Chapter 8
Blake leaned casually against the far wall, arms folded, eyes on Elise as she hunched over her laptop in the quiet corner of the library.
She’d been immersed for hours, buried in documents and old shipping ledgers, her notes scattered across the table in neat stacks only she could decipher.
Determination radiated from her, and it was sharp and relentless.
The kind of single-minded focus that made her dangerous to men like Zajac.
Unfortunately, that relentlessness also made her a danger to herself.
The soft click of her keystrokes stuttered. “Shit.” Elise straightened suddenly. “What?”
Blake was beside her in a moment. He blinked at the screen as it went berserk. Lines of code spilled across her desktop, files opened and closed, the cursor flashing and rolling around the screen as if it were possessed. Elise sat back, brows knitting, her mouth parting in confusion. “What the—”
In his earpiece, Jewell’s calm, wry voice slid into the silence.
“She’s good, Blake. I’ve been following her work.
Elise has threaded Zajac’s donations through to shell charities and is like two hours away from tying them to his shipping manifests.
Give her another forty-eight hours, and she’ll have him cold. ”
Blake’s jaw tightened. “And the fireworks on her screen?” he murmured low as Elise muttered and banged on keys trying to get her computer to respond.
“My doing,” Jewell admitted without a shred of guilt.
“I scrambled the system before she could stumble over something she can’t afford to see yet.
I can restore everything in seconds, but you’re going to tell her Guardian can handle the deep dive.
Say it’ll take weeks to run. Sell it, or she’ll have a neon target on her back.
She won’t wait to publish the information once she puts all the pieces together.
This buys you time until Zajac returns to Budapest. Until then, she stays breathing. ”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaling slowly. Jewell was the best in the world with a keyboard—his aunt, his ally, the voice that had helped him navigate some life-threatening situations, but she had a brutal streak of practicality. And Elise didn’t even know she existed.
Elise stared at the lifeless screen, her pulse hammering in her ears.
Hours of work, careful cross-checking, highlighting, and mapping out connections, all of it gone in less than a minute.
She wanted to scream, to slam the damned machine shut herself, but …
Blake’s hand did it for her, calm, deliberate, as though he’d seen this before.
Her gaze shot to his. She was furious and hissed, whispering at him, “It’s gone. Everything. That was my proof, Blake. My trail. My God, why didn’t I write it all down on paper?”
His expression didn’t waver. He looked infuriatingly steady, as if her panic and frustration couldn’t touch him.
“It isn’t gone,” he said softly, the kind of calm tone meant to settle wild children.
But she wasn’t a child. When she opened her mouth to tell him so, he held up one finger.
“Guardian can get it back. They’ve got experts who deal with this sort of thing every day. ”
Elise crossed her arms, leaning back in the chair, suspicion prickling at the edges of her chest. “And how long will this miracle take?”
“A couple of weeks. Maybe more.”
Her stomach dropped. Weeks? She didn’t have weeks. Zajac’s ships were moving now, the donations timed in perfect rhythm with every port of call. She was close, so close she could taste it, and now, he wanted her to just hand it all off, sit back, and wait?
“I don’t have weeks,” she snapped, her voice low but fierce. “You don’t understand, Blake. I’ve found a pattern. Zajac’s ships and the donations line up. It’s not random. It has to be money laundering. If I can just dig a little deeper …”
He leaned closer, cutting off her words, and for a moment, the intensity in his eyes stole her breath. “You’ve done enough for now. Let Guardian take it from here. I’ll make sure they run the deep dive, and you’ll get the answers you’re looking for.”
She searched his face, looking for cracks, for any flicker of deception. But all she saw was steady resolve and that unshakable calm that irritated her almost as much as it steadied her.
Her throat tightened. He meant to keep her out of it.
Sideline her. Elise forced herself to look away, focusing on the closed laptop instead of the man beside her.
She told herself she was furious at the delay, at his quiet insistence that she step aside.
But under the fury, another truth pressed against her ribs.
She wasn’t as angry at his presence as she should have been.
Elise narrowed her eyes at him. The frustration that had been simmering now bubbled over.
“Guardian can get it back?” she repeated, her voice low, clipped.
“How exactly? You make it sound like they can just waltz into my hard drive and pluck out whatever they want. Don’t they need warrants, or, oh, I don’t know, a shred of legality to make that happen? ”
Blake didn’t flinch. “You’d be surprised what specialized forensic tools can recover,” he said evenly. “Nothing is ever truly lost on a computer. Deleted, corrupted, scrambled, yes, but that doesn’t matter. The data is still there. Guardian has the equipment and the people who can dig it back out.”
Elise leaned forward, refusing to let him skate by with calm generalities.
“Forensics? Fine. But if they recover it, what then? How do they use it? This isn’t some neat little academic exercise, Blake.
Zajac has companies and even governments in his pocket.
If you’re saying Guardian plans to act, they’ll need legal standing.
Evidence chain. Warrants. Otherwise, it’s worthless. ”
He held her stare, his jaw working once before he spoke.
“Guardian isn’t doing this for law enforcement.
We don’t need a warrant to look at corrupted files.
We don’t need to stand in front of a judge and argue admissibility.
For this, we’re going to gather intelligence.
We will confirm it. Then, when the time is right, it finds its way into the right hands. ”
The way he said it—so casual, so certain—sent a shiver down her spine. “The right hands?” she pressed. “That’s awfully vague. Who decides what’s right? You? Your bosses? What if it gets buried, twisted, used as leverage instead of justice?”
His mouth curved, not into a smile but into something darker, edged.
“You think too small, Elise. You’re picturing red tape and bureaucrats.
Guardian doesn’t play by those rules. If the information proves that Zajac’s laundering, it won’t vanish into a file cabinet.
It’ll be used to dismantle him piece by piece. He’ll never see it coming.”
Her pulse spiked at the conviction in his voice. He believed it. Every word. And that unsettled her almost as much as the thought of handing over her hard-earned work to faceless computer people she’d never meet.
Elise folded her arms tight against her chest, trying to cage the storm inside her. “So, I’m just supposed to trust that Guardian’s intentions are pure? That your people will take my research, run their mysterious deep dive, and do the right thing? You don’t see how insane that sounds?”
Blake leaned in just enough that she caught the warmth of his breath, his voice dropping to a murmur that made her skin prickle. “I’m asking you to trust me. Not Guardian. Me.”
The weight of his words settled between them, heavier than the silence that followed.
Elise wanted to demand more, to tear apart the easy confidence with pointed questions he couldn’t dodge.
But for one dangerous heartbeat, all she could do was stare at him and feel the ground shift beneath her feet.
Elise’s frustration erupted. This wasn’t about the information.
It was about vindication, justice … it was about étienne.
“You don’t understand. This isn’t just about money laundering.
It’s about étienne. He wasn’t drunk. He didn’t stumble into a canal by accident.
He was silenced. And the private investigator who tried to help me?
He’s dead, too. Their blood is on Zajac’s hands.
” Her voice wavered, but she forced it back to steel.
“If Guardian buries this in their files and passes it to some nameless official, it’s nothing.
It disappears into the ether. People will forget. And Zajac walks away untouched again.”
Shaking her head hard, she leaned forward, needing him to understand. “My article will show the world who he is. That’s the only thing that matters. It has to come from me—not a faceless government, not an agency that can’t admit what it knows. Me. I need to prove étienne didn’t die in vain.”
Blake didn’t speak right away. He just watched her, eyes dark, intense, weighing every ounce of her conviction.
Then, slowly, he reached across the table, covering both her hands with his.
His touch was warm, steady, immovable. He leaned closer, holding her gaze as if he could anchor her with nothing more than his presence.
“I promise you,” he said, his voice low, unwavering, “your article will be published. By you. Not a word stolen, not a fact twisted. Every piece of information will be recovered, and the answers you’re chasing … we’ll find them.”
Her throat tightened, and her heart pounded as the weight of his promise sank deeper. She wanted to doubt him, wanted to demand more, but something in his tone wrapped around her like armor.
Her fingers curled against his. “You mean, they can trace it all? Find out who’s really behind the layered companies?”
“Shell companies,” Blake said without hesitation.
“Shell companies,” she repeated, the sharpness in her voice cutting through the rawness in her chest.