Chapter 13
Do beavers even know what they’re doing, or do they just see water flow and think, “absolutely not?”
— Text from Dima to Keely
DIMA
Getting down onto my haunches, I stared at the stupid woman.
“ Do you need to die to finally understand that you’re not as strong as you think you are?” I asked her. “ That was quite dumb, like she said.”
Dorie blinked.
“ Don’t come around anymore,” I emphasized. “ I don’t want you here.”
With that, I walked back to my bike and hopped on it.
I considered following behind her the entire way, but I wanted to get into the building before she got there to ensure that I could get a good feel for how she was treated there.
I passed her on the hell that was 635, then took a cut-off and zipped through side streets and between traffic before parking in the back lot next to what I knew to be Copper’s truck.
At some point in the last few days, he’d gone and bought it at the first Ford dealership he could find.
It wasn’t fancy.
In fact, it looked more like a basic, non-descript truck that would blend in with everything.
Which was likely his goal.
Moving the bike into the parking spot beside the truck, I maneuvered it so that Keely could get in behind me mostly all the way, then headed into the building.
I went in through the back door that employees used and didn’t have to swipe a badge or anything to get in, which was slightly concerning.
If Keely was going to spend any amount of time here, she would need to get better security in place. I wouldn’t be comfortable with her working in such a high-profile position without even basic security.
I tracked her phone to make sure she arrived safely as I simultaneously entered the main building to take the lay of the land.
She arrived five minutes after me, and didn’t waste time getting into the building.
Her first stop was a security desk that would stop most honest people but hadn’t stopped me.
Hell , the man hadn’t even seen me slip past him because he’d been busy on his phone.
“ Ahh , if it isn’t Tequila Clayborne ,” a greasy looking man said from beside the security desk.
Keely didn’t bother to acknowledge him as she kept walking past security to the elevator.
Before the man could follow her onto the elevator, I stepped into his path on ‘accident’ and stayed there until the doors of the elevator closed.
“ Hey , what do you think you’re doing?” the greasy fuck asked.
I ignored him and kept walking, heading to the stairs.
“ Inbred degenerate,” the grease stain grumbled as he pressed the button for the elevator.
I took the eight flights of stairs to the top floor, then headed past multiple people milling in the hallways to head for the conference room.
I passed Keely talking to her secretary, rubbing my hand against her ass as I did, and continued on into the conference room.
Chevy , Copper , and Cutter were already there.
They stopped talking when I entered.
“ What are you doing here?” Cutter asked.
Before he could reply, Keely entered and shut the door.
She stared down the three men that were eyeing me, then answered with a small smile on her face, “ I’m seeing him.”
“ What ?” Cutter looked adorably confused for such a big guy.
“ Seeing ,” she repeated slower. “ As in, dating him? Do you know what that is? Oh , wait. You just skip from meeting to marrying.”
Chevy snorted.
Cutter bared his teeth at her but didn’t look mad at her words.
Copper leaned back in his chair and studied me.
Out of them all, Copper was the most dangerous.
I knew that before I’d even walked into the room.
I’d spied him at the table from the back of the hallway, and even though he hadn’t acted like he’d seen me, I knew he’d clocked me from the moment he had line of sight.
That was prison life for you, though. You always had to watch your back.
“ You need to do something about security.” I diverted away from the dating thing. “ She won’t be coming back until you can make it safe for her to be in the building.”
Copper’s brows rose. “ What makes you think she wasn’t safe?”
“ The fact that I just walked past multiple people and wasn’t asked who I was?” I shrugged.
“ I’m working on it.” He sighed. “ This is a huge shit pile, and it’s taking a lot of time to sort through everything.”
“ Security first, then other matters later,” I offered. “ You were locked up a long time, so I know you know the importance of surprise attacks.”
Something shuttered in Copper’s eyes.
Keely put her crap onto the seat next to the one I assumed she was taking and said, “ Copper , I know that you love me, but I just want to tell you that I hate scrambled eggs now.”
Copper’s eyes narrowed and focused on her.
“ Since when?” he asked carefully. “ They used to be your favorite.”
“ Since I was fifteen and decided that they smelled like wet dog.” She shrugged. “ I really like over-hard eggs, but I also like anything that’s not scrambled as long as it has salt and pepper.”
“ You can have mine,” he offered.
She waved her hand in the air. “ I had McDonald’s about two and a half hours ago, so I’m good.”
“ Okay .” He looked a little bit hurt that she wasn’t going to eat the food he ordered.
“ Dima’s going to eat it, though,” she blurted.
My brows rose and I glanced over at Keely to see her staring at me pleadingly.
She’d seen the look on Copper’s face, too.
I eyed the food.
I didn’t usually eat poorly for any meal of the day.
My body was a temple, and all that jazz.
In reality, I just didn’t like sweets all that much.
I also didn’t like anything that was greasy.
And by the looks of the bags on the tabletop, everything there was greasy.
But if she wanted me to eat her food, I’d eat it.
“ Yep , starving,” I lied.
“ How did you two meet?” Chevy asked curiously.
“ That’ll have to wait for later,” Copper said. “ We can catch up after. There’s a reason I asked you to be here today.”
Chevy leaned back and crossed his hands over his chest, eyes on his brother.
I took the seat directly across from Keely and next to Cutter .
“ We’re going to talk about this after we’re done,” Cutter grumbled under his breath.
I grunted in answer.
“ What’s going on?” Keely asked as she took her seat.
Copper started pushing food toward us and I reluctantly opened the bag that had grease stains in the wake of the bag sliding.
Pancakes , biscuits, scrambled eggs, bacon, and a shit ton of jelly and syrup.
I pulled out the bacon and eggs and started eating.
Mostly , they were about as good as you could ask for.
I preferred egg whites and turkey bacon, but I’d live.
As I ate, I listened to Keely and the three brothers discussing the business and found it thoroughly boring.
Basically what I got from it was that the top shareholders had been embezzling money for years, and Copper was discussing what was next.
Next being cops, lawyers, and a whole lot of shit that I didn’t want to deal with.
Luckily , the only reason Copper needed the three of the siblings there was that with them all, they owned the majority share of the business. And even with the top three shareholders not selling their shares, they still owned the majority and could take the business any which way they wanted.
Cutter and Chevy immediately offered to sell their shares.
Keely looked at her brother a little longer and said, “ Do you need me here, Copper ?”
Copper looked at her.
“ Long term, if you don’t want to be here, then no. I don’t need you here. But short term, until we can transition everyone over to me, yes.” He looked from her to the brothers and back. “ The money you saved for me over the last fifteen years was very generous, and I can easily buy the three of you out of your shares.” He looked ravaged. “ I can never thank you enough for all that you’ve done.”
I started tuning in at that.
In my sleuthing, I’d seen that they all three had accounts that they used to save money each month. Though Keely’s was quite a bit smaller than the ones that her brothers had managed.
However , the money that Keely had drawn from the Castanon Enterprises had gone untouched since she’d started drawing a salary.
I’d noticed yesterday when I’d gotten an alert about the account that it was now empty and had all been transferred into a separate account that also had Copper as the main account holder, with Keely as a signer on the account.
“ Copper ,” Keely whispered. “ All of that money would’ve been yours anyway had you been able to work.”
“ You’re wrong,” he disagreed. “ Y’all wouldn’t have had to give up part of your salaries each month, or work quite as hard, if I’d also been here. But I’m not going to get into an argument with you about it. I’m going to just say thank you, buy out your shares, build up this business, then spend the rest of my life thanking you in any way that I can.”
“ Copper …” Cutter said.
“ You’ll have babies,” Copper interrupted.
“ Yeah …” Cutter hesitated.
“ And if you won’t take the money for yourself, you’ll take the money for them.” He looked at me then. “ Not saying that Milena and you won’t already be set for life thanks to other extracurriculars, but at least when it comes from me, you won’t be worried about a government investigator questioning how you got it.”
I flashed my teeth at him.
We cleaned our money very fuckin’ well, thank you very much!
There was nobody that would find any hint of illegal wrongdoing in our money.
Cutter sighed. “ Just as long as you don’t start helping us until you’ve fully gotten yourself situated.”
“ That’s a promise I can make,” Copper agreed. “ Keely , I estimate that I’ll need you about six more months.” He paused. “ Full -time.”
Keely opened her mouth and then closed it.
“ You want me to quit my job?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting to hear her reply.
I knew she didn’t much like her job at the sleep center, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t find a better job somewhere else in the nursing field.
“ You hate nursing,” Copper said. “ I’m doing you a favor.”
“ And what happens after six months?” I asked.
“ She can stay on in any capacity that she would like, with the knowledge that all she’ll have to do is what she wants to do, and nothing more. Or she can pull a salary and take time off until she figures out what she wants.” He shrugged. “ In six months, we can revisit.”
Keely looked intrigued. “ I know you think that I know this place well, and that everyone will listen to me, but Copper … I did the absolute bare minimum here to keep it running. I kept all the stupid things from getting done when all the losers on the board wanted to take it in a different direction than what you wanted. But Copper …they don’t really know me.”
“ They do, and they’ll need a familiar face when I take the board and dismantle it,” he elaborated.
For some reason, I didn’t feel like the dismantling of the board would be as easy as he thought it was.
I’d kill them all if I thought it would help Keely in the long run, but I had a feeling that anything that happened to those six men would garner quite a bit of media attention.
Copper would likely have to do this all by the book to avoid the cops coming after him.
And he would be the first person that they looked at.
Ex -con coming into a business of his father’s—a father that he killed—and all of the board members get taken out?
I wasn’t even a cop and that would be the first place I’d look, too.
“ I’ll do it under one condition,” she finally said.
“ Anything .”
“ You let me work my own hours,” she said, her eyes coming to me. “ If you need me at a certain time, I’ll be here. But I don’t want to be a slave to this place.”
“ Done .”
“ And you also have to quit my job for me. I don’t like doing that.”
Copper chuckled. “ Does it have to be a phone call, or will an email work?”
She shrugged. “ Email should be fine.”
“ I’ll get it sent to you ASAP , and all you have to do is copy and paste it.”
Copper’s grin was boyish in that moment, as if he loved the idea of working with Keely .
I wondered, idly, what made her hate the nursing job that she’d gone to school for and made a mental note to ask her why when we were at home by ourselves later.
I polished off the bacon and eggs, and then discreetly pushed the rest back into the middle of the table so it didn’t look like I wasn’t eating it.
When the meeting wrapped up, Copper turned to me and said, “ What do you think about tightening up the security here?”
I thought about it for a moment and said, “ I could do it. But I’m not an expert. I think you’d need an expert, and I have a suggestion if you don’t mind spending the money.”
“ Who ?” he asked.
“ Brecken , Shasha’s wife, has some brothers that their whole job is to build and fortify businesses and homes that can withstand a siege. I think that if they can do it, they’d be great options. And if they don’t have the immediate availability, they’d know someone who does.” I pulled out my phone and sent the contact to his phone. “ I’m good at protecting people or killing them. But not in a security mindset.”
“ Dima ,” Keely scolded me. “ This place isn’t secure.”
I flashed an impish look at her and said, “ This room is. I checked it.”
Her brows rose. “ You did?”
I pulled out the small device from my pocket that I’d turned on when I’d walked in the room and said, “ It blocks radio frequencies. Nothing that we say will make it out of this room. Not even our phones would’ve worked until I turned it off.”
“ Oh ,” she frowned. “ Do you think that we should be worried about what’s here?”
“ I think that the board members are feeling the squeeze, and they’ll do just about anything to make sure that they stay where they want to be,” I said. “ From what you shared about Copper’s last meeting with them and you, I think they might be really feeling that squeeze.”
“ That’s why I’m not in an office, or Keely’s office yet.” Copper sighed. “ I’m still pretty far behind the technology curve. I have Apollo coming out soon to hook up our entire building with cyber security, but until then, this is the only room he assured me was safe. And he also told me not to use anything of the company’s equipment until he could get a look at it.”
Keely sighed. “ It sounds like this is going to be a long six months.”
Copper grinned. “ I can’t wait.”