage of their family’s respective influences and start building a power base of their own. Callum was the face of the group, being a member of a well-respected and very old family and managing to make a few smart political decisions that made him look good. Damon was essentially the attack dog, managing connections even with personal and criminal lawyer circuits to pull plenty of strings and probably bully a few people. The last was the CEO, Mitchell, who led the initially small shipping company his family owned and, in the past few years, had started pushing competitors out with help from his friends.

“I’ll admit to being alittlewary of what the in with him is,” I said, thinking he was probably the easiest to get to. He had the least amount of security and was fond of spending time on his own.

“Well, I’ve been trying to get at them from just about every angle I can think of. But there was one I wasn’t giving too much thought to even though it should have been obvious.”

“That being?”

He pulled up a screen, and I raised a brow. “An escort service?”

“It didn’t occur to me to look at escort services. In my mind, the bastards enjoyed using what they could to lure people in and then getting them.”

“I mean, yeah, but they can’t get their kicks like that all the time when they want to get off. That would leave a big, messy trail that not even they and their families could cover up.”

“Well, consider me appropriately corrected,” he said dryly and just a little testily.

“I didn’t think of it either, so I’m glad you did,” I told him, watching the annoyance disappear. “But how is that our in?”

“Well, lawyers might be allowed to be sleazy, but there’s a limit. Apparently, a service in the city caters to...interesting tastes.”

“Just how interesting?”

“The kind of interesting that would raise eyebrows...legal ones.”

“Oh shit, how legal?”

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