Ren stirred beside me. “Is everything okay?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep but threaded with worry.
“No.” I scanned the floor and reached for my boxers and pajama pants. “Someone got onto the property last night. I need to go see what’s going on.”
She pushed herself up on one elbow, nodding carefully as her mind woke up. “Okay. Are you all right?”
I shrugged, pausing for a second because no one ever asked me that question. Not even Sofia had asked because it was just assumed that I was fine, because I had to be. I shrugged again and chose honesty. “Not especially. But this is my life.” I looked at her closely, studied the way she watched me with concern she hadn’t tried to hide.
If I stayed another second, I wouldn’t go at all.
I went to my room and dressed quickly, pulling on jeans and a hoodie before I hurried downstairs to meet Damien.
Damien was waiting at the back entrance, standing beside a golf cart that looked comically small beside his large frame. He nodded once in greeting and settled into the seat, aiming the golf cart down the narrow path that led to the security house, its headlights cutting through the early morning fog. The farther we went, the quieter it felt. It was the kind of quiet that didn’t belong to nature. It felt unnatural without the usual sounds of crickets, bullfrogs, and birds.
I spotted the body before we stopped.
“We wanted you to look at him first to see if you recognized him,” Damien explained, mistaking my silence for anger.
I stepped from the cart and went to the body. He was on his back on a blue tarp with his arms at his sides. The map of his death was clear, with one bullet hole in his forehead and two grouped close together on his chest. His eyes were open and full of death. That stillness never failed to affect me—the completeabsence of life, the stillness of death. The tension of life, long gone.
I’d seen death more times than I could count over the years, had been the instrument of death more times than I cared to even fucking count, and the stillness never left me.
“Who is he?” I finally remembered who I was and what was happening, and the words came out quieter than I meant. I kept my gaze on the dead man’s face, something vaguely familiar about him that I couldn’t pinpoint. Yet.
“Unknown,” Damien answered. “No prints in any domestic database. Possibly foreign, but based on his movement and gear, I’d guess former special ops.”
I stared down at the man’s face, and recognition hit. “The lost hikers,” I grumbled. “He was one of them.”
Damien’s brows lifted. “You sure?”
“Yes.” My jaw tightened. “They weren’t lost.” They were doing recon, and Ren’s instincts had been right. Again. “Find anything you can on him,” I demanded. “And look for a female associate because he wasn’t alone the last time he was spotted on the property.”
“There was a woman?”
I nodded. “They posed as a lost couple of hikers. I’ll get you a photo,” I promised, already pulling out my phone to text Ren about it.
Seconds later, the screen lit with the image of the couple and I showed it to Damien. “We’ll run it through all the databases we have access to.”
“Good.” I glanced at the body once more before I turned my back to it. Somebody had just crossed a line that there would be no walking away from—not for them, anyway.
On the way back to the house, I called Luca and filled him in. He swore under his breath and promised to move resources. The rest of the day unraveled in pieces.
I spent the rest of the day in my office, bouncing between conference calls with government bureaucracies who needed information about the bombing, with executives and fixers, with my lawyers at my side every step of the way. It was a shitshow of a day, but it was productive.
The phone rang again and I sighed, knowing that my hellish day wasn’t over yet.
“Boss,” my front-of-house manager at the Beverly Hills DeRossi’s Place said. “Some Russian guy came by with two cases of vodka. Said you approved it.”
“I didn’t approve shit,” I grumbled, my fingers gripping the phone until my knuckles ached.
“I figured,” he said with a dark chuckle. “Told him as much and got a black eye for my efforts.”
“They want a piece of the business,” I replied. “No matter how fucking good the deal sounds, I didn’t approve it.”
“Got it,” he answered easily. “Just wanted you to know.”
I nodded. “You did good, Steve. Thank you.”
“Of course.”
