As she moved toward the curb, he noticed the camera over the entrance—tracking and recording—and retreated farther into the shadows.
Headlights swept over her as a car pulled up. Summoned and expected. She lifted her hand briefly then closed the distance to the waiting vehicle.
She slid into the seat without looking around. No second check. Trusting the moment to be what it appeared to be. And like that, she was gone.
He didn’t move. There would be other chances. Better ones. Safer ones for him.
Besides, he craved the process—the planning, the anticipation, and the careful construction of the trap—as much as the culmination, turning denial to defiance and defiance into surrender. Cruelty was essential, but it had to be calculated and precise.
Anything less ruined the experience.
He turned and walked away, keeping to the shadows, avoiding surveillance and streetlights. No need to linger now, or to risk exposure. What mattered had already happened.
His decision was made. He’d selected his prey.
And once chosen, he never turned back.
Chapter 6
Leland pulled into the parking garage, grabbed his travel mug, and headed inside. The familiar rhythm of the office surrounded him immediately. Phones rang. Printers hummed. The scent of fresh coffee drifted from the break room.
Greta looked up from behind the reception desk, one hand covering her headset microphone. “Dev just went in,” she said. “They’re about to start.”
“Thanks.”
She flashed him a smile before returning to whatever crisis she was currently preventing.
Greta ran the office with quiet efficiency and the patience of a saint. New clients, payroll, scheduling, vendor disputes, personnel headaches—she managed the place as effectively as Dev managed investigations. Which made the contrast between office Greta and club Greta no less startling.
At Devil’s Pointe, she became softer. More yielding. The submissive side of herself she shared only with Michael and a trusted circle of friends.
The choice had always fascinated him. Like most strong women in the lifestyle, she wasn’t pretending at either role. She simply allowed herself different freedoms in different places.
Leland headed deeper into the suite, past the glass-walled command center manned 24/7. Lorenzo Clement sat at the controls, which was surprising. He was one of their best skip tracers and hated being confined to monitoring as much as the rest of them.
He stuck his head in the door. “Hey, Ren. What did you do to piss Dev off?”
“Nothing,” he grunted, without taking his eyes off the screen. “I got ‘volunteered’ for a few shifts while Russ is on vacation. How do you not know that? Didn’t he ask you?”
“Nope. First I’ve heard of it.”
“Great. You can pick up some of mine. I got four days in solitary confinement.”
“Gotta go. Meeting started,” Leland said, backing out of the doorway.
“Hit me up when you’re done.”
“Right…” Leland drawled, already in the hallway, the door nearly shut.
“Hale…”
Striding toward the conference room, he heard Ren’s voice through the glass, repeating his name. He didn’t stop and felt no guilt. As Dev’s first hire and unofficial second-in-command, he had seniority. They had started out with a couple of tables and chairs with free-standing monitors. Now the command center occupied a huge space in the middle of the office and looked like a military operation. He had done more than his fair share of drudgery shifts during the first few years. It was someone else’s turn: new guys with fresh eyes.
Russell on vacation.Go figure.
Time off was a foreign concept. Leland couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken more than a long weekend. Vacation meant downtime, quiet, and way too much opportunity for his brain to wander into territory he preferred to avoid. And it sounded too much like the last forty-eight hours, which had felt endless.
Leland frowned. Maybe he needed to pick up extra assignments on weekends. Out-of-town skip traces. Surveillance shifts. Hell, he’d volunteer for VIP protection details, which hedespised. Anything that kept his mind occupied. Because lately, his thoughts had developed an irritating tendency to loop to the same place.
