Chapter 5 #2
“I knew that she was already doing some things that she shouldn’t have been,” Sawyer murmured.
“I had my own private investigator on her. Mostly because I was gathering evidence of her dalliances so that I could file for divorce and not have to pay her half of my company since she was with me when we started it.”
“Whoa,” I said.
“I fired my private investigator because he was obviously not doing a good enough job. Then I hired a retired SEAL to do the investigating.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
I looked behind me to see Denver standing there.
Well, I knew him as Boone’s Uncle Sinclair first. Denver, president of the Dixie Wardens MC Montana Chapter, second.
“Sinclair!” I smiled and got up, walking into his arms.
He wrapped me in a hug and kissed the top of my head.
When I pulled away, his warm honey eyes sparkled.
Then he whispered, “Congrats.”
I blinked.
He winked.
And I knew somehow he knew.
Like he always knew.
He let me go, and I walked back to my seat next to Eddy and across from Boone.
Boone’s shoulders were stiff, but his words weren’t.
“Denver had already been poking his nose around. There were some things that didn’t quite line up when it came to my mother’s and dad’s relationship.”
“A lot,” Denver cut in. “I never knew that Boone wasn’t biologically related to Sawyer until they told me, though.”
My breath hitched.
Sawyer was such a good dad.
No one would know that Felicia and Boone weren’t his by the way he treated them.
They were his kids, no matter if they were biologically his or not.
“When we started to look into her more fully, we found a much bigger mess than we could’ve ever expected,” Sawyer stated, steepling his fingers over his chest. “Did we find evidence that she was complicit in your miscarriage? Yes. But that wasn’t all. Nor the worst.”
I couldn’t think of anything worse.
I mean, my child was killed.
What could be worse than that?
“And don’t think that I’m downgrading what happened to you.” Sawyer read the thoughts that were crossing my face.
I looked over to Boone to see his hands fisted on his knees, so tight that they were bloodless.
“It started out when she was sixteen and dropped her baby off at the fire station.”
I inhaled deeply.
“She decided that she couldn’t be a mother, and just poof. Gone,” Boone said.
“She got caught up with a couple of guys that ran long cons. They were fleecing old people out of their life savings. Young people out of their homes. Then they met Gail, and they started to aim higher. When she turned seventeen, Gail ran her first long con. She targeted a rich dude that liked young girls. They got married. Then he would die of mysterious circumstances. She did this four more times before she met me,” Sawyer explained.
“Why didn’t she kill you already?”
Eddy snorted at my words, but it was an honest question.
I mean, why had she spent that long with Sawyer after she’d found such a good thing marrying and killing off her husbands?
“Because with me she had a better thing going,” he said. “With me, I’d just created a tech company that would net millions.”
“So she stayed with you so she could get a steady income?” I guessed.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “She’s been funneling millions out of my company for years now. Right now, she’s up to about five hundred and ninety-five million. All of it tax-free.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
“She gives half of her income to those guys and keeps half of it herself in an offshore bank account,” Boone said. “But we’re not the only job that she’s running. She’s also sucking dry all of the charities that she’s a chairman of. She funnels off the top a little bit at a time.”
“She’s up to about seven hundred million off of all of her charities,” Denver added. “She also has her fingers in a lot of pies. A lot of pies that are financially sound and won’t notice that she’s stealing from them.”
“Whoa,” I breathed.
“A couple of years ago, when one of the guys that she originally hooked up with wanted more than she wanted to give, she hired a hit man and had him killed,” Denver continued. “The one guy left is really good with computers. A black hat hacker that saw no issues in Gail’s methods.”
“So what now?” I finally asked. “How does all of this work?”
And, just sayin’, I still thought my loss was greater than all of that.
I could hate Gail for what she’d done to Sawyer and Boone in general. But I was forever going to be gutted for what she’d done to me.
She’d stolen something precious. Something completely and utterly innocent.
I would never, ever forgive her for that.
But it was nice to see that Boone had finally cottoned on to what was going on with his own family.
That didn’t fix the past, but it definitely helped toward the future.
Maybe I could trust him with our daughter.
Maybe he wouldn’t let that crazy bitch anywhere near her.
“We also think that Felicia isn’t the baby that she was pregnant with.”
That bomb went off, silent but deadly.
Sawyer’s words felt like gunshots in the otherwise silent room.
My brows were high as I breathed, “What?”
“We think that she kidnapped Felicia when she was an infant.” Denver moved toward the middle of the room and took a seat on Sawyer’s desk.
Sawyer moved the cup of pencils before he could knock them over.
“How does that even happen?” Eddy spoke her first words since they started.
“At first, I thought that Felicia was just another child that was Gail’s but not mine.” Sawyer sighed. “But we found out that Gail visits a girl in Bear Pass once a week.”
“And she looks just like Dad,” Boone added. “Same honey-colored eyes. Same copper-colored hair. Same skin tone. Same nose.”
I opened my mouth and closed it, unsure what to say.
“Why?”
“Control and collateral,” Denver added, his voice grumpy and cold. “We think that she’s insurance in case Sawyer ever finds out everything.”
“Why? Who raised her? Who is Felicia?”
“Gail sees her a bunch, actually,” Sawyer admitted. “Has since she was an infant. But she lives with the hacker, Kurt Pruitt.”
“Ida Bell Pruitt?” I squeaked.
They all looked at me. “You know her?”
“We graduated with her, Boone,” I pointed out. “She was that girl that always got bullied for being a nerd. The redhead that got shoved into a locker once a week by all the high school bullies.”
Boone’s eyes narrowed as anger lit his eyes.
Sawyer cursed.
Denver was the only one who didn’t look surprised.
“And Felicia? Where does she fit in all this?”
“We think she knows,” Sawyer sighed. “Not at first. At first, she was just a little girl. My little girl. But now, we think that she’s helping Kurt and Gail run the cons. Didn’t you see her brand-new Mercedes G-Wagon? I didn’t buy that for her.”
“Whoa,” Eddy mumbled.
“So what is it that you’re doing now?” I asked. “Why are you telling me all of this?”
Boone leveled me with a look that said, ‘I know you know why.’
I looked down at my lap. “Because the only way to fix this is to get her out of my life. We’ve spent the last two years tracing the money, but as we said, Kurt’s a really freakin’ good hacker.”
“What about Apollo?”
Apollo was the man that’d helped all of the men that’d once been in prison get out. He’d planned out new lives for them. Created new identities. Established a history in the town. Found them the Dixie Wardens MC.
I was probably one of a couple thousand townspeople that would’ve known the truth when the men had arrived due solely to the fact that I’d had a tie-in to the club.
I knew the members, though not well seeing as Boone had joined after we were a thing.
But Denver had always been a part of them, and he hadn’t shied away from bringing his club members to the family functions that Sawyer had put on.
Not that Sawyer would’ve ever denied a single person a place at his table.
He wasn’t a part of the club, but he was the most giving man I knew.
“He’s been steadily looking into it. But we can’t have him found.”
I knew why.
Because Apollo was protecting some ex-cons. Some escaped convicts that were now considered dead to the world, and Apollo couldn’t be found out.
An escaped convict, one of which my sister happened to be getting married to.
It was understandable that this operation would need to be very delicate.
“Shit,” Weaver sighed, his first words added to this conversation. “What’s the plan then? How are you going to fix this?”
Because he knew, just as I did, that something needed to be done.
“We’re still trying to find out everything,” Sawyer admitted.
“Gail’s not very smart about how she’s doing things.
But the man, Kurt Pruitt, is. He cleans up after her constantly.
But sometimes, Gail slips up, and we find the information before Kurt gets to it.
We now know where the woman we think is my daughter, Ida Bell, is.
Apollo has also helped us slip some tracking devices on their phones.
Kurt doesn’t clean those up but once every couple of months.
We have someone tailing both Gail and Felicia everywhere they go.
We know their schedules. We know their way into the company. And now the FBI is involved.”
I blinked. “You involved the FBI?”
“We had to.” Denver crossed his arms over his chest, causing his muscles to bulge. It was a sight to see, for sure. “Mostly because they were already onto us because of a huge money movement that Gail made a few months ago thinking we wouldn’t notice when we merged with another tech business.”
“How much did she take?” Weaver asked.
“Eleven million.” Sawyer shook his head. “Way too much to go under the radar of the government. But we’re working with the FBI now, and they have access to a few hackers that have a lot freer access to do what they need to now that there’s an active warrant to get into our financials and hers.”
“So…what do we do?” I asked. “What do I do?”
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” Denver suggested.
Boone was already shaking his head, as was Sawyer. “That’s not going to work.”
Denver frowned. “Why not?”
I bit my lip, knowing what was coming.
I sent an apologetic look toward my sister just as Boone said, “Because Nettie is pregnant.”
Chaos, pure and total chaos.
Because Nettie is pregnant.
The room was silent for a long moment as the other three people that hadn’t known the news digested it.
Then Eddy screeched and said, “What the fuck, Nettie!”
My lips quirked as my heart radiated happiness.
I was happy partly because Boone was smiling like the light of God had shone down upon him at my having told him first.
With my sister and I being twins, no one would’ve blamed me for sharing that news with her first. However, when I’d found out I was pregnant at sixteen, I’d told him first then as well.
The bond that we shared would transcend time and even trump a twin sister’s outrage.
“How could you not tell me this?” Eddy threw up her hands.
“It was Boone’s right to know first.”
The same thing I’d said all those years ago when Eddy had posed the same question.
Eddy huffed.
Weaver grinned and threw his arm around her shoulders, pulling her into his side.
“Then I would suggest you staying with Boone until we figure this out,” Denver suggested. “His place is wired for cameras and security. We made the place impenetrable if he wants it to be once we learned what his mother was doing.”
I felt nerves start to take flight in my belly.
I’d fully intended to move into Boone’s house once the baby got here. But again, I thought I had four months to figure out how to steel my heart against heartache.
An impossible task all on its own.
However, as usual, nothing in my life went as planned.
“I…”
“She’ll do it,” Eddy insisted. “She’ll do it, because this is the only for sure way we can keep her safe. The baby safe. She’s not dumb. She is also careful and thoughtful and kind, and would never make her sister worry about her in any way.”
The way Eddy said it had me lifting a brow to look at her in an “oh, really” kind of way.
“Is that right?” Denver drawled. “What happened to that one time where she found out she wasn’t going to be valedictorian and went and stabbed the principal’s tires, then got arrested for it, and sat in a jail cell for two days rather than call any of us?”
My lips pursed and I narrowed my eyes on Denver. “That was between you and me!”
“You did what?”
Denver grinned at me and winked.
Boone looked between Denver and me, narrow-eyed and calculating.
He was wondering what else he didn’t know.
“We were broken up,” I grumbled. “And like your mother needed another reason to hate me.”