Page 64 of Velvet Vaughn

“Only the ones who try to argue their way out of an ambulance with a possible broken rib.” He pulled a card from his jacket pocket, pressing it into her hand before the paramedics loaded her inside. “Call me. Or text. Let me know you’re okay once they’ve patched you up.”

She studied the card, then lifted her gaze to him, something curious moving behind the pain in her eyes. “Remington Methany. That’s an interesting name.”

“It’s a name,” he agreed. “Call me anyway.”

The doors closed before she could answer, and the ambulance pulled away with its siren rising. Remi stood on the curb, watching it until it turned a corner and disappeared entirely.

A patrol officer found him then, notepad out, asking the standard questions in a tired cadence. He’d no doubt worked this type of scene a hundred times before and had grown weary of them. Remi answered most of it honestly. The other car ran the light, hit the Jeep hard, backed up, and drove off. It had no plates, front or back.

He left out the part where the sedan had been following them and that its last maneuver had looked nothing like an accident and everything like a deliberate attack. That detail belonged to Anja’s board tonight, not a patrol officer’s incident report. Remi climbed back into the Escalade.

“You good to drive?” Leo asked.

“Yeah.” Remi pulled back onto the road, adrenaline humming under his skin. A pair of turquoise eyes kept surfacing in his mind throughout the ride home, entirely against his will but refusing to be filed away quite as neatly as everything else from that afternoon.

He had a feeling it would be a long while before those eyes left him alone.

#

Remi’s call had come through as Anja watched Danica Webb chat with the sports-betting executive, his voice clipped and controlled, telling her faster than his actual words that something had gone seriously wrong.

He started with, “We’re fine.” He’d clearly learned which words to lead with when calling her mid-op. “But somebody tried to run us off the road. They didn’t succeed. It was deliberate, though that’s not what I told the cops at the scene.”

Her stomach had dropped straight through the floor of the hotel lobby, coffee forgotten on the table in front of her. Every instinct screamed to abandon the stakeout and drive straight to wherever Leo was. “Where are you? Is he hurt? Is anyone hurt?”

“We’re fine. There was a woman in another vehicle who suffered the brunt of it. An ambulance took her in, but she’ll be all right. We’re heading back to the safe house now.”

She’d thanked him, hung up, and sat with her pulse hammering for a full minute before she steadied her hands enough to pick her phone back up and finish the task in front of her. Falling apart in a hotel lobby wouldn’t keep Leo safe, and neither would abandoning the one lead currently pointing anywhere useful.

By the time she made it to the safe house that evening, the worry had cooled into something more useful. After seeing for herself that Leo was unharmed, she went straight to the case board. She blocked out a new heading beside the one she’d added that morning: Vehicular — Deliberate, and beneath it, in her tight shorthand, No plates, front or back. Coordinated timing with office breach. She underlined deliberate twice, the same way she’d underlined nothing taken that morning, because two incidents on the same day refused to look like a coincidence.

Remi’s phone buzzed against the desk, the screen flaring bright before he flipped it over. He read whatever waited there in about two seconds, a private smile curving the corner of his mouth.

“Everything all right?” She kept her tone light, more curious than probing.

“Fine.” He set the phone screen-side down beside the keyboard, his grin tucking itself away. “Just a text.”

He offered nothing else. Anja didn’t push, but she filed it away anyway under things worth remembering and turned back to the laptop.

Tyler’s face filled the screen, and his energy alone announced that the data had cracked open and started talking.

“Okay. I’ve been in Vic Shaw’s finances all afternoon, and I found something. Vic was broke. Spectacularly broke. The gambling, the divorce, two mortgages underwater. On paper, the man should’ve been eating ramen.” Tyler pointed to another line. “Except for these. Six deposits over the last nine months. Cash, structured just under the reporting threshold each time, routed through a shell company registered in the Caymans.”

“How much?” Leo peered at the screen.

“North of four hundred thousand, all in.” Tyler let that hang. “And here’s where it gets interesting. I traced the shell as far as it’ll go, which isn’t all the way, because Cayman, but far enough. The money’s parked behind a holding structure that has fingerprints all over the offshore gaming world: online betting, the Vegas crowd, the gray-market operators, the platforms muscling into every state that legalizes.”

Remi folded his arms. “Shaw was on somebody’s payroll.”

“Bingo.” Tyler nodded. “And follow the logic. You’ve got a blackmail operation collecting compromising material on pro athletes. Who on earth profits from leverage over the people who play the games? A sports-betting platform. You own dirt on a quarterback, you don’t even have to publish it. You just make sure he knows you have it, and suddenly you’ve got influence over performances that move millions in betting handle.” He spread his hands. “Motive, means, money trail. It all points in the same direction.”

Anja pulled up the photo on her phone and turned it toward Leo and Remi. “This is what I was doing today. Danica Webb had lunch with Anthony Reyes, VP at ApexPlay, a Vegas betting platform. Webb poached Leo’s client nine months ago. Her name’s on a filing tied to a vendor three of the eight athletes used, and now she’s breaking bread with a betting executive.” She set the phone down. “Nine months. Same window as Vic’s first deposit.”

Leo looked between the screen and the board, and Anja watched relief leech out of him in one long exhale. “So it’s not Pinnacle at all. It’s a betting syndicate. Webb’s feeding them, they’re paying off insiders like Vic, and the whole thing runs out of Vegas.”

“Everything points that way,” Tyler agreed.

“It’s clean.” Remi rubbed his chin.