“No,” Jordan shook his head. “We’d know. There has to be another way.”
“There’s no widow here,” I added. “It would have been found in the background check. Were we sloppy? Sometimes shit gets out of control, and we have to act fast. That means killing people on the spot or dragging them to a warehouse. We could have had a tail on us and didn’t realize it.” That went for more than this problem. We’d been doing this for a long time. At any point, someone could have been hiding in the shadows, watching us, waiting for the right moment to fuck us over.
Barry was still on the phone. “I’m freezing everything. No new clearances. No new anything. We have to go through each employee and look for what we could have missed.”
“Or that’s just what they want us to do,” Barrett said. “What if they want us focusing on internal operations to draw away from who this really is? Fuck up the organization from the inside out. If we topple in here, it’ll domino.”
Lane dropped his head into his hands. “There’s no way to know. It could be anyone.”
“We trust those in this room, along with Barry, Reghan, Vail, Hartley, and Forest. Everyone else has to be checked thoroughly.”
“Even Irene?” I asked. She was Jordan’s personal housekeeper and cook. She’d been with him forever.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jordan seethed. “Next, you’ll suggest Ava.” She was the girl Vail had custody of and who lived in Jordan’s home.
“That’s too far.”
“So’s Irene! There’s no way she has anything to do with this.”
I put my hands up. “I don’t want to argue with you. I’m not the one who made the trust list.”
“Enough,” Barrett said loudly to cut through Jordan and me. “Arguing won’t get us anywhere. I’m going to take that bag of bits and have it tested. My money is on there not being anything interesting in here.”
Jordan nodded. “Lane, work with Barry to begin going through my employees. Start from the top down. Whoever sent this knows more than they should. Raiden, you and Vincent make a list of guards and start interviewing them. I need to know if they had anyone in their life they’d die for, who wasn’t disclosed and we missed during the background checks. Barrett, handle the bag and box. Sheldon, start thinking. We have to put our heads together. Sheldon doesn’t usually kill alone. He’s therebecause I take him along. There’s more than him and Forest at risk here.”
We stood from the table, each of us with our tasks. At this point, I just wanted to get back to my apartment and pull Forest close so I knew he was safe.
26
FOREST
I’d been staring at the laptop screen for hours. Sheldon offered to put a desk in the apartment and get me a monitor and keyboard so I could dock the laptop. He didn’t like coming home to find me hunched over it at the dining table. I refused. Not because it wouldn’t be nice to sit somewhere else. I didn’t want this to be permanent. Putting in a desk resigned me to working out of here and never going back to the office. I wasn’t accepting that.
He’d told me what happened last week with a package showing up. I wanted the details, but I didn’t at the same time. In the end, I told him not to let me in on what it was. If I didn’t know, I could pretend it wasn’t bad. It was, of course, but I would rather live in my Sheldon-created bubble than out there where a person was trying to kill me and the man I loved.
In the days that followed, Jordan’s trusted guards went through their entire roster in the building. Every person was checked thoroughly, their history, what they did outside of here, family, you name it. They all came up good. Sheldon told me no more gifts showed either. That was a relief. He could have lied about it, but I didn’t think he would. Sheldon and I didn’t have a habit of doing that.
A knock on the door pulled me away from staring at the now blurry screen. I’d stopped focusing on what was on it minutes ago. I stood and answered it, finding JJ on the other side.
“Hey,” I said, shocked to see him. “Are you here visiting your dad?”
“Nah, but I’ll say hi before I leave. Got a minute?”
“Sure, come in.” I held the door wider, but before JJ could enter, Sheldon slid inside to stand next to me.
“God, you’re fucking weird,” JJ said. “Seriously, did a beacon go off in your head that alerted you to my presence?”
“Much like Jordan finds out everything that happens in the building, so do I. I might no longer walk the halls at night, but I have many ways to know who comes and goes, especially in our home.”
I turned to face him. “Our?”
He placed a soft kiss on the tip of my nose. “Yes, beautiful. Our.”
“Enough with the sappy shit,” JJ cut in. “Do that after I leave. I actually came to talk about work with Forest.”
“Okay, but I’m not forgetting you said that,” I told Sheldon.
He winked in response.
