Chapter Eight #2
“She’s connected to you.” Anja spoke with the directness she used when she needed him to receive something cleanly. Not unkindly. Just straight. “She’s your family. That makes her leverage. Look at the date stamp.”
Leo leaned closer. “Son of a bitch. They were taken earlier today.”
“Yes.”
He put both hands flat on the island and studied the photos. Chloe was laughing at her phone, with no idea in the world that anyone was watching her. Carefree in the parking lot, keys swinging, a perfectly ordinary afternoon.
“Someone slid this under your door, and they wanted you to come home to it. That’s a message.”
“What kind of message?”
She faced him. “They’re letting you know they know Vic contacted you and they know what you love. They want you to understand that those two things are related.”
Leo straightened up. Six years of reading rooms, people, and unsaid things beneath contract language, and the thing he felt right now had no professional framework for it. It was older and simpler and considerably less manageable than anything he’d ever navigated.
“I have to call her,” he murmured.
“Yes, but not yet.” Anja held up one hand. “Not until I check the building camera footage from tonight. I want to know who put that under your door before we do anything else.”
“Building security will have it. I’ll call them now.”
“Tell them it’s urgent and don’t tell them why.”
He had the night manager on the phone in ninety seconds. The man was cooperative and clearly accustomed to top-floor residents with specific requests at odd hours, which gave Leo a new and slightly concerning perspective on his neighbors.
He handed the phone to Anja.
She asked questions, listened, asked one more, thanked him, and handed the phone back.
“One of the security guards,” she explained. “He found it downstairs on the floor of the mail room, so he brought it up.”
Leo processed that. “Nobody broke in and slid it under the door in the dark.”
“No, but it makes tracing it significantly harder.”
“Chloe is safe in the compound with Kayne.” Leo pointed that out more for his own benefit than for Anja’s, since she already knew it. Hell, she lived there too. “She’ll need to stay and not leave.”
“I’ll have to tell Kayne.” Her tone suggested she wasn’t particularly excited about that task. “After we bag these properly, I’ll call Luke and Logan first.”
She walked to her duffel in the hallway, retrieved an evidence bag from a side pocket, and returned to the island.
“You should change,” she told him as she slid the photographs into the pouch. “You’ve been in that suit since six o’clock.”
“I’m fine.”
She gave him a look that was seventeen percent concern and eighty-three percent I have made a medical assessment and you are incorrect. “You’re running on four hours of sleep, a fundraiser dinner, and whatever that was. Go change. I’ll be here when you get back.”
“What about you? Don’t you want to put on something comfortable?”
“I will.”
He glanced from the bagged photographs to her.
“Anja.”
She raised her brows.
“She’s going to be okay.”
He needed to say it out loud to someone who would tell him the truth about it.
Anja held his gaze with the calm certainty that had steadied him twice now in the last two days. “She’s going to be okay,” she repeated. “And I’m going to make sure of it. Now go change.”
He went, and between the hallway and his bedroom, it occurred to him that one of the most frightening nights of his life was also the first in five months he hadn’t felt completely alone in it.
Leo changed out of the suit and hung up the jacket, opting for sweats and a T-shirt. He heard Anja on the phone in the guest room. She didn’t look up when he passed the open door.
He made coffee, stayed out of her way, and did not, for once, try to manage a thing.
#
The guest room had a dresser, a lamp, and enough quiet that Anja couldn’t even hear the city below the windows doing its late-night thing.
She’d changed out of the gown, put on a blue tee and yoga pants, and sat with her back against the headboard.
Her phone rested in her hand for thirty seconds before she made herself dial.
She hit Luke Colton’s contact first.
He answered on the second ring, which meant he hadn’t been asleep. Luke rarely was.
“Anja.” His voice was carefully neutral, knowing a late-night call wasn’t social. “Everything okay?”
“No, and I’m sorry about the hour. I need to talk to you and Logan.”
“Give me thirty seconds.”
There was an inaudible murmur on his end, followed by shuffling and a door closing. When he came back, his voice had shifted from warm to focused, which was the version of Luke Colton that got things done.
She waited with the bagged photographs in front of her.
Logan came on the line. “What’ve we got?”
She walked them through it without editorializing.
Vic Shaw’s death. The thumb drive. The blackmail dossier on eight athletes, two of them Leo’s clients.
Devonte Cross’s mother receiving a surveillance photograph of his sister with a red circle drawn around her head.
The four photographs of Chloe, shot in Bloomington that day, tucked inside a hand-delivered envelope.
When she finished, they let the silence hold for three more seconds.
“Where are you now?” Logan asked.
“Leo’s condo in St. Louis.”
“How long have you been running this solo?”