Page 55 of In the Dark

Callahan’s voice was softer now. Consoling. It was a tone he’d never used with me. It was a voice for a woman he actually cared about, or at the very least, one he’d spent significant time between the sheets with.

The realization hit way harder than it should have. They had. The way she looked at him, the way he was handling her ego … they were definitely sleeping together. Or they had been until he decided to choose me as his Ruiz bride.

I turned away, not out of respect, but because the bile was rising in my throat. I walked a few feet away to the next desk, where a weary-looking officer was staring at a monitor.

“Busy night?” I asked, my voice sounding hollow to my own ears.

The officer looked up, blinking at me. “Not too bad. Just the usual.” He gave me a small, pitying smile, clearly sensing the tension radiating off the presence behind me.

Callahan didn’t wait for me to finish the small talk. “Jas, time to go.”

I let him walk me to the car and didn’t even fight him on the doors being opened. I wanted to be done with this day, done with thinking of him, done with thinking of all of it.

He told me the evidence was all in the file on the laptop’s home screen. He gave the computer to me when we got to my room, along with the username and password, and then he said, “Why don’t we start wedding planning tomorrow?”

There was that sickening, consoling voice, except it was out of pity for me now rather than anything else.

“Whatever you want,” I said tiredly and closed the door to my room.

I didn’t open the computer. I didn’t go near it.

Instead, I sat on my bed and took out my crocheting kit.

I did that instead for hours and hours until I fell asleep.

The next day, I sat on the edge of the bed in light-blue pajamas made from the softest, thinnest fabric with the laptop glowing like a blue omen on my lap. I didn’t click on the folder. I knew he was probably in his own office, watching the activity on the server so he could track the exact second I decided to shatter my own heart.

I felt like chickenshit. I was a fighter, a viper, a woman who had survived stabbings and drownings, but I was terrified of a few digital files. Because once I opened them, the man who raised me would be dead twice over, and I would be truly alone in this house with a man who shared his bed with beautiful detectives and looked at me like a burden.

And the more time I spent not doing anything with that information along with the SD card, I lost more and more respect for myself.

Get it together.

This is why I was here and not my cousins. They wouldn’t have been able to deal with hearing Paolo was trafficking. Or maybe they wouldn’t have cared, but this was my family’s name, and I was going to clear it if it took doing it all by myself.

I sat alone in my room until the dead of night with my laptop’s arrow hovering over that single folder that read Paolo.

I breathed in deep and glanced around my room. I was in the dark of the night, and there was only the soft glow bleeding in from under the door. Paradise Grove was quiet with its perfect lawns, soft lights at the gate, and extravagant homes. So perfect that it wasn’t perfect at all for me.

I clicked the folder, ready to shake up the flawless place with whatever evidence Callahan provided.

The first files were financial, all ledgers I recognized because I’d been a part of all this. These were routing paths I’d set up myself, along with companies we’d created, to layer in and space out just enough to pass audits. I knew I was good at illegally making money disappear and reappear clean.

This wasn’t at all a surprise, and I started to relax, like maybe Callahan had nothing more on my family than I already knew. We were all a bit dirty with our money. And I’d known Paolo kept things from me. To him, I was just a woman, after all. My aunt was never given any sort of information either.

Men had big egos and hoarding secrets made them feel powerful.

But when I swiped to the next file, I realized how stupid I’d been to allow him to build up his ego, because where the money came from was a company he told me was for firearms.

Yet, instead, I clicked the company name file and there was security footage.

My stomach dropped as I watched the grainy profile of him in a warehouse I recognized immediately as one of our own. The layout was the exact restructure I’d sat through meetings with him on.

It was supposed to be for weapons.

We’d made deals internationally that even the government knew about. It was mostly clean, and I was proud of the revenue stream until I saw a truck backing in. And when the doors opened, the bile rose in my throat.

The women and children, much too young and much too obedient, were herded out of the truck.