Page 24 of Threaded Lies

So many fucking ways.

“WillowBend, I assume?” Bob asks.

“Yes. The owners are teetering on defaulting on their loan. They’re more than late on their payments.”

“Even with the ten percent they received closing the deal?”

I glance down the hallway through the wall of windows on my office toward Rhett’s. My door is closed. I can speak freely. “That ten percent doesn’t stretch far when you have to account for taxes, lawyers, accountants, the disbursement to the other shareholders.” I smirk and then scowl. “Then there’s the upcoming wedding. No doubt both sets of parents will request to pull funds from their family trusts—”

“Which now have virtually nonexistent balances.”

“Correct. I mean, if you’re throwing the biggest wedding Westmore’s ever seen, then no doubt you only want the best of everything.” I choke on the words and hate the acrid taste they leave on my tongue.

“It’s a tough way to live, robbing Peter to pay Paul and then floating the funds again so Peter thinks he’s still rich.”

“Shell game,” I murmur. Been there, done that. It was the only way I could survive at times. But my game was to deceive banks into giving me more loans, not to trick my parents so they don’t know I siphoned all the funds from their accounts. “Spread the wealth around. Put enough in the trust to pay for the wedding so no one questions anything. Give enough of a payment on the loan to satisfy the lender that more is coming.”

“The lender will allow that?”

“When your last name is Rothschild or Williams, you get endless favors.”

He chuckles. “Clearly they don’t truly know the man with the last name Knight.”

“Clearly.” I stretch my fingers and for the first time in days feel slightly more in control of things. “We’ll need to watch TinSpirits’ accounts as well. No doubt they’ll try something—a big payment to a nonexistent supplier or something in case they get in trouble.”

“I’m assuming you have that taken care of on your end?” Bob asks.

“I have. Yes.” I put triggers in TinSpirits’ operating system long before we inked a letter of intent. And those safeguards have allowed me to follow a trail of payments. Knowledge is power and they have no clue how much I have on them.

“Okay, so … what do you need from me?”

“Give them hope that WillowBend is sold. We’ll string those assholes along. Get right up to the signing day and then I’ll yank it the fuck away from them with a public decree of how they’re falsifying reports. Get the real estate board to investigate them for fraud.”

“Perfect. The fuckers are slimy.”

Chadwick walks out of his office and glances down the hall toward mine. I meet his eyes but don’t react outwardly otherwise. My hands fist and shoulders tense. What is it you’re giving her that I can’t?

“They sure are,” I murmur. “Like I said, I want it to hurt.”

Then Chadwick walks to the door of Rowan’s office, leans his hip against the doorframe, and laughs that fucking laugh again presumably at something she says.

“Holden?”

Chadwick looks back over his shoulder and smirks my way.

Oh, how I want it to fucking hurt.

“Yeah. Sorry. Where were we?” I swivel in my chair so my back is to the show in the hall. “They’re going to panic, Bob. What’s the last thing you want to happen when you’re running for public office?”

“A scandal. An exposé. Running out of money.”

“Exactly. And right now all three are threatening Rhett. So they’ll fight. They’ll call in favors. They’ll hold on. And then the house of cards will crumble.”

“You really think Chadwick will remain loyal and at Rhett’s side?”

I think of the damn lighter left in the gutter. Clank. Click. Clank. The best friend, Rhett, who’s kept a secret for Chadwick for all these years.

“Each knows where the other has buried the bodies. There’s no way they’d betray each other now.”