Page 11 of Roar Me Like You Mean It
Of course she was.
“And the footage?”
He hesitates. “We got a close-up on the conversation with you. Audio’s clean. She led with sarcasm, pushed into challenge, backed off before escalation.”
“Professional.”
“Calculating.”
I nod once, slow.
“Send the footage to my private terminal. Delete all other copies. Scrub the raw feed.”
Michaelis doesn’t ask why. He just turns and walks back to the elevator, vanishing the way all good soldiers should.
I stand in the silence again and let the weight of her linger, not like perfume, but like a threat.
There’s a line somewhere between strategy and temptation. I used to know exactly where it was.
Now I’m not so sure.
6
JENNIFER
The gala left me humming, not in a pleasant way but in the way a taut wire hums before it snaps. I return to the office the next morning with my spine straight, coffee clutched like a weapon, and a determination that feels bone-deep. Malek Thorne is not just another wealthy bastard who hides blood under contracts.
He is something else, and the only way I will find out what that something is will be the way I’ve always handled men like him: dig deeper, pull threads, and ignore the voices telling me to stop.
Marcy greets me the second I push through the glass doors. She’s already mid-sentence, which means she hasn’t slept either.
“I’ve been cross-referencing the Luxembourg shipment with the Panama records. There’s overlap: three shell companies funneling through the same trust, but the trust doesn’t exist on paper. I called in a favor with a guy at Interpol, and he says the registration numbers tie to an offshore clinic that doesn’t officially operate anymore.”
I set my bag down and look at her over the rim of my cup. “And unofficially?”
“Unofficially, it’s moving money faster than anything else in our files. Biotech, mostly. But it doesn’t look like medical research.”
“Arms.”
“And something worse.”
I motion her into my office. We close the door, the noise of the bullpen dropping into silence. She spreads the documents out across my desk, line after line of carefully layered deception.
“See here?” she says, pointing to one faded receipt with numbers that don’t match. “This batch was supposed to be replacement parts for medical ventilators. Except the weight listed on the cargo manifest is triple what it should be. And if you dig into the invoices, the suppliers don’t even exist.”
“Classic laundering,” I say.
She nods. “But it’s the biotech angle that worries me. These transfers aren’t just to war zones. Some of them are to private labs in Eastern Europe, South America, even stateside. And if I had to guess, they’re experimenting.”
I lean back, pinching the bridge of my nose. The office lights hum faintly overhead, a reminder of how many nights I’ve stared at files exactly like this. But none of them ever smelled quite so rotten.
Before I can answer, my phone buzzes with a secure line notification. Not many people have that number. I pick up.
“Callahan,” I say.
The voice on the other end is low, distorted by a filter, male but untraceable. “You don’t know me, but I know you’ve been looking at Thorne’s records.”
I don’t react outwardly. “That depends on who’s asking.”
