Coming Clean
Dante
The stew smelled incredible. Almost as good as anything from Dino’s. I was hungry, but there was no way in hell I was sitting down to a meal with my fucking prisoner. No matter how great a cook she was.
I shook my head as I took the laptop out of the trunk.
Ophelia. Business owner, art expert, and now a cook. A complicated woman, full of surprises. Not many people surprised me anymore, but she was one of them.
My father would have approved. He’d always complained Valentina was a terrible cook.
I frowned and slammed the trunk down hard enough to echo off the surrounding trees. Max, who was on guard duty, glanced over. I lifted a hand to signal everything was okay.
Shit. Where the hell had that thought come from?
It must have been the cooking. It was my father who’d first taken me to Dino’s back in the day. Home-cooked food from the old country, he used to say.
I scowled as I marched back to the cabin. She was always in my fucking head, one way or another. I felt like I needed to exorcise her or something.
It was ridiculous. Women had no influence over me. I didn’t even do relationships. My romantic assignations were unapologetic hookups. And only when I needed to take the edge off.
I stayed clear of anything that lasted more than twenty-four hours, and even then, my partners never knew who I was. Wrong. What I was.
It wasn’t worth the risk. Sex was the ultimate power play. If I was going to lose control, even for a brief moment, it wasn’t going to be with someone who could hold it against me.
When I walked back into the cabin, Evelyn was setting an oven dish—that I never even knew we owned—on the countertop. Then she sat back down at the table and swiveled the laptop to face her.
Reluctantly, I moved the chair beside her and eased myself into it. Being this close was a bad idea, but I had to watch what she was doing. I didn’t want her sending any under-the-radar emails or messages without my knowledge.
We might be working together on this, but I still couldn’t trust her.
She logged on using a password I didn’t manage to catch, and searched the file system for the spreadsheet she’d mentioned.
“Here it is.” She opened it up on the screen. “This is my record on all my customers and buyers.”
I scanned the list. There were a lot of names.
“I’m breaking all privacy regulations by showing you this.”
My scowl was still very firmly in place. “Do I look like I care?”
She sighed and scrolled in silence.
“There,” she said, pointing to the screen. “Except it looks like those sales were one-offs.”
“Explain.”
“We never dealt with those customers again. Chloe couldn’t find much on them either, by the looks of things.” She pointed to the records with very little information in them. “I’ve got the directors’ names, but I doubt they’re real.”
She was probably right. “They’ll have forged their signatures or gotten someone unconnected to sign.”
She squinted at the document. “They all used the same buyer though.”
That could be something. “I need a name.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Ricardo Sánchez. I remember him now. He bid by telephone. His English was excellent, but he did have a slight accent.”
“What about contact details?” I was already pulling out my phone to call my brother.
“I think so.” She clicked a different tab and brought up a list of intermediaries. “Here it is.”
She enlarged the page so I could see the email address and phone number. It was an American cellphone provider.
I stood up and called Nico. He answered on the second ring.
“Hey, Nico. I need everything you can find on an art buyer. Name’s Ricardo Sánchez.” I gave him the details.
“What do you need them for?” Nico asked, but I heard the pen scratch as he wrote down the name.
“Could be linked to the guys who ambushed our shipment.”
There was a long pause, then he said, “Thought that was Malakov.”
“Nah, not Malakov. At least I don’t think so.” I glanced at Evelyn, who shook her head. There was no tell on her porcelain face. No flicker of an eyelid. No nervous twitch.
I turned away. I didn’t want to admit it, but I might have been wrong about her.
“These guys were also using the gallery to clean their cash.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m looking at the customer spreadsheet now.” I kept my gaze firmly planted on the wall.
“Am I missing something?” Nico said slowly. “Mother said you’d taken care of the gallery owner.”
It was my turn to hesitate.
“You didn’t do it, did you?”
“Not exactly.” I waited for the explosion I knew would come.
“Jesus, Dante. You know she’s going to go apeshit.”
He wasn’t wrong there.
“I know, but I’m not going to… Fuck.” I dragged a hand through my hair. “Can you come out to the cabin? I’m not having this discussion over the phone.”
“What, now? It’ll take me at least a couple of hours to get there.”
“Tomorrow. Come first thing. We need to talk. And for God’s sake, don’t tell Valentina.”
“Wouldn’t dare. See you tomorrow.”
He hung up.
I stared out the window to where Max was standing, surveying the perimeter, rifle over his shoulder.
There was a time when I’d been part of that unit too.
It felt like yesterday. We’d all followed orders that had gotten us court-martialed.
We’d been thrown under the bus by our CO and lost our careers because of it.
Dishonorable discharge. I still couldn’t say the words without feeling incensed. You gave your life, and that’s what you got. Betrayal.
So, no. I wasn’t about to blindly follow orders again, not without doing my own due diligence first. Valentina had pressed me, so I’d lied to her. It had been the only way to buy myself some time, and to keep Evelyn alive long enough for me to check her out.
Thank fuck I had, too, since it was beginning to look like she wasn’t the rat. Just an innocent caught up in this whole ugly mess.
If I’d listened to my mother, I’d have her blood on my hands. I’d have added her face to the ones I carried around in my head.
Another, darker thought plagued me. If I hadn’t abducted her and brought her here, whoever had broken into her apartment would likely have killed her.
In a twisted, fucked-up way, I might have saved her life.
“Who’s Nico?” she asked, closing the laptop with a snap.
“My brother.”
Her eyebrows rose in a delicate arch. “He’s coming here?”
“Yeah. If anyone can find out about Ricardo, it’s him.”
“Why didn’t you want to talk on the phone?”
“You never know who’s listening. Besides, I want to talk to him about… family matters.”
“About me?”
I gave a stiff nod.
“Who’s Valentina?” She bit her lip, and it drew my eye. “Is she your wife?”
I coughed, then shook my head. “No, my mother.”
“You call your mother by her first name?” Her eyes widened with surprise. Granted, it wasn’t a normal thing to do, but then, we weren’t a normal family.
“Sometimes,” I acknowledged. “When the situation calls for it.”
She tilted her head and studied me as if she were appraising a painting for her gallery. I didn’t like it. “And the situation calls for it now?”
“Valentina runs the Marcelli family business,” I explained, although why the hell I was telling her this, I didn’t know.
Maybe I wanted her to understand that this wasn’t just me she was dealing with.
This was a family where scores were settled with fists, or in blood. “Think of her as a ruthless CEO.”
“She’s the boss?”
“That’s right.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s not around anymore.”
“I’m sorry.” A pause, then she said, “My parents are both dead too.”
“I know.”
She glanced up at me. “You do? How—?” She flushed as the realization dawned. “You checked me out?”
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. “I check everybody out, especially people we suspect have betrayed us.”
She frowned, and I was tempted to kiss away the lines on her forehead. “Was it Valentina’s order? You know, to kill me?”
I gave a curt nod.
“Thank you for not doing it,” she whispered.
I got up, feeling agitated. The kitchen was overly warm from the cooking. I needed some air, some breathing space.
“It wasn’t for you,” I snapped, seeing her eyes cloud over. Good. I had to break this familiarity that had developed between us. “I needed your help to find the people responsible for stealing our shipment. That’s all. It’s not personal.”
“Fine.” She stood, picking up her laptop. “You don’t have to be such a dick about it.”
I let out a frustrated breath.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Evelyn.”
She turned.
“Leave the device.”
“But—”
The look on my face must have convinced her against arguing, because she set it back down on the table, then fixed me with an angry look and stormed off to the bedroom.