“Riley, it’ll be fine. I’ll race there, drop the box off, and then come back. One quick trip and then it’s taken care of.”
Sloan stuck his head into the room and knocked on the wall twice to get my attention. Why was he away from the video feeds? He should have all eyes on the bakery. On my girl.
I didn’t have time to argue and my options had run dry. “Okay, but come back here when you’re done.”
I wouldn’t be able to rest until I saw her again. Mostly Maine didn’t have a ton of crime. There were a few weird ass people when you ventured into the unpopulated sections of the state. They lived by their own rules and codes of conduct. How much trouble could she get into?
Lots.
“Okay, I’ll message you when I get close to town again.”
I grunted as a goodbye and then disconnected the call, stopping myself a second before I accidentally dropped three short words of commitment. Things with Cass felt so normal that “I love you” almost slipped out. It was way too soon to say something like that to her, even if it felt right.
Cass never shared her plans for the future with me, but the longer she stayed, the more I developed my own. It quickly became my life’s goal to keep her in Pelican Bay forever. I’d lost her once. I couldn’t lose her again.
Not after this.
With my desire came a sudden need to know where she was at all times. Here I made fun of Ridge and his obsession with Tabitha too often, but now I understood his concern. Did I have time for one guy to run over and attach a tracker in her car before she left? Was it acceptable to track someone you technically weren’t dating?
Probably not.
I slipped my phone back in my pocket, pointed a finger at Colt, letting him know he was in charge, and then turned to follow Sloan back out of the room. “Okay, tell me what you’ve got.”
“I’ve been tracking the Grand Master, and he’s definitely not in Chicago any longer.”
“Have you figured out where he is?” I asked impatiently. I hoped this wasn’t the entire reason he drew me away from a phone call in a meeting. We had to figure out where the Grand Master moved to help locate Cyrus Kensington, but without actual evidence, I couldn’t do much.
The leader of the Chicago mob said he wasn’t connected to the crimes happening in Pelican Bay with the Kensington twins, but I didn’t believe him.
“He was last seen boarding his private helicopter on top of his building. I have photos of him strapping in. The public flight plan indicated a landing at his house in Florida, but he never arrived.”
Ridge had spies everywhere and the current gossip coming down the line was Cyrus and an unnamed woman escaped from a ship off the coast of Florida, but no one had seen them since. The flight could be a lie to put us off the trail, but more signs were pointing to Florida.
“Did they crash?”
Sloan shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve been monitoring the police and fire calls on a flight path plus fifty miles on either side and there had been no reports that would lead me to believe they suffered a crash.”
The Grand Master was a formidable opponent but not one we expected to deal with in Maine. He ran a criminal organization based out of Chicago and normally liked to keep his head down and the attention away from him. Involving himself in a sex trafficking ring in Maine didn’t follow his usual MO. But we couldn’t afford to overlook what happened with Corbin Kensington last month.
If the Grand Master wasn’t pulling the strings, he was still involved. Finding him put us closer to Cyrus. I’d bet money on it.
“If you don’t think he ended up in Florida, search his property records and see if you can find anywhere else along the coast that he might have a place to stop. Anything else?”
Sloan shook his head. This time irritation built up in the corners of his lips. “Not yet. Jerico still hasn’t surfaced. The ship we suspect Cyrus was being held on is still at the dock in Florida, but Ridge is waiting before anyone makes a move.
Ridge was keeping me up to date, but things moved fast on his end of the country. I was hopeful we’d have Cyrus back in our protective custody soon. The Grand Master promised it wasn’t his hand at work with the Kensington twins but Jerico striking out on his own.
Sounded like a bullshit excuse to me.
It left a lot of questions. When could you trust a mob boss to tell you the truth? And if Jerico was an employee of the Grand Master who’d gone rogue as he led us to believe, what were his motivations?
We weren’t strangers to working with the seedier crowd. Ridge built alliances with Frankie Zanetti, our own connection to the mob although a different family. And we also fought tensions with the Pelican Bay motorcycle club. Their new leader, Dominick, did a lot to change the club, but I wasn’t naïve enough to believe both of the men were shooting the straight and narrow.
Sometimes you had to look the other direction, and I let a few things slide in order to help the greater good.
I tapped Sloan on the shoulder as he stared at his computer screen. “Good work. Keep looking.”
I left him to finish his work, checked in at the meeting still happening in the conference room, and then slipped into my office to give an update to Ridge.
