He sat and began untying his shoes. “Sounds good. Did you get any writing done?”
She shook her head. “Changed my mind and decided to call Callie. They’re going to tell everyone about the baby once we’re back, and I get to go to the next ultrasound.”
He glanced up, then smiled. “You’re excited, aren’t you?”
She didn’t fight her own smile. “A little. They’ll make great parents, and I get to be the fun aunt.”
A weighted silence fell over the room as he removed his shoes. The next obvious question was whether she intended to move. He held back, though, and she understood why. It wouldn’t be a casual question between friends, not after what they’d shared in the past few days.Sheheld back offering the information because she didn’t want him to feel as if she had expectations of him if she stayed.
He rose and filled a glass from the pitcher of filtered water the staff left in the room. She watched as he drank, his throatmoving up and down with each swallow. Barefoot in nothing but his gym shorts.
“I’m thinking of moving,” she blurted out. She still wasn’t sure if she was the relationship type, or if that’s what he wanted either, but if they were headed that way, then it seemed like sharing her life with him was a step in that process. The process of building trust, of communicating.
His eyes met hers as he set the empty glass down. He said nothing for a long stretch, then slowly, a hint of a smile appeared. “Good to know,” he said. “Want to join me in the shower?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“I’ve seen some crazy things in my line of work, and I won’t say this is the craziest, but it’s definitely a top twenty,” Special Agent Barb Hershorn said. “When the entire Sweet Dreams empire falls, I bet they are going to regret sending Weeks and Beeker after you,” she added, looking at Lovell, her corkscrew curly red hair bobbing like a buoy in a rough ocean.
After a quiet night in, he and Daphne now sat in a small FBI office in lower Manhattan, with several HICC staff dialed in, talking with the team Stella had looped in.
Lovell nodded. “I don’t know how much money they make in their illegal activities?—”
“North of twenty million a year,” Callie said over the line. “They have minimal staff, mostly security, and the rest of the people in their network they pay on contract or in cash. As of two years ago, they own their property outright. I’m guessing Chanel-slash-Nicole nets close to eight million a year.”
Lovell shook his head. Daphne remained silent, watching everyone in the room in the way he’d seen her do before. Not suspiciously, but as if cataloging expressions, reactions, physical responses.
“If we can stop this trafficking and sex ring, then I’m glad they did hire Weeks and Beeker, but it does seem like a gamble when they had no idea the size of the inheritance.” He paused. “Actually, Chanel is legally dead, so she wouldn’t have seen any financial benefit from my death. Which makes me think it was Malcom’s idea and she went along with it.”
“Probably to bring you down a peg,” Daphne said. Everyone looked at her. “If they succeeded, you’d be dead, so that probably isn’t the right phrase—writing is way easier than speaking when it comes to getting words right—but you did something they couldn’t, you got out. For that reason alone, I could see someone like Chanel agreeing to Malcom’s plan out of sheer spite.”
“I may have gotten out, but not entirely,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. “Not if Malcom can drag me back in, even if only to put a bullet in me.” Daphne nodded in understanding. “A sick motivation,” he added.
“Jealousy often is,” she said.
“Regardless,” Barb continued. “She’ll regret agreeing, if that’s the case. We’ve talked with Henry Jefferson and Chief Warwick, and they are sending over everything they have. The lawyers are doing their lawyer thing. Once we have all the intel, we’ll make a plan.”
“Is Weeks coming through?” he asked.
Hershorn nodded. “He’s telling us what he knows and what he’s heard. There are a few existing task forces that are picking through the intel, connecting it to other information we have. We’ll conduct the physical raid, but most of the evidentiary work will be driven by those units.”
Lovell shifted. He planned to be a part of that raid one way or another, only he wasn’t sure of the best way to make that happen. He knew the value of teamwork and didn’t intend to pop up unannounced. But he also didn’t want to ask and be given a hard no. Showing up and forcing their hand was bad enough.Going against a direct order? Well, he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to do that either. One of those ask forgiveness rather than permission things, only in this, going the forgiveness route could seriously fuck up their op.Alsoa risk he didn’t want to take.
“We’re targeting four this afternoon for the planning session,” Hershorn continued. “By then, we should have schematics of the house and a distillation of the relevant intel from Weeks. Come by at three and we’ll get you kitted out.”
He blinked. “Pardon?”
“You’ll need standard-issue equipment if you’re joining us. Tologodor can help,” she said, nodding to one of the three agents in the room with them. A tall man with gaunt, pale features, dark hair, and a mustache. The other two were Khafra, a short, stocky man of Southeast Asian heritage, and Charnette, a tiny woman with an even tinier build but with a mane of blond hair pulled into a bun, low and tight at her neck. Everything about them was intentionally nondescript. Except their eyes and the sharp intelligence behind them.
He nodded, a slow motion up and down. He wasn’t about to question the decision, but he didn’t understand how it had come about, and he didn’t like not being in the know. Not about something like this.
“Go, enjoy our fair city for a few hours,” Hershorn said, rising. As if pulled by strings, the rest of them rose as well. “Be back at three,” she added.
“Give me a call when you’re back at the hotel,” Callie said over the speaker.
Lovell glanced at Daphne when she didn’t immediately respond to her sister. Her dark eyes studied him, as if looking for something. No, not something, a reaction. In rapid fire, his mind sifted through fragments and theories. Two breaths later, the truth hit him like a wrecking ball to the stomach. Howeverhis involvement in the raid came about, he’d bet his eyeteeth it originated in the conversation between Daphne and Callie the night before.
But he wouldn’t ask her about it now. He didn’t want to give the FBI any reason to second-guess their decision. “We’re not far, we should be back in less than twenty minutes,” he said, replying to Callie’s question while shooting Daphne a what-did-you-do look. The smallest of grins was the only reaction he got.
