She let out a low chuckle. “Just kidding about the sex dungeon. It doesn’t exist.”
She forced her gaze away from the man before she started running numbers that didn’t belong in any equations she knew.
Some outliers were better left unexamined.
THREE
The war room was already pulsing with tension when Ash took his seat. One look at the maps plastered across the wall told him shit was about to go down, and in a big way.
Though he’d slept badly, tossing and turning, and only got three hours, he was ready to lock and load at the first signal.
He leaned forward, forearms braced on the table, chair angled just enough to keep every screen and every person in his line of sight.
That included their new accountant, who sat near their intelligence team comprised of Dante, Elin and Sophie. Ash had yet to figure out whyshewas still here. Unless she kept Cipher’s personal books, it seemed the intel she brought to the table could be gainedmanyother ways.
Besides, she looked entirely too alert for the pre-dawn hour. Her hair was too bouncy. Sophie hadn’t been wrong—like a shampoo commercial. And when she turned her head to look at the screen, it did that swishing thing again as if the wind was blowing.
Everything about the woman was overtly sensuous in a way that his body noticed.
He picked up his steaming mug of coffee and brought it to his lips, using the moment to study Ellory. Besides her shiny,bouncyhair, as Elin had called it, she wore her own cardigan buttoned all the way to the neck. And those tortoiseshell glasses.
He knew if he slipped them off her, he’d find little bite marks on the stems.
His gut clenched for no good reason, and he set his coffee down with a little too much force, causing it to slosh onto the table.
Con entered the room last, bringing all of them straighter in their seats. Without pause, he strode to the front of the room. “Dante.”
Dante pushed to his feet and positioned himself in front of the screens filled with maps. From his tight posture and the dark circles carved beneath his eyes, Ash guessed the poor bastard had worked through the night.
Elin looked to be in the same shape.
Dante cleared his throat. “Elin and I had intel come in late last night. It didn’t look like much at first, but once we started digging…”
He trailed off, and Elin tapped the keys. The main screen lit up with a bland corporate logo—gray, forgettable and deliberately generic.
Ash’s jaw tightened.
“We traced a new shell corporation tied to Daniel Sheen.” Dante swept the room in a look. “Same structure we’ve seen before, but when we dug deeper, we saw the scope of reach this particular fake company has.”
Elin swiped, and the image fractured into a wide map of the United States.
Dots appeared, one by one. Soon dozens of them marked the map.
Ash felt the entire room zero in.
“That same shell rents safety-deposit boxes,” Elin said. “Multiple states. Different banks.”
“Storage,” Ash muttered.
Ellory’s thick eyelashes lifted as she darted a glance his way, and he hated that he noticed it.
“Exactly,” Dante continued. “Documents, assets. Anything he doesn’t want to be found. If it’s digital, we hack it. If it’s physical…well, he only has one recourse, doesn’t he?”
“Blow it up.” Ash flexed his fingers around the handle of his mug but didn’t drink.
He studied the map, trying to find connections between locations but there didn’t seem to be any pattern. Which was smart.
And more dangerous.
