Page 37 of Velvet Vaughn

She considered that. “Then tell him we met through Chloe.”

It was the cleanest possible answer, true enough to hold up, and for a second he just looked at her. She’d had that ready. Of course she’d had that ready.

Everyone at his office knew what had happened to Chloe a few months ago since it was all over the news, but they didn’t know about Anja.

“Got it.”

She closed the laptop. “The stylist expects me at two to pick out a dress. Ninety minutes tops, then back here to brief you on the questions before we leave.”

He drummed his fingers once on the counter. “Three questions for Devonte.”

“Write them down. I’ll refine them on the drive.”

“You want me to write the questions?”

“You know him. I don’t.” She pushed off the stool and carried her mug to the sink. “Write them how you’d actually talk to him, not how an operative would. He needs to think it’s a conversation, not an intake form.”

Leo pulled his notepad with the Pinnacle logo from the junk drawer and uncapped a pen. Questions for Devonte, a twenty-six-year-old Pro Bowl wide receiver. The kid who’d called Leo at midnight from the hospital when his son was born three weeks early because he hadn’t known who else to call that late.

He wrote: Anything strange happen in the last few months? Anyone new around the family? Anything that felt off and you wrote off as nothing?

He set the pen down and studied what he’d written.

“Anja.”

She glanced over from the sink.

“He’s going to give me the clean version first.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m going to have to push past it.”

“Yes.”

He tapped the notepad once. The Pinnacle logo stared back at him. He flipped it over. “Okay. Let’s go get you a dress.”

#

The boutique didn’t have a sign.

That was the first thing Anja noticed when Leo pulled the Range Rover into the narrow alley off Maryland Avenue. A lacquered black door set flush into the brick and a security camera angled above the frame. There was nothing else, not a flashy window display, a placard with hours posted, or even any evidence that the building was anything other than a very expensive wall.

“This is it,” Leo announced.

“BeBe does nothing halfway.”

“I’ve noticed.”

He came around and held the door, because apparently that was something Leo De Luca did without thinking about it. Manners were underappreciated. Anja walked past him to knock on the door. It opened with a click into a space that smelled like patchouli and dry-cleaned silk and money.

The private fitting suite was located behind a second door, accessed through a narrow hallway lined with covered racks. A woman came out to greet them. It was hard to determine her age. She was anywhere from forty to seventy, Russian-boned, with silver hair pulled into a chignon and reading glasses pushed up on her forehead like a crown. She wore a crimson blazer and the expression of having dressed diplomats’ wives and movie stars.

“Larisa Morozova.” She extended her hand to Anja for a brief, professional shake. Then she turned her attention to Leo. “You are the boyfriend.”

“That’s the working theory,” Leo said pleasantly.

Larisa studied him for two full seconds. Then she pointed at a pair of chairs set against the far wall with a table between them holding a bottle of sparkling water and two glasses. “Sit.”