Me:
Me too
But there wasn’t. With that in mind, I shoved my phone into my pocket and turned my attention to the meeting. Or I tried to. Because without thoughts of Nova to distract me, my mind went to my other problem.
My family’s business problem. A problem that could have far-reaching consequences.
“Attwood!”
“Huh?” I blinked, the TV screen coming into focus. Shit. Coach Lazovsky was staring at me, and he didnotlook happy. “Sorry, Coach. Can you repeat that?”
His nostrils flared. “Listen carefully, Attwood. Do notmake me repeat myself again. I said, we will start with the line pairings we used in last practice. That means you will start in the centre.”
“Okay.”
“Good. We will move on to tactics. Pay attention. I am talking to you, Attwood and Worthington,” Coach barked.
“Yes, Coach,” Kane said. Although his words were polite, he had a dark, almost angry look on his face. I caught Ryker’s eye, discreetly signalling towards Kane.
I’m on it, he mouthed, and I nodded in acknowledgement before returning my attention to the screen. I did my best to keep my mind on everything Coach was saying, but the worry I’d been suppressing crept back in. I had to get to the bottom of what was going on before it was too late.
“You’re not still doing that assignment, are you?”
“Huh?” Scrubbing my hand over my face, I lifted my head to find Ryker eyeing me over the top of my laptop. Fuck, how long had I been sitting here at the kitchen island, staring at my screen?
“The economics assignment. You were working on it when I passed you earlier, weren’t you? That was over two hours ago.”
“Uh. No.” I raised my arms above my head, stretching my stiff back. “I need caffeine.”
“I’ve got it,” Ryker said. Crossing to the fridge, he pulled out two cans of Red Bull and then slid one across the counter to me. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. Why are you still here? Shit, I mean, you’rewelcome here anytime. You know that. Sorry, mate. Uh. Yeah. Forget I said anything.”
He snorted. “Okay, now I know something’s up. You’re acting weird.” Pulling out the stool perpendicular to mine, he rested his elbows on the polished marble surface. “What is it?”
I groaned, pushing my laptop away and dropping my head into my hands. “These fucking accounts. I don’t get it.”
“The clinic’s accounts?”
“Yeah. Volkov got me access to the one I couldn’t get into, but the numbers aren’t adding up. There are too many discrepancies, and I’m starting to think that it isn’t because of sloppy accounting.”
“Shit.” Ry dragged his stool next to mine. “Show me?”
I clicked through to the transactions I’d been studying for the past hour, all taking place during the past six weeks. “See, here? This line. It doesn’t add up. There’s almost two grand unaccounted for. It’s not the only entry like this, and I’ve only gone back through six weeks’ worth. And here—” I highlighted another line. “This account number. It’s only showing me four of the digits, but they don’t match up with my dad’s business account. It could be the accountancy firm, but I don’t know why they’d be sending money from surgeries to their own account. It’s all supposed to go into one business account, and my dad controls it.”
Ryker’s brows pulled together as he studied the lists of numbers. He tapped his finger against the screen. “What’s this here? NS-MISC?”
“It stands for non-surgical, miscellaneous. Uh…I think my dad uses it sometimes for your dad’s business… Y’know, it’s mostly cash, but sometimes it’ll be a card transaction. He puts it through on your mum’s card or a card of one of the other women in the syndicate. Easier to explain it away since they use the clinic for their treatments already.”
“Okay. So we can rule those out,ifthey go into your dad’s account. Is there a quick way to check? Can we find all the payments that go to the unknown account?”
I sucked in a breath, the knot of tension in my stomach loosening somewhat at the reminder that I wasn’t alone in this, that my friends had my back. “Yeah, we can do that. I’m still going to have to go back through it line by line to find the other discrepancies, though.”
“Pull up the miscellaneous payments and print them out.” He swung his body off the stool, striding over to the far side of the room where our communal printer was stored on top of an ancient bureau. “Where’s the paper?”
“In the bureau.”
He loaded up the printer while I selected the relevant rows, focusing on this year’s records. I exported them and sent them to the printer, then got to work isolating the transactions that went to the unknown account.
