7. Progress
seven
Progress
“I’m sorry, sir,” Alessa said. “Neither of us saw a sign of anyone all night.”
Mikey drummed his fingers impatiently over the arm of his chair. He’d already gotten as much from Ryōma, but he did appreciate that Alessa had at least pulled herself together enough to report in person. Not that the answer made him any happier. He’d gone to the trouble of getting permission to send two of their aces essentially undercover for the entire night in Brandi’s condo, hoping to catch her assailant at his next attempted assault. A decent plan that had failed miserably. “And the security system?”
Alessa set the recorder Mikey had sent her out with the previous day back onto his desk. “As far as I can tell, it was undisturbed. All the data should be there.”
Mikey snatched it up and twirled the object between his fingers. If he was a little lucky, maybe he’d at least get some back-data. He’d have to be careful, though. If the man was skilled enough to bypass Brandi’s home system, he might possibly have left something behind to cover his tracks. “Keep your eyes peeled for anyone who matches that description while you’re out. Now go catch some sleep.”
Alessa nodded and turned on her heel. She was pretty much the same age as he was, and like him, she’d grown up in this life. She knew not to let a single night’s poor sleep show on her face. It was for that reason that Mikey knew the exhaustion still visible around her eyes had little to do with the late-night assignment and a lot to do with the grief the entire family knew she was doing a poor job of handling. He could hardly blame her. He didn’t know how he’d handle losing a brother.
Mikey dropped his gaze back to the object in his hand, released a breath, and picked up his phone. He had an afternoon meeting to consider, so it was best to dive into the data sooner than later. He locked down his office as he stepped out and projected his voice to Miguel. “Downstairs.”
Miguel let out an unprofessional sigh. “Aye, Captain.”
Mikey rolled his eyes and paused at Berto’s desk. “I’m unavailable for a bit. Reach me on my cell if something comes up.” Berto could handle anything that wouldn’t come directly to him until this was done.
Berto turned a grin his way. “Can I call you ‘captain’, too?”
“Don’t push it.”
Mikey and Miguel piled into the elevator, and Mikey pressed his thumb to the scanner that provided access down to the basement level. The top three floors were his formal business, and while a lot of the family came and went through his doors on any given day, the business at its core was fully legal. He’d taken his inspiration from his brother. But the basement was different. The basement was the family’s digital headquarters. The basement was his goddamn pride and joy.
“Did you get the image I sent out yesterday?” Mikey asked as the elevator descended.
“’Course,” Miguel said. “Started it up on facial rec like you asked and everything.”
“Excellent. Our undercover team struck out, so let’s see if he showed up somewhere else last night.”
It was close to noon before Brandi worked up the nerve to check her email. She knew how to protect herself online, and she was confident that on Mikey’s home network any skill she brought to the table was little more than a cherry on a sundae. Nevertheless, some instinct she couldn’t name insisted she wasn’t going to like what she saw when she opened her inbox next. She made sure to have waited for a lull in the workflow—not overly difficult at the moment, since she hadn’t been handed a new project yet—and had set an easy snack within reach. If nothing else, she was done letting all this stress cost her meals.
Except she lost her appetite when her gaze zeroed in on an email she would ordinarily have dismissed as undisguised spam. From a sender merely labeled as RG, with an email address that couldn’t possibly be accurate, was an email with the daunting subject line “miss you, sweet B” and an icon indicative an attachment.
The nausea was instantaneous.
She wanted to delete the damn email without clicking on it. But she also wanted to know what the hell he was sending, in case she or her new family could use it against him. I can’t do that with what I have on me. With no better ideas, and seeing no other emails from that or any other suspicious senders, Brandi reached for her phone and dialed Mikey.
He answered after the second ring. “Everything okay?”
She hesitated for a beat. “Do you have cameras in here?”
“Only in certain rooms. I wasn’t expecting your call.”
Brandi made a mental note to figure out the certain rooms and put the issue aside. “I decided to check my email, and the son of a bitch emailed me. I’m not set up to open whatever the hell he sent, especially with an attachment.”
“You’re sure it’s him? He didn’t show at your condo last night.”
She leaned back in the office chair. “What? He didn’t?” She gave herself a shake. “Do I want to know how you’re sure?”
“I had a couple people sit on it, just in case. Now you.”
Okay, that’s not unreasonable, actually. It would certainly have made fast work of one problem if he’d shown up. She really wasn’t prepared for that disappointment. Brandi pulled in and slowly released a breath, knowing what she’d have to say. “He … calls me ‘sweet Brandi.’ The email subject is ‘miss you, sweet B.’”
Mikey was silent for several seconds. She had no way of seeing him, let alone what he might have been doing, but the silence felt off. Heavier than she might have expected. Then, finally, he said, “Let me finish up what I’m doing and I’ll come home. I’ve got the tech to tackle that in my office.”
“You’re at work.”
“Good thing I own the company, then. Give me half an hour.”
She opened her mouth to ask about the meeting, which she knew was at two, but he’d already hung up. All she could do was glare at the taunting email in her inbox, feeling stupidly intimidated by it until she finally closed out altogether.
Forty minutes passed before Mikey strode in, and Brandi had moved to a common area to avoid letting herself become some kind of hermit even within the boundaries of her new residence. If she never got used to other spaces, she would never use them. Not that perching on the edge of a seat and absently scrolling through ringtone options for fifteen minutes was much of a use of space.
She looked up as he entered the room, feeling somewhere between self-conscious and oddly grateful at the way his gaze swept over her. It wasn’t a lingering, lustful look or a broody, angry glare. For that moment in time he genuinely seemed to be trying to ascertain the changes to her physical state, and it wasn’t hard to convince herself it was because he wanted to see her get better. If there was more of a reason beyond the inconvenience or ugliness of her injuries, Brandi couldn’t gauge it. Nor could she blame him if there wasn’t.
“I heard the cut on your leg didn’t look too bad,” he said.
She tried to give him a pointed look, but wasn’t entirely sure if her eyes and eyebrows moved in such precise ways yet. “I wondered if that would get back to you. I guess there’s no ‘patient privilege’ here.”
“There is not.” He held out his hand. “Let’s go take a look at that email. Did you eat lunch yet?”
“Sort of lost my appetite.”
He frowned at her.
“I had a late breakfast, anyway, and it was like twice what I’m used to. I’m fine.” All of that was true, and she suspected the truth of it was why he dropped the subject. She might even have been flattered if their relationship was real. She’d never known a man who cared so damn much about her actually eating.
He led the way to his office, which was on the other side of the wall from the one he’d given her and twice as large. It was also the only room he kept locked up that she’d discovered, and considering what she imagined was hidden within the physical and digital walls of the space, she couldn’t be upset about that. Even less so when she saw inside, and saw the setup that at least rivaled if not outclassed the one he had at his office at work.
A veritable wall of monitors that surely shielded him entirely from view when he sat at his desk, making the beautiful window wall horrendously pointless. A cram-packed built-in bookcase, a curved leather sofa, a pair of chairs that were tufted to match the sofa but positioned between the sofa and desk. And still so much space, it wouldn’t have been hard to slip a bed in. She wondered if perhaps he did sometimes sleep here, or if perhaps he usually slept there, and she would eventually come to think of this room as his home and the manor as his firewall.
She laughed at herself for the thought, even though it also felt a little too plausible.
Mikey grabbed hold of one of the nice leather chairs and dragged it around to rest behind the desk, indicating for her to take a seat as he himself settled into the overpriced desk chair. “Remote access okay?”
“You break it, you buy it.” She mostly meant it as a joke. All her important things were already quadruple protected, anyway.
Mikey chuckled and went to work. In just a couple of minutes, Brandi was watching—her eyes darting repeatedly between her laptop screen and the monitor he was mainly using—as he clicked open her email. She knew enough to understand the technicalities of how it worked, but sometimes seeing it done to her own stuff was surreal.
He hovered the curser over the spam-like email she’d previously described to him. “This one?”
Her skin crawled and she averted her gaze. “I really thought I was stronger than this, but just looking at that sitting in my email feels violating.”
“Do you need to leave the room?”
She was tempted. More than tempted. To keep herself from taking the coward’s way out, Brandi leaned closer to him, until she had to fight to keep from resting her still swollen and bruised face on his shoulder. “Just let me hide a little.”
Mikey’s hand left the mouse and he reached down, resting his palm fully over her half-bare knee. The squeeze he offered was brief and still light, but in its own way tender and warm. “Do you want a safe word?”
The question jerked her upright and heat rushed to her face. All of a sudden, she was reminded of how tempted she’d been to pleasure herself to thoughts of this specific man just two nights prior—and not for the first time. “I beg your pardon?” She tried to sound indignant, but the words escaped her in something much more like a breathy whisper that was far, far too telling.
Mikey blew out a breath. “I was referring to a word that makes everything come to an immediate end.” His hand curved, fingers trailing down and under the backside of her knee at a slow, tantalizing pace.
The breath caught in her throat and hours seemed to pass before Brandi managed to find an answer beyond the utterly ridiculous pleasure from his simple touch. “Casino.”
He glanced over at her, one eyebrow arched. His hand didn’t move.
She licked her lips and forced herself to meet his stare, sure that her face was not so bruised as to hide the flush. “I hate them.” A feeling she decided not to have toward the less-than-innocent, though still feather-light caress of his fingers that had run between and beneath her legs.
His lips lifted in a faint smirk. “Good to know.” He drew his hand back up, following the same path as he had originally, and gave her knee another gentle squeeze. Only then did he look away and reach once more for the mouse. “Now you know what to say if this becomes too much.”
It’s already too much! She had thought, maybe, there was a slight chance his hand had moved on some subconscious instinct. A reflexive stroke or touch that he hadn’t been truly aware of. But if that had been the case, he wouldn’t have — couldn’t have—perfectly reversed it and repeated the tender squeeze at the end. He’d known precisely what he was doing and she had no capacity for handling that. The idea that he had purposely, willingly, touched her that way left her speechless. The idea that he’d done so when she was the beaten-up mess she was? He really is a dangerous man.
While her brain was distracted, Mikey opened the email.
His low, discontented growl helped refocus her and Brandi leaned forward again. She aimed her gaze at the larger monitor over his desk instead of the one for her laptop that he’d helpfully partially lowered, and her mouth went dry. There were only two lines of text. Both of them felt angry, even though he hadn’t even used the social standard of all caps.
Did you think I wouldn’t notice?
Where’d you run off to, sweet Brandi?
There were two images attached to the email.
“I’m going to open them,” Mikey said in warning as he moved the cursor over the first. He didn’t actually wait for her to respond before filling the monitor with a slightly grainy, too zoomed in candid shot of Brandi. It had obviously been taken the morning before, as she recognized herself immediately despite the oversized sunglasses and blatantly visible dark spot on her face. Also plain to see was the suitcase she remembered struggling to lift into the Uber that had come to idle only about halfway up her drive.
Brandi barely registered reaching out to curl her fingers into the back of Mikey’s shirt. She wasn’t trying to stop him. She just needed to borrow some of his strength, and maybe the reminder that he was with her.
Another monitor lit up and blinked once as the image popped up on that screen, followed by a series of rapid, overlaid partial windows indicating various scans. Brandi watched that for only a second before dropping her gaze back to the previous monitor, in time to catch as he opened the second image.
The second image was far more jarring than Brandi was prepared for. It was a picture of a man she didn’t immediately recognize, sitting in a simple wooden chair, his mouth duct taped and blood smeared across the side of his head. Rope was tied around his shoulders and his legs, holding him in place, but he was conscious, holding a sign in his lap, and facing the camera. She read the sign before she finally realized why he was vaguely familiar.
“Don’t even think about it,” Mikey said, as if she might heed the sign’s instruction to be back at her condo that night—alone—because of the implicit threat.
He gave her too much credit.
Not that she didn’t feel like shit. “That … that was my Uber driver.”
Mikey tossed the second image up onto the other monitor, triggering another series of scans. “I don’t care if that guy’s your best friend in the whole fucking world, you’re not going.”
Tears threatened for a second and Brandi dragged in a breath. “I don’t even remember his name,” she said, feeling like dirt. “I don’t remember if I even tipped. I was so … I just wanted to run. He offered to take me to the police and I was afraid I’d get us both killed if I took him up on it, so I told him to drop me and forget me.” She swallowed hard. I’m getting him killed anyway.
Mikey turned away from the computer setup and faced her again, this time raising both hands to carefully wipe the tears off her cheeks with his thumbs. “The only thing you could possibly have done differently to protect whoever showed up to drive you from this asshole would be to have stayed in that condo and waited for round three. Can you look me in the eyes and tell me that was an option?”
She shook her head as fiercely as his grip allowed. “No.”
“Then the next best thing you can do, now, is to fight back. And for that you have me.”
Brandi pulled in a deep breath and willed the rest of her tears away. “Thank you.”
Mikey’s phone buzzed as he turned back to face the computers again. He dipped his hand into his pocket, glanced at the screen, and swiped to connect the call before setting it on the desk. “You’re on speaker. You better have something useful.”
There was a pause before the caller, who Brandi quickly recognized to be Miguel, said, “Fuck, I hate bein’ on speaker. Always gets me in trouble.”
“Probably because you start with ‘fuck,’” Mikey shot back. “Imagine if I was with my mother.”
“You’d never put me on speaker if you were with your mother.”
Brandi felt her lips twitch.
“Get to it, Miguel.”
“Right, right,” Miguel said. “Computer finally isolated a ninety-five percent match for our target. Thought you’d wanna know, wasn’t sure if I should—”
“Tell me,” Mikey snapped, tapping keys to wake up another monitor and opening fresh search engines.
“Got him listed as Ralph George. An’ here’s the fun part. Georgie boy’s from all the way out in Las Vegas.”
Brandi’s eyes widened, her gaze tracking back to the waiting email on the other monitor. RG… Those hadn’t been random letters. He was smart enough to bypass security systems and stupid enough to leave his actual initials in his emails. “Vegas? Really?” She clapped a hand over her mouth when she realized she’d spoken that half of the thought out loud.
Miguel let out a whistle. “You’re with a chick? The fuck?”
Mikey’s hand left the keyboard.
Brandi’s mouth opened faster. “A chick ? Next time it’s my turn for the coffee run, I’m dumping yours in your lap. I thought we were friends.”
Mikey sighed.
Miguel barked out a loud laugh. “Brandi? Holy shit! That’s even—”
“Focus, Miguel,” Mikey said sharply. “Anything else? Or are you done?”
“No, no, definitely not done,” Miguel said between wheezing gasps. “I just was not prepared for that. Man, half the office thinks you don’t even like each other, this is gonna be great.”
The words cut a little deeper than they should have and Brandi let her hand slide back into her own lap.
“Not for your immediate future,” Mikey snapped simultaneously. “George. What else?”
Miguel sucked in one more audible breath. “Right. Ah, I’m pullin’ up his travel itinerary now, but so far nothin’ on him leavin’ the area. And looks like he returned his SUV to the rental agency late yesterday, so best guess is he’s got some new wheels by now. I did get a real pic, though. Nasty lookin’ fucker. You want me to send it over?”
Mikey took a single second to answer. “Text it to me, update the others. If you get anything current, let me know.”
“You got it.”
Mikey blew out a breath as the line disconnected. He switched the open search engines for something that resembled a color-coded calendar. “Damn. Naturally.” Then he reached out again and tapped a couple of buttons on his phone. Ringing filled the air as he said, “You should probably pay attention for this part.”
Brandi swallowed and nodded. “Okay.” She wasn’t sure what he was even talking about, but if it distracted her from the weird, stabbing disappointment in her chest, she was happy to oblige.
Right up until the line connected and what had to be Dante De Salvo’s voice filled the room. “Mikey, what’s the situation?”
“I have a name and source for Brandi’s attacker,” Mikey said, “and I was hoping you knew if Cris had left California yet.”
Brandi blinked, confused enough to at least be sufficiently intrigued.
“He doesn’t generally call me with his every move,” Dante replied. “You should have his schedule.”
Again, Mikey sighed. “I do, and it says they were due to be in the air about an hour ago. I was just hoping.”
“Why?”
“Because the guy who came after Brandi has Vegas roots.”
Something like a humming sound carried across the line. “This is supposedly about a debt Wesley owes, correct?”
Brandi found herself nodding.
“As far as we know,” Mikey confirmed.
“When was the last time he was in Las Vegas?” Dante asked.
Brandi’s eyes widened and she turned her gaze to Mikey again. He only tipped his head toward the phone. She cleared her throat, suddenly self-conscious, and said, “It has to have been at least a year, but I don’t remember him ever specifically mentioning going out that way.”
Dante was silent for several seconds. “We need to know more about the organization behind this man. Mikey, find someone who’s up for a field trip. We’ll tap our friends for local resources, but I want one of ours running lead.”
“I’ll get you some names by this evening,” Mikey said before the call ended.
Brandi stared at the darkened phone. “You … have friends in Las Vegas?”
Mikey switched off the most recently opened monitor and turned enough to meet her gaze. “We have friends scattered across the country, and we’ve started making inroads in Europe, too.”
“Holy shit.” She was marrying into a mafia empire.