Chapter 19
19
Nathan
I ’m not sure whether I should be relieved or upset about the sight before me.
Christa sits on the edge of a hospital bed, still shaking but safe. She hasn’t said much since I picked her up off the side of the road somewhere outside of Portland. She wanted to get to the hospital, which seemed odd as she had no visible injuries, but she was so upset I didn’t argue. I drove her and called Triple A to handle her car.
Deep down, I’m seething. Worried out of my mind.
“You seem calm,” I tell her once the doctor leaves.
“Clean bill of health,” she says with a weak smile. “Thank you for everything.”
I look around, making sure we’ve got enough privacy. Cassius and River already have the hospital room number. I give the attending nurse a slight nod, and she gets the hint. Hurriedly, she jots a few lines down on Christa’s clipboard, then discretely walks out of the room.
“How are you feeling?” I ask Christa.
Fear swirls in the caramel pools of her eyes, and her plump lips quiver ever so slightly. Her appearance tells a story, and I’m not letting her go anywhere until I get the details.
“Better, thank you,” she replies. “I just wanted to make sure I’m okay. Especially after this morning’s fainting spell.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that.”
“Do you think you can scrounge something up from the vending machine? I think there’s one somewhere down the hall. I’m pretty hungry.”
“There is no way in hell I’m letting you out of my sight,” I bluntly reply.
“Nathan—”
I cut her off. “Don’t ever try to push me away again.”
Cassius and River walk into the room. Right on time, too. “Push us away, that is,” I add the correction.
To my surprise, Teagan is with them.
“Christa,” she gasps and rushes to her side. “What happened?”
Christa looks at her with a shade of confusion. “Teagan, what are you doing here?”
“Well, I heard about what happened earlier this morning and what happened tonight,” she says. “Are you okay?”
“Physically, yes; I’m fine.”
“Good. You need to be okay,” my sister says, gently placing a hand on Christa’s shoulder.
“I will be okay.”
Cassius comes forward. “It’s time for us to have a conversation about what’s going on.”
Christa turns and gives Teagan a pained smile. “I hope you’ll forgive me someday. I never meant to hurt you.”
Despite her sometimes-volatile nature, I’m proud to see my sister finding the clarity she needs to assess this situation. Instead of pushing and prodding, she simply gives Christa a soft hug and takes a couple of steps back.
“I think the four of you need to talk, first and foremost,” she says. “Christa, I’d like to catch up with you over coffee. Maybe tomorrow or the day after? How does that sound?”
“It sounds great. I’d love that,” Christa sighs deeply. “Thank you, Tee.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she adds, then turns to look at us. “You three had better keep her safe from now on, got it?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I give her a wink.
Once Teagan is out of the room, looking visibly relieved, we return our focus to Christa. Her expression reminds me of the time I caught her and my sister trying to sneak a bottle of booze out of the Hawthorne mansion for Teagan’s eighteenth birthday. The same wide eyes and sweet, quivering lip. This time, however, I also see an underlying fear that has nothing to do with us.
We never gave her any reason to fear us.
Cassius clears his throat and sits next to Christa on the edge of the bed. “I think it’s time you open up to us,” he tells her. “You’re the one who reached out after you ran off. Again.”
“Cass, I didn’t run off. I just wanted to go for a drive to clear my head.”
“That didn’t turn out well, did it?” River mutters, arms crossed.
“What happened to your car tonight?” I ask her. “I saw the damage. Were you hit?”
Christa nods slowly. “It was another message from the Mancinis.”
“The Mancinis?” Cassius replies, though I can tell he’s already making the connections in his head. “You mean the Mancini crime family?”
“The mobsters out of Los Angeles, yes.”
“Okay, start from the top,” River says. “Perry-Sage. What happened there? We know whatever upper management was still alive went to prison along with a handful of Mancini people. There’s a connection here. Help us see it.”
Taking a deep breath, she closes her eyes for a moment as if to rewind her past.
“When I was still at CalTech, we had a couple of recruiters come in from several major fintech corporations,” she says. “Perry-Sage was one of them. They gave us an assignment, and it became part of our doctoral theses. I came up with an investment product based on an extensive analysis of historical tendencies in the financial market. It was crazily accurate. I impressed them, let’s just say.
“After I graduated, I applied for several jobs at different companies, Perry-Sage included. I figured that since I’d designed a product that was so good that they ended up selling to their clients, they’d want me to be a part of the team. I was right, because they called back. But I never had an official interview. It was very cloak-and-dagger, you might say.”
“How so?” I ask.
“They wanted me to do a certain type of work that straddled the very thin line between investment products and fraud,” Christa says. “For me, it was a challenge from a mathematician’s perspective. I was eager to prove myself, to make money, to build my life and my career. So eager, in fact, that I didn’t read the fine print until it was too late.
“By the end of my first year with them, I could already tell something was off about how they were moving insane amounts of money in and out of the company—not to mention through the company. Given my clearance level and expertise, they had to give me access to pretty much everything, hence the NDAs and the secrecy surrounding my employment. I saw everything, and I noticed the patterns.”
“Does it have to do with money laundering?” River inquires.
“Oh, that’s just skimming the surface. Yes, Perry-Sage was literally the Mancinis’ go-to washing machine.”
The more she tells us about those people, the more intrigued I am by the level of her involvement. The tighter the knot in my stomach twists as I wonder where Christa decided to draw the line.
“How deep were the Mancinis involved?” I ask her, “at least as far as running the day-to-day operations went?”
“Barely,” she says. “One of their lieutenants would come in every other week for a briefing. My former boss, the head of the investment product department, would have me sit in on every meeting and explain how the products worked. How the clients were hooked, how much money rolled through, and how much we got to keep while the clients were told about losses and volatile markets.
“I always made sure they got some returns on their investments. Just enough to keep them hooked, to keep them pumping more money into every scheme. For a while, it worked. I didn’t feel too bad because most of Perry-Sage’s clients were just horrible people. Real estate and oil tycoons, corporate heads, and billionaires who had lots of disposable cash to throw around, hoping they would make even more. Greedy, heartless bastards.”
“That’s the story you told yourself so you could sleep better at night, right?” Cassius scoffs. I know his response is coming from a place of anger.
Christa looks genuinely distraught by my brother’s words.