Ken sat back and tried to ignore the insistent warning tingle at the base of his spine. Miranda Segura looked legal on paper to the outside world.
But that members of her family had operated the cartel wasn’t something he could overlook.
Ken suspected she wanted to run a secret endgame around her elderly father to insert herself into taking control of the cartel in Manuel’s “absence.”
I’ll need to call Carl and have a talk with him and Mateo about Manuel Segura’s men, Abundio, and Miranda.
Ken made more notes for himself before refocusing. He’d worked his way through approximately half of the latest batch of corporate data he’d skimmed from their servers when someone knocked on the office door. Removing one earbud, he glanced at the time and realized he’d been working nearly two hours.
“Yeah?”
The door opened. Ken leaned back in his chair, instantly wary of the nearly identically grim looks Trent, Badger, and Duncan wore.
“What happened?” Ken asked.
Badger was the last one in, and he closed the door behind him, locking it.
Trent motioned for Ken to stay calm—and quiet. “We have to talk,” he whispered. “About Peyton.”
Ken found himself standing and rounding the desk, the sensation at the base of his spine now a screaming roar that echoed through every nerve ending in his body. “What happened? Is he okay?”
“We don’t know,” Trent said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ken
Twenty minutes later, Ken stood there, stunned, attempting to process what he’d just learned. He returned Trent’s letter and slumped back, leaning against the desk.
“So now what do we do?” Ken asked. “Have you told Dewi and Gillian?”
Trent shook his head. “No one here besides us knows. We agreed we’d rather wait as long as possible to tell Dewi. As for the ‘what do we do’ part, we need to open the safe.” He pointed to the bookcase directly behind Peyton’s desk.
Ken moved out of the way so Trent could circle the desk. Ken knew the safe was back there, and Peyton had shown him how to access it because it had a biometric lock keyed only to certain people’s fingerprints.
Including Ken’s.
Everyone currently standing in the office, as well as Gillian and Dewi, could open it.
Trent popped the secret latch and swung the bookcase out of the way. He opened the safe, rifling through large manila envelopes until he stopped and withdrew one, turning and showing it to the other men. On the outside, in Peyton’s handwriting, it was dated the day before Peyton flew out.
Trent closed the safe, returned the bookcase to its usual position, and the men gathered around as he slid a finger under the sealed flap and opened it.
Inside were three sheets of paper and two envelopes, one a small manila envelope containing something that bulged slightly, and a plain letter envelope with Ken’s name.
Trent handed it to him and started reading through the papers.
The envelope felt like it was empty until Ken realized there was an index card inside. Opening it, he shook the card out. On it was printed one word in Peyton’s handwriting.
Hestia
Ken staggered, bracing his hand on the desk as a dizzying amount of information suddenly appeared in his brain.
No, not appeared—slammed.
Like he stepped out from behind a protective wall in a hurricane, and the winds blasted him and knocked him on his ass.
He was vaguely aware of the men talking to him, Duncan even draping a steadying arm around him, but Ken shook them off. Reaching over, he snatched the small manila envelope from the desk where it had landed and ripped it open, dumping the contents. One of the nuggets of new information he suddenly held was the imperative to find a certain item in this envelope among several more letter-sized envelopes, and one small padded mailer, also with Ken’s name on it.
