Chapter 29
KATE
After supper, I’m aching to track down my sister. I want to know if the newlyweds are sharing a romantic dinner somewhere in town. Maybe they splurged on a night in some hotel. If they used a rideshare or taxi, I should be able to trace the activity through their credit cards.
But Breagha won’t appreciate my interfering. And I have to accept that I’m a threat to her safety. I don’t know if Tarasov has the resources to track her the way I can, but he can certainly follow me if I travel around town—with or without a loyal Sawgrass escort.
The safest thing to do is to stay in the Georgetown mansion.
Besides, I have work to do. I head into my office and fire up my computer.
When I frantically checked my mobile for news about my sister, I had a text from Fiona Moran.
Now, reviewing the message, I see that she reached out almost thirty-six hours ago.
I consider typing back, but I’m afraid that won’t show an appropriate level of concern for my client’s needs.
Setting my jaw, I tap her number on the screen.
She answers: “It’s about time.”
“I apologize.” I’m not some stiff-necked gombeen. I can say I’m sorry if that’s the quickest way to get us back on track. She certainly doesn’t need to hear excuses about Tarasov, about Collins, about Breagha. “It won’t happen again.”
There’s a moment where I think she’ll still give out, and I bite my tongue so I don’t say something I’ll regret while I’m taking the lashing.
But she must do her own biting, or maybe she’s just in a hurry to get work done, because she finally says, “I have thirteen different login procedures, depending on which holdings I want to access first. If I’m ever going to train someone to manage things here, the entire process has to be simplified.
One basic screen, with options I can click on. ”
“That should be an easy enough fix,” I say, reaching for my keyboard.
The adjustment only takes a couple of minutes. I need to modify a chunk of Cole’s code, streamlining it with a trick I figured out for the Red Cap Raiders a year or so back. I test my handiwork twice before I hand the controls back to Fiona.
“Thank you,” she says after she’s verified the fix. Her voice is substantially warmer than when we started this call. I suspect she thought she’d have to wait days for a solution.
“Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
“You know I will,” she says.
I consider apologizing again, but I think her ruffled feathers are already as smooth as I can make them. Instead, we both say goodnight, and I wish her a good weekend.
Once I ring off, I head down the hall to tell Cole about the exchange.
When I get to his office, though, he’s staring intently at his screen.
For a moment, I think he’s coding something for a client.
But then I realize he’s reading with the sort of riveted focus that born-again Christians reserve for the Bible.
I wonder if he’s studying real-life task forces, mastering government tactics we can deploy against Tarasov. Maybe he’s deep in FBI archives or studying records from the Department of Homeland Security. He might be reviewing video transcripts or he could be focused on paramilitary tactics.
It’s fascinating to watch him work. The planes of his face are carved into sharp relief as he leans toward his monitor.
His eyes glitter as if the gold flecks have caught fire from the sheer force of his concentration.
He’s completely dedicated to the task at hand, a natural-born hunter zeroing in on prey.
This is the focus that makes him the best coder I’ve ever known. It’s the total absorption that built his financial empire in less than a decade, growing his holdings from nothing to more than a billion. It’s the flawless control that makes him my perfect Dom.
I slip back to my office without interrupting his flow. Later, I’ll give him the code I used to solve Fiona’s problem so he can deploy it for other clients.
Once he has other clients.
For now, I’ll leave him alone to structure the master con that will finally take down Nikolai Tarasov and the Baltimore bratva forever.