CHAPTER TWELVE
MUFFIN DAVIS FITZHUGH was a winner.
She hadn’t started life that way. In grade school, she’d been called Hand-Me-Down Girl and Muffin with Nothin’. But by high school, she’d been attracting men’s notice for years, and it was only the girls who hated her. The boys liked her—and what she was willing to do to them—a lot.
That’s where she’d gotten her first taste ofpower, something she’d never had in her life before. Not in school, and certainly not at home, where her sister excelled at everything and took what little attention—and money—her parents had to give. Where her deadbeat uncle also took whatever he wanted, whether she wanted to give it or not.
When she’d learned that a guy would do just about anything for a girl who’d go down on him, she wasinstantly hooked. As a junior, she turned her sights on the senior boy from the second richest family in town. AJ moved on the fringes of the popular crowd, too much of an introvert to inhabit that space, but he played varsity football and was hardly an outcast.
He was handsome and sweet and slightly in awe that he’d attracted her notice. And he treated her like a queen until the day he leftfor college.
The day of her own graduation, she ruthlessly cut ties with everything and everyone in her small Alabama town and moved to North Carolina. Surviving on ramen while sleeping on another volunteer’s couch, she spent long hours on the state assembly campaign of a young, handsome lawyer from Jacksonville, North Carolina—home to a Marine Corps base and not much else—quickly working herway up from canvasser to volunteer coordinator to campaign manager’s assistant.
And then she’d finally met Fitz in person. The attraction was instant and incendiary.
Despite the difference in their ages—he’d been thirty-two—and his family’s protests, they were engaged six months later. What no one else understood was that she and Fitz were the same. They were both driven to succeed at anycost.
Their drug was power, and together they were unstoppable. Everything she’d done since then—putting up with Fitz’s wandering dick, blackmailing those who got in the way of his career, blowing whoever needed a push—had been in service of their continued rise.
Fitz had been intelligent enough to see that with her at his side, he’d scale the political ranks higher and faster than with anyoneelse. She could fight dirty behind the scenes while he put on a show.
She would always be his fiercest protector because he’d enabled her to claw her way out of poverty and finally show those snobby bitches from back home who actually mattered in this world.
Those girls were queens of a landfill of a town that no one had ever heard of. Muffin was on the verge of becoming queen of theworld, and only one person stood in her way.
Tara Fujimoto.
But not for long.
Rick jabbed at the phone to end the call with Narwhal, his blood pressure going through the roof. Maybe it was time for another visit to Sonya.
Tara Fujimoto was still walking around with damaging information in her head and Rick’s hired muscle didn’t have a fucking clue where she or her companion had gone.
“I have someone sitting on her condo, but so far no activity,” Hank said, throwing out his hands in a helpless gesture. “The guy, Patarava, doesn’t even have a local address. He uses a PO box for Virginia, but his home address is in Colorado. One of my guys there checked it out, but according to neighbors no one’s seen him since before Thanksgiving. The place is being rented out as a vacation home.”
Rick squeezed a stress ball.
“Sorry, boss,” Hank said, hands clasped behind his back like a guilty schoolboy facing the principal.
Rick took a deep breath. His guys could be effective weapons, but they needed someone else to provide the target. “Keep on it. I’ll call Hyper. Maybe she can track them down.”
The giant enforcer nodded, relief softening his rough looks. “Yes, sir.” Hank leftthe room.
As soon as the door shut, Rick dialed a number from memory. “I have a rush job for you,” he said when the woman answered the line.
“Name?” Hyper asked in a voice that made her sound about fifteen.
For all he knew, she was. “Tara Kazuko Fujimoto and Jeffrey Michael Patarava.” He passed on their birthdates and socials. “I’ll send you copies of the reports I have.” Under a shell corporationhe had an account with a credit check service. Between that and access to real-time GPS locations provided by the cellular providers, he usually had all he needed to track someone down. But these two had done a runner and turned off their phones, so stronger measures were needed. “Both work for Steele Security.”
“Steele?Holy shit.” A keyboard clacked in the background. “Valerie Sanchez worksthere.” A loud slurp grated on Rick’s ears. “Actually, I think she’s Valerie Kramer now.”
“And I care why?”
“Dude, she’s like, hacker royalty. But she turned white hat. Made the news a few years back when she was accused of espionage.”
Rick made an impatient noise.
“I’m sure she has everyone at Steele locked down tighter than your ass,” Hyper said, followed by more tapping of keys. “Thiscould actually be fun.”
