Page 102 of Velvet Vaughn

Chapter Twenty-Two

The two thugs hauled Leo up by his bound wrists. His bullet wound screamed loud enough to blur his vision at the edges. Blood ran warm down his chin, dripping onto the hardwood Curtis probably paid a fortune to have imported. Leo concentrated on that single absurd detail because it was easier than focusing on the two men gripping him hard enough to bruise or the man watching from behind the desk wearing an expression that bordered on grief.

“Careful with him.” Curtis rose from his chair. “No need to make this worse than it has to be.”

“Worse than it has to be.” Leo spat blood onto the Persian silk rug, a petty, useless act of defiance that cost him a fresh jab of pain in his ribs from the man on his left. “You’re having me beaten in your office, Curtis. Tell me what part of that isn’t worse.”

Curtis came around the desk, straightened his cuffs with maddening normalcy, and gestured toward the door.

They dragged him through it, his shoes skidding uselessly against the polished floor. The hallway swam past him in a smear of framed photographs. Near the end, Lydia stood just outside the kitchen doorway in her bright cardigan and her fixed, unnatural smile, watching him get hauled past her with the detached indifference reserved for a piece of furniture being moved.

“Lydia.” Her name tore out of him, half a plea, half a last, desperate grasp at the world he’d believed in a half hour ago. “Lydia, please call the police.”

She stared mutely at him. For one fractured second, something human flickered across her face that might have been pity, or more likely, the last surviving ghost of the woman who’d once told him she was so happy Leo had found somebody. Then she turned away and walked back into the kitchen without a single word, her heels clicking against the tile in an unhurried, ordinary rhythm, as though a bleeding man dragged past her front hall was simply Tuesday in this house.

The betrayal landed harder than any punch they’d thrown. She’d known. Maybe not everything, but enough to greet him at the door with a smile stretched too bright over something rotten underneath. Enough to lead him straight to the man who’d have him killed. And certainly enough to turn her back the second it mattered.

The front door opened to a black SUV idling in the circular drive, headlights off, a driver Leo didn’t recognize sitting motionless behind the wheel. The two men shoved him into the middle row. One climbed into the passenger seat while the other took the back row. Curtis settled beside Leo, smoothing his coat beneath him with the same fastidious care he brought to everything. He pulled the door shut with a slam that sounded far too much like a coffin lid closing.

“Drive,” Curtis commanded, and the SUV rolled forward, gravel crunching under the tires. Lydia’s bright windows shrank in the side mirror until the trees swallowed them whole.

For a long stretch, nobody spoke. Leo’s whole body throbbed in time with his pulse, his wrists rubbed raw against whatever they’d used to bind them. He stared straight ahead at the back of the driver’s seat because looking at Curtis felt unbearable and looking away felt too much like surrender.

“Why?” The word cracked out of him, rough and disbelieving.

Curtis exhaled long and slow. Leo wasn’t sure he’d answer. Then he began to speak.

“Do you know what leverage actually is, Leo?” He turned his head, studying Leo’s bloodied face. “Everyone in this industry throws the word around as if it’s a strategy. It’s not. It’s the only honest currency that exists in professional sports. Everyone is manipulating someone. Owners manipulate players. Media manipulates fans. Agents manipulate everyone, including their own clients, and call it representation. I made the manipulation explicit. And profitable.”

“You’re talking about blackmail.” Leo’s voice shook, more fury than fear now, though both were fighting for equal space inside him. “You’re talking about ruining families to fix games.”

“I’m talking about owning the only leverage that’s ever actually worked in this business.” Curtis’s tone stayed gentle, a professor correcting a promising student’s misunderstanding. “You don’t threaten the athlete, Leo. Rule number one. Athletes have lawyers and agents. They have public platforms, and they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by exposing you. You go through the people they love. A mother with a gambling debt nobody can trace back to her paying itself off overnight. A brother’s immigration case resolving with a phone call. A sister’s stalker problem instantly disappearing.” He shook his head slowly. “The athlete never even meets me. He learns, eventually, that a favor is owed, and it’s one he can’t refuse, because as soon as he does, the good thing that happened to someone he loves gets taken right back.”

“And then what?” Leo’s jaw ached with every word, blood pooling thick at the back of his throat. “They throw games for you?”

“Rarely something so crude.” Curtis seemed faintly offended by the suggestion. “A missed free throw, or a phantom injury that sits a player out for one specific quarter, or a trade-demand rumor planted at exactly the right point to move a market. No single incident raises an eyebrow, Leo. The pattern only becomes visible if somebody has the entire library in front of them, which is precisely why Vic’s little thumb drive terrified me so completely. Eight dossiers. I’ve built north of sixty over the last two decades, and he only ever saw eight, but it was enough to bring everything down.”

“Sixty families.”

“Give or take.” Curtis sounded so pleasant, he could’ve been delivering a quarterly earnings report. “Some are active while others have retired. There are a few I never even had to use but were simply insurance held in reserve for a future I hadn’t needed yet. It’s two decades of very patient work, Leo, and I built every piece of it myself, one relationship at a time.”

“Who buys it?” Leo forced the question out through gritted teeth, some instinct that refused to fully accept there might not be anyone left to tell. “Who pays you for this?”

“Betting syndicates, mostly. A single manufactured turnover in the right quarter of the right game moves millions in prop bets. That’s the most lucrative piece of it by far.” Curtis ticked it off with two fingers against his knee. “Rival front offices pay well, too, for the right injury report or a timely trade rumor. And private interests pay the most reliably of anyone, because an athlete who owes you a favor through his mother will show up at your fundraiser and put his name on your product for the rest of his career and never once ask why.”

“That’s not sports management.” Leo snarled. “That’s not what you told me this job was, Curtis. You told me representation meant protecting people.”

“I did protect people.” Curtis’s eyes sharpened for the first time, the warmth cooling into cold calculation. “I protected the ones who mattered. My clients got the best contracts in the league because I owned enough clout over the entire system to guarantee it. My family. This firm. The people who worked for me. They’ve all lived very well because of what I built. I never once apologized for that, and I’m not going to start today.”

“You murdered Vic.” Leo’s voice shook now, grief tangling with rage in a way that made it hard to keep his words coherent.

“Vic got careless.” For the first time, regret flickered across Curtis’s face, brief and genuine and utterly useless.

“You had him killed for trying to do the right thing.”

“I had him removed because he was going to destroy twenty years of work and everyone attached to it, including you.” The warmth disappeared. “Do you understand that part, Leo? You were never a target. You were the only piece of this whole architecture I wanted to protect. I brought you into Pinnacle six years ago because I’d been watching you since your playing days, and I knew who you were. Loyal. Principled. A face that makes an entire operation look clean simply by standing next to it.” He shook his head slowly. “That wasn’t only strategy. I want you to believe that, whatever else you think of me tonight. I taught you this business because I respected you and loved you like the son I never had. Ask Lydia. She’ll tell you the same thing.”

“Lydia just watched them drag me out of your house bleeding like a stuck pig and turned away like I was nothing.” Leo’s voice cracked entirely now. “How long has she known?”