Chapter 6
GRIFFIN
“Councillor Macklin’s a grade-A piece of shit for letting his sister walk into a date with a goddamned criminal.”
Ford tosses the file on McCrae’s forty-second-floor boardroom table. The soft clap of the paper on wood punctuates his sentence.
He and Lionel are sitting at the giant table while I’m standing by the window, my back to the New York City skyline.
This meeting’s been going on for a full hour already, and I can’t sit still that long.
Especially when my boss suddenly has selective hearing.
Ford’s only repeating what I’ve said a hundred fucking times since we got here.
Lionel’s nostrils flare, but otherwise, he keeps his expression bland.
He’s turning sixty this year, and it’s starting to show.
The big man has a weariness about him, and besides the leathery skin and thinning hair, the broken capillaries on his nose show he hasn’t been handling the stress of life well.
Part of me wants to feel sorry for him. To give him the benefit of the doubt, knowing what he’s been through.
But I went through it, too. I clench and unclench my fists, willing myself to at least stay calm.
“You’ve made your feelings clear, Jason,” Lionel says.
I glance over at Ford. He hates being called by his first name.
But by some miracle, he keeps his expression neutral.
Like me, Ford’s been in surveillance mode for the past six weeks: shaggy hair, beard, jeans, and T-shirts.
But also like me, he’s cleaned himself up for this meeting: his dark hair’s neatly combed back, and he shaved.
He looks neater than me, actually. I just took the clippers to my head, buzzing it short, and opted not to shave.
Lionel was an army brat and has a thing about personal grooming.
But it hasn’t mattered—he’s not budging.
“I agree with Ford,” I say. “Councillor Macklin and Vincent Creelman are known associates, and it’s likely both have funneled money into our client’s company. There’s no reason why we should stop watching them.”
Lionel’s eyes dart to mine as he leans back in his chair, his face tight with anger. “You weren’t supposed to be watching Macklin in the first place.”
Did he think I was going to take his side because of our history? Loyalty isn’t a one and done. You have to keep proving you’re worthy of it, and he hasn’t.
“Why? Because his hands are clean?” I snap.
“It doesn’t really matter what either of your personal opinions are on this.” Lionel’s voice is hard to match mine. “The point is, you were explicitly told not to tail the Councillor or Vincent Creelman.”
“It’s not a matter of opinion,” I say, trying to keep my anger in check. “We’ve got fucking receipts, Lionel.”
“Yes, and receipts are the reason we’re here. Twenty thousand dollars-worth of them, Griffin.”
I grit my teeth. “Jesus Christ.”
It’s been three weeks since the incident.
But it’s only now that the accounting’s come back, which is why Lionel’s called this painful-as-fuck meeting.
My stunt at Sequoia—a little smoke in the kitchen to trigger the sprinklers, plus an early pull on the fire alarm by yours truly—was costly.
Water remediation’s no joke, and we used one of our preferred contractors, too.
But it was worth every penny.
“You know it was the right call,” Ford says.
“Is it about the money, Lionel?” I ask, at a fucking loss. “I’ll cover the costs myself. Would that make you happy?”
Ford shakes his head. “That’s insane. It was my call, too. The damages are a legitimate business expense. McCrae should be covering the costs.”
I’m serious about covering it. I don’t give a shit if I have to do it.
Cash isn’t an issue for me, not since the couple of patents I filed after my engineering degree, when I was doing R&D at a tech firm.
Before I discovered I didn’t care about fixing broken mechanical systems and cared more about fixing corrupt systems that hurt people.
“I wouldn’t change a thing about what happened at that restaurant,” I say.
Except for getting the intel too late to prevent her from going to the date in the first place.
While Lionel and Ford get into it again, I look back out the window. Down below, people look so small as they cross the street, going about their lives. So vulnerable.
Kind of like how Sasha looked through that window when Creelman grabbed her hand.
I have to fight the rage from coming back by taking a long, deep breath and pinching my eyes shut. When I open them again, I force myself to look directly into the bright late-morning sky outside, keeping my eyes open.
They burn, and not just from the light. I’m wrecked with exhaustion. I haven’t slept more than a few hours a night since that night, and if I weren’t so on edge, I could sleep for a week.
But every time I close my eyes at night, I see a woman in a soaking wet dress, her skin raised with gooseflesh, her eyes filled with fear while an alarm screams around her.
That asshole looking at her like she belongs to him.
I’m doing a shit job of compartmentalizing these days.
“I know you told us to back down on Creelman,” Ford says behind me. “And we have. Especially now that we can’t watch him in person.” That’s a direct dig at Lionel cutting our team. “But we happened to learn about this one because Griff knows the woman in question.”
I utter a silent curse in my head. I know what Ford’s doing—giving us good reason for having ignored our boss’s direct order.
Keeping us from having to tell him we still have Creelman’s phone tapped.
It’s smart, but I don’t like my personal life overlapping with work in any way. Shit gets complicated.
“How exactly do you know Sasha Macklin?” Lionel asks.
I knew I’d have to do this. I have an answer prepared.
“Our connection is thin at best—she’s a friend of my brother’s girlfriend.
I’ve only met her a couple of times, but I found out through the grapevine that she was going on a date with someone who matched Creelman’s description at the behest of her brother. ”
“The grapevine?” Lionel asks, his brow furrowed.
Ford smirks behind Lionel’s head as I say something about small-town business.
The truth is, it’s a euphemism for phone tap transcripts we’re not supposed to still be reading.
Lionel got us permission from local law enforcement to scan their taps when we started looking at Creelman.
He’d lose it if he knew our contacts were still slipping them to us.
“So you knew she was going to be there and you took it upon yourself to intervene?” Lionel asks. “May I ask why you couldn’t have spoken to this grapevine to nix the date before it happened?”
This is where it gets tricky. Until now, we’ve only gone over the transcripts every few days, since Creelman’s not the main focus of this job.
Our whistleblower thinks there’s a stronger connection between his company and another criminal syndicate we’ve got our eyes on.
It’s the one Lionel wants us to focus on.
But Ford and I didn’t feel good taking eyes off Creelman, Macklin, or anyone this company had dealings with.
Unfortunately, due to our main focus on the other organization, I only found out about Sasha ten minutes before she was due to meet him, and only because my eyes landed on her name in Creelman’s transcripts.
It wasn’t enough time to keep her out of danger. But it was enough time to keep things from going much, much worse.
Luckily, the simple truth works best. “I found out about it too late.”
For a second, I’m taken back to that terrible moment.
While I tore through the city in our discreet company van toward the restaurant, Ford and I volleyed ideas back and forth for how to intervene.
I wanted to storm the place and knock Creelman’s teeth out.
Ford had calmly reminded me that we can’t show our faces—we’re supposed to remain in the background.
It’s a speech I’ve given new recruits for years, but I was seeing red.
We finally came up with the idea for the fire alarm when we passed a fire station a block away. I dropped Ford off to sort out getting an outfit—still not quite sure how he pulled it off—while I ran up to the sushi restaurant to get eyes on the situation.
Seeing Sasha had sent relief coursing through me. That is, until I saw that piece of shit clamp down on her hand with his.
Once again, my stomach turns as I think of what might have been if we’d been there only a few minutes later.
“You should have consulted with me before taking action,” Lionel says.
“There was no time. We don’t leave people in danger.” My voice is steely.
“And you don’t go rogue just because you feel like it!” Lionel yells.
Ford and I exchange a look.
The Lionel we know never would have questioned this.
“Lionel,” I say. “You need to tell us what’s going on. You’ve built a career—a legacy—on protection. That’s why we’re all here.”
Lionel’s jaw snaps shut. He knows I’m right.
Our company’s motto is You’re safe with us.
He cares about protecting the innocent so much he even has the best family protection policy I’ve ever seen—employees and their families are given all the same protections as our clients should they ever need it: fail-safes, safe houses, special surveillance. The works.
But he meets my gaze.
And then my heart fucking sinks.
Because the look I see flash in Lionel’s eyes is one of deep, heavy pain, and though I swear I can pack that pain in a box most days, it cracks open for the barest second now. The one person neither of us could protect is the albatross that stands between us now.
I don’t know if Ford sees it or if he’s just trying to get to the bottom of things, but he clears his throat and asks the question we should have asked from the beginning. “Are you in some kind of trouble, Lionel?”
For a moment, no one says anything.