Page 73 of Remington’s Mate

As if his thought had conjured the devil, an alert sounded on Remy’s phone. It was from the keylogger software.

Ethan Sutcliffe had finally accessed his offshore bank accounts.

Remy ran inside and got his laptop, watching while the information came through. Bank codes. Passwords. Cloud account access.

As soon as he had the information, his encrypted little Trojan horse kicked in. It went into all Sutcliffe’s cloud accounts and secretly dumped all his files into another account Remy had set up, and then moved them to another and another—a whole encrypted chain until it landed on his own server.

As all this was going on, he was watching the bank accounts, waiting to see if Sutcliffe started to withdraw the money. If he did, a failsafe would kick in to divert it to one of Remy’s accounts.

He didn’t want to do that yet, though. He didn’t want Sutcliffe to know they were after him until it was too late.

He watched as Sutcliffe transferred more money into the accounts. The skim for the substandard materials, Remy realized. They’d been delivered earlier in the week under Colt’s signature, but it took a while for the payment to process—the excess of which was diverted to Sutcliffe’s account.

Remy waited for Colt’s cut to be transferred out to the account they’d set up, as Sutcliffe had promised him when the materials were delivered. He was unsurprised when it didn’t happen. They suspected that Sutcliffe’s original plan was to pay Colt and make sure the paper trail led to him, in case the building failed or anyone caught on to the scam.

The fact that it didn’t happen confirmed that Sutcliffe had probably moved on to Plan B—not to pay Colt, and get rid of him instead.

Sutcliffe didn’t know if Jaeda was alive or dead, but he knew she had friends who’d come in to rescue her the night she’d been shot. What he didn’t know was whether Colt was one of them.

Colt had been going to work as usual, and had pretended not to know where Jaeda was. Sutcliffe had told him she quit and disappeared. Colt had given him shit about it, hoping they’d put him off the track, but they’d suspected Sutcliffe might consider Colt to be too much of a loose cannon to risk leaving him alive.

Their only hope had been to keep Sutcliffe hanging on until the deal was made and they got all the evidence they needed—plus access to Sutcliffe’s money.

Now they had it. It was time.

Chapter 29

They let twenty-four hours go by after Colt was supposed to have gotten paid. Then he called Sutcliffe, bitching about his money.

“There’s been a delay,” Sutcliffe said. “We need to meet.”

He gave Colt a time and place—the next night, at a secluded barn in the country where Sutcliffe had had the substandard materials delivered before they got to the construction site.

Colt and a couple of other guys had gone in and changed the labeling and markings on the materials to make everything look like the real deal.

Colt had come back in a bad, bad mood after having to do that. He was out for blood.

So was Remy. Sutcliffe had tried to personally assault Jaeda, and then had ordered his guys to take her out. He wanted to meet the fucker up close and personal and make him pay.

“Okay,” Brandon said, when they met in his office to make their plans. “We need to get out to the barn early and set up an ambush. Then when Colt goes in, we’ll take out Sutcliffe’s guys and get Sutcliffe before he can run.”

“Are we turning him over to the cops?” Colt asked. He sounded like he hoped not.

Brandon said, “Unfortunately, yes. That’s the downside to taking cases involving humans. The Shifter Council put me in touch with someone at the FBI we can trust. Since Sutcliffe’s fraud was perpetrated in at least two states, it’s FBI jurisdiction. But it would take days, if not weeks, before they could go through everything we have and move on him. I’d really like to get a confession from him and take him tonight.”

“You want me to go in wired?” Colt asked.

Brandon shook his head. “He’s too paranoid—he’ll check you for that right away. One of you needs to fly in early and plant parabolic mics under the eaves on the outside of the barn, and in the rafters inside, to record everything that gets said. If we’re really lucky, he’ll cop to trying to kill Jaeda.”

“I’ll do that,” said Remy.

“Okay,” Brandon said. “Here’s what we’ll do. Kitty, Remy, Titan and I will get out there early, come in cross-country and set up our perimeter, plus the microphones. Also, Brock offered to come in on this, and I agreed, so we’ll have more manpower.”

He looked at the twins. “Colt will stay in the hotel, and drive out to the meeting at the time Sutcliffe said, so his spies will report that everything’s going according to plan.”

“Callie wants to come too,” Colt said. “She’s pissed about Jaeda getting hurt. And we could use another gun—this guy is smart and tricky.”

“That leaves Jaeda alone at the safe house,” Remy pointed out. “I’m opposed. I’m even more opposed to leaving her out here at the territory alone.”