“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night,
and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
—Sun Tzu
With my grip locked around Emmy’s waist, I head down the hall and back to Raife’s office. I’m fucking hard as shit, but my cock is going to have to get over it. I step inside to find Raife absent and Felix collecting the papers on the coffee table.
I narrow my eyes. “Short meeting.”
Felix flicks his gaze up to me, shakes his head, and shoves the files under his arm. “It’s done, man.”
“What’s done?”
“Murphy.” He walks up to me and adjusts his bowtie. “Raife is setting up his pickup for later today as we speak.”
I grit my teeth, clutching Emmy tighter against me. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“They already sent a file straight to Murphy. It has all we’ve got on Misha. His involvement controlling everything from Katerina’s crimes to the sex trading, burning the extra bodies—even their romantic affair. Anything we were able to dig up.”
My jaw ticks. That’s nothing new. In fact, it’s exactly what we sent Murphy when we first tried to get to him several years ago. At the time, he proved with ease that none of it was strong enough to connect him directly to the crimes. Not that we expected it to. We don’t need ‘hard evidence.’
We lived it.
We were set to move forward—until we weren’t. It wasn’t until Felix discovered a particular photograph buried deep in Murphy’s private files three years ago that Raife lost it, and Murphy slipped from our grasp.
The photograph was of a sixteen-year-old boy, naked, with dirty-blond hair, sunken-in eyes, and hollow cheeks. Written in permanent marker at the bottom:No name. Due for redistribution.
Raife stalked Murphy, barged into his house in the middle of dinner, and stabbed him in the stomach from behind. Of course, if Raife had followed protocol and planned for a proper pickup, he would have known there was a guest in their restroom at the time, who happened to be an off-duty cop. A dirty cop in Murphy’s pocket, but a cop nonetheless. Raife barely escaped without getting shot.
The only fortunate thing to come out of the experience was that Murphy didn’t link Raife’s current identity toNo Namefrom fifteen years ago.
Murphy had no idea how personal that night really was.
It was easy to assume his attacker was one of his many disgruntled, cheated clients, and Murphy’s fear of damaging his delicate reputation overrode any impulse to seek justice. He already had us—anonymously—threatening to leak Misha, and a stabbing in the midst of all that would hurt more than help. He thought offering us a shit-ton of money was enough to make everything disappear and reset life to normal.
And it was.
It had to be.
For a little while.
It was dumb luck that Raife didn’t get caught. Murphy did investigate us harder than shit after that incident, however, and he came too fucking close to connecting all the dots and figuring out our identities. If it wasn’t for Felix’s talents, he would have too. He would have reburied us before we made it out of our own graves.
Releasing Emmy, I refill Felix’s shot glass with a bottle on the table and down the whiskey. “What aren’t you telling me, Felix?”
Emmy tracks my movements, her brows furrowed as she shifts her gaze from Felix to me.
Felix scrubs a hand over his face. “You, ah, wanna send her downstairs to Aubrey for a few?”
I squeeze the glass in my hand. “She stays.”
He blows out a breath but answers me. “They didn’t send the file anonymously this time.”
The hand at my side curls into a fist.Fucking idiots. “Of course they didn’t.”
“We’ve been going over this at some of the meetings, but lately you walk out or spend them doing kil”—he glances at Emmy, clears his throat—“in the basement.”
“Bullshit. You fucking know this plan is shit, and you knew I’d shut it down if I found out about it. This was purposefully outlined in my absence.”
