She bit down on her lower lip and looked back down at the papers. “It looks like they tried to stop right before they were killed because that’s when all the payments stopped. Which would make sense because I told them I was coming back to live at the ranch and they tried to stop me, but I wouldn’t listen. I just wanted to come home and ride horses.”
I flipped through the papers again and again, trying to figure out what was making me feel so tense. Trying to figure out why this all felt so wrong. The cartel didn’t need this money. It was a couple million, which was nothing to them.
“Bank clerk say anything else?” I asked.
“Yeah, actually.” She leaned forward slightly and sighed. “They said the payments in and out of the account stopped right before my parents died.”
My head lifted. “Payments going out?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Must’ve been someone in the cartel. I don’t mind giving the money back—not if it keeps me and the ranch safe. I just hoped I could do some good with it, but I get it. I thought it was too good to be true.”
“Did they give you a name, Rowan? Of who the payments were going to,” I asked, gathering the papers together and putting them all back into the lock box.
“Yeah, it was a man named Peter Anthony. I don’t know anyone with that name, though, so it has to be someone in the cartel, but it doesn’t sound like a Mexican name.”
Rowan was still talking, but I couldn’t hear a thing she was saying.
Everything stopped and my body had gone still. A cold spread through me like ice in my veins, freezing everything in its path as the gut-churning realization hit me.
“Peter Anthony?” I repeated quietly.
She nodded. “Yeah. Weird name, right? Like I said, it doesn’t exactly sound Mexican.”
“It’s not Mexican,” I replied.
I knew that name. I knew it real well.
Peter Anthony wasn’t cartel, and he wasn’t some middleman.
He was a fucking rat.
He was the rat in our club.
And suddenly, everything made sense.
