Page 57 of Bastard

I seemed to be the only one who didn’t know what this meant. “Explain it like I’m five?”

David nodded. “All the letters are shifted three places.”

Georgia laughed harder, doubling over. “They…didn’t…even…make it hard?” Then she started cackling.

“What does it say?”

David watched Georgia laugh before shaking his head with a smile of his own. “‘Victoria Roark Hit’ and ‘Longoria Punishment’. For confirmation I tracked down a former member of the club. For a small financial incentive he gave me the details he remembered. On the record.”

“This has to be planted.” Sam shook her head.

But David seemed positive. “It’s not. The files are archived and haven’t been accessed in several years. I doubt they even know they have them on the cloud. And yes, before you ask, someone put their entire archive on a cloud account. An account housed on a server I have access to. I suspect it was an accident. Someone trying to be helpful.”

I had to stop Aces from backing up our phones to the cloud just last year. Simple things got missed all the time. It normally didn’t matter unless it was nudes or state secrets.

Or in this case, a hit job.

“You brought the receipts?”

He nodded once. “I did. But I want you to know, my side of things is moving pretty quickly. They want to put an end to the illegal smuggling as soon as possible, so they won’t sit on this long.”

Which meant Steel needed to shit or get off the pot. “Georgia?”

She stared past me for a long moment before standing up and moving to her ornate desk. She opened a drawer and pulled out a small external hard drive. “This should help.”

“What’s on it?”

“Everything I have on Bernard. The changes he made with the Feyereisens and Randall Cork, all their communications I copied years ago before his death, and everything Samantha has discovered. All the ways they’ve intentionally manipulated the company for their financial gain. Some of it is perfectly legal. Much of it is not.”

24

Sam paced. She’d been pacing for days. I canceled our trip back to Florida to stay here and work on the new evidence. The pieces kept falling into place. A beautiful picture developing in front of us. Combined with the latest scheme to hire Todd for illegal organ harvesting, this was turning into a slam dunk.

“Is this really happening?” Sam spun on her heel. “It feels like a trap.”

I switched back and forth between complete confidence—I had been working on this for so long that I knew every moving piece—and a sort of out of body experience that felt more like a dream.

I turned away from the computer and stretched. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t waiting for something new to blow up in my face.”

“So you turn all this over and your superiors review it and everyone gets arrested? But then there has to be trials right? They’ll get out on bail or something? Does that mean things will get worse before they get better?”

I pulled her into my lap and kissed her. Mostly to get her to stop babbling, but also because we hadn’t kissed in a while, so it was definitely kissing time. “The short answer is yes. Things will get worse before they get better. But we prepared for this. I doubt Todd will get bail. They’ll all be too dangerous and too likely to flee. But the Feyereisens?”

“Too rich to keep behind bars.”

“Exactly.”

She snuggled into my chest, pulling her legs up too. “I don’t like living in a tower.”

It definitely sucked. In a way, she was in a prison too. “At least you have multiple beautiful prisons to retreat to.”

“You’re right. Of course you’re right.” Then she froze. “Or can I? Will I be safe anywhere?”

I hoped she wouldn’t put that together so quickly. “It depends.”

“On?”

“Do they arrest the Dragons too? Do they stay behind bars? And do the Feyereisens have any other hired killers on their payrolls?”

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