One
Oz
July 7, 2025
Asking Linc Shephard if he was fucking serious was pointless. Glancing at my best friend, I could see from the look on Bane Cash’s face that this wasn’t a joke. I shook my head, trying to digest this information. Six months—six fucking months—and we were just now figuring this out? How in the hell had it gone on this long?
“I’m struggling with the fact that no one realized the money was counterfeit. It’s not like he’s the first son of a bitch to try and pay us with bogus shit. We’ve always caught it immediately,” I said.
Four million dollars was a lot of damn cash to be fooled by.
Bane held up a hundred-dollar bill. “You saw it. Hell, he handed it to you first. You tested it. This is the closest thing to the real shit that I’ve ever seen. He’s not only an artist; he’s a fucking genius.”
Linc picked up his glass of whiskey and took a long drink. It was seven in the morning, and he was already drinking. Seeing as Linc led the Mississippi branch of the Southern Mafia, I knew that this mistake had been brought to him first. I might have been the one to take the kid’s bets, but Linc hadn’t caught the fraud either. His son, Levi, had, and he was one of the boss’s closest friends, he went to Blaise Hughes instead of warning his father.
“I’ll go get him,” I said, ready to slaughter the scrawny-ass computer nerd who had started placing bets on different sporting events. He lost terribly, then began to randomly win big between the times he lost money.
I’d been aware that for the past month, his winnings had far exceeded his losses. So much so that he’d broken even with his overall losses.
“Oz, you really think I came and woke you up the moment I got the call?” Linc asked.
I frowned, glancing back at him. “What do you mean?”
Linc took another long drink. “There wasn’t a call. Gage, Levi, and Huck showed up at my door at midnight. They had already gone to find him. He wasn’t there. They were going to handle it, and then Blaise was going to let me know of our mistake. But the addresses we had for him had been completely emptied, void of all fingerprints and DNA, they had nothing. The landlord at his apartment shit his pants and pissed on himself while Gage threatened him. The man wailed and cried that he hadn’t known the tenant had left. He’d paid for the month in advance. The security cameras had nothing. All footage from five days ago had been permanently deleted. HE IS GONE.” He slammed his glass down onto the table, causing the things on it to rattle. Gage Presley and Huck Kingston along with Levi were Blaise Hughes trusted circle that he kept with him. They were all friends and had grown up together. If they had been sent this was even worse than I realized.
Bane cleared his throat. “But,” he said in a firm tone, “Levi did get some useful information. He found one thing that wasn’t protected or hidden. Seems our mad genius hadn’t been completely thorough. He left something of great importance behind. The one thing we can take to draw him out of whatever hole he is hiding in.”
My eyebrows shot up. The first good news I’d heard since being jerked out of bed before the fucking sun. “And that is?” I asked impatiently.
Linc took a folder and slid it across the table to me. I snatched it up quickly, anxious to find out what it was that I needed to go get to find this fucking asshole. He had made me look bad. Not just to my family here, but to the boss too. Four million dollars’ worth of bad. I’d always been the best bookie inside the family across all the Southern states. I brought in more money than any of the others. I didn’t like being made a fool of.
Snapping open the folder, I looked down at a photo of a…woman. A fucking gorgeous one. No. That wasn’t possible. This female was not in any way attached to fucking Perry Gerard. He might be stalking her, but that was it. The skinny, pale-faced geek did not have a stunner like this one interested in him. I shook my head, wondering how Levi Shephard had made such a mistake. Was he that blinded to other women now that he was married to his little redhead?
I held up the picture and looked at Bane. Had he seen this? “Not believable.”
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” he replied.
“That’s Perry Gerard’s older sister. She’s a second-grade teacher at Madison Christian School. She is his only living family member, and his call log—on a phone that Levi found under his name—had calls to her daily, as well as text messages. They keep in contact. He checks on her all the time. Tries to give her money regularly. Bought her a plane ticket and cruise for Christmas that she just used last month. He seems to spoil her. She is important to him. From what Levi has pulled up she is one of the two people he contacts regularly.”
Linc cleared his throat, then continued, “Her name is Winslet Gerard. Age twenty-three, as of three days ago. This was her first-year teaching in the classroom. Perry had paid off her student loans last year. She lives in a small apartment. No romantic relationship since she broke up with a boyfriend of two years almost a year ago.”
I stared back down at the photo in my hand. Brown almond-shaped eyes with ridiculously long black lashes, dark chestnut-brown hair that hung in waves over her shoulder, smooth olive-toned skin with no makeup at all. There was just pure, natural beauty. This woman looked nothing like Perry. Nothing.
I looked through the other photos. In the first one, she was carrying an over-sized tote bag with a large red apple on it that read Teacher on the front as she walked from a building out to a bright yellow VW Bug. That was a fucking ugly-ass car. Another photo showed her going into an apartment building, holding bags of what looked like groceries. There was one of her in a red bikini on a sun deck, holding a margarita while taking a selfie. I closed the folder, angry with myself for looking at her tits. I didn’t give a fuck about the size of her boobs.
“He calls her Winzy,” Linc went on. “She is enjoying what is left of her summer break. Should be easy enough to find and snatch her. I’ve already got a location ready for you to take her to. It’s set off in the back of one hundred acres of land in Natchez, Louisiana. It’s family-owned. An old plantation house that has been moved, along with an added basement and security for holding those who need to be kept hidden. I want to get her out of Mississippi to get Perry’s attention fast.”
Frowning, I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He held out a key, burner phone, and a piece of paper toward me. I studied the items, but didn’t take them. I lifted my eyes back to meet his before giving Bane a brief glance.
“Are you telling me I am supposed to abduct this woman and take her to fucking Louisiana?” I asked. “Why can’t she just be held on the cabin on your property?”
of Linc’s eyebrows slightly lifted. “A man has used us to clean four million dollars’ worth of counterfeit bills, and now, he is missing. We have the Feds on us, questioning where we got that much counterfeit and why it looks so damn real. I have no answers because the man who it came from can’t be found. Blaise Hughes is ready to start a killing spree, and your head isn’t safe from his path. So, yes, I expect you to take this woman, hide her, and keep her locked up in the basement.
“Don’t push her past her limits, but find out whatever you can about Perry. Don’t feed her—women like to eat. Try a little hunger, but don’t starve her to the point of death. Make her uncomfortable. Don’t let her out to bathe. Make her use a five-gallon bucket to use the bathroom. You’ve seen her; she looks soft. Well taken care of. She’s not going to be hard to crack. She will talk, and when she tells us how to contact him, we can get word to the bastard that we have his sister and she’s being tortured. Easy. Just go get her, do your job, and we will get our four million back, then hand over Perry Gerard to the Feds.”
He was serious. I knew it because he was right. This was the quickest way to weed the bastard out. Typically, this would be a job for Bane, but this was my mistake, and I had to clean it up. And even if it wasn’t, Bane wouldn’t be sent to take a woman off to the woods and stay in a house with her for an unknown amount of time. He was married with a baby now.
I took the items Linc held out to me.
“There is reason to believe she knows about her brother’s illegal doings. He paid off her school loans, sent her on a cruise, bought her the car she drives, and recently deposited five grand into her checking account. That tells us she is loyal to him. Just push until you find her breaking point. She will talk.”
The image of her face in the pictures turned sour. It was always the ones born with beauty like hers that you couldn’t trust. They had been using the power of their looks over men since they had been old enough to realize they could. Flash a smile, bat those eyes, and— bam —men fell at their feet.
Not this time, darlin’. You are about to meet one who’s completely immune to your appearance. A man who hates you for your connection alone.