Chapter Eighteen
Maximus
“Report.” I sat behind my desk with my fingers steepled in front of me.
Jake was the person I trusted most in the world, and he stood staring out the window. Lewis and Stefan were my other two generals who worked in other areas of my empire, both trustworthy, and more than capable of acting in my absence.
“CCTV shows six men arriving at three thirty in the morning,” Jake said, turning to face the rest of the people in the room. “The door looks as if it has been damaged by tools, but that damage was done after they had already been inside.”
“There are the cameras that everyone can see and map if they have the time and inclination, but there are other cameras at all our clubs that only the people in this room know about,” Stefan continued, his jaw tight.
That club was under his protection. “There are cameras in the main office, and at every door in and out. You can see them entering, and turning the alarm off before they searched the place. Then they activated everything, and set fire to the place.”
I nodded slowly, rage smouldering deep in my stomach since someone in my employ had handed over the details to our club.
“Do we know what they were searching for?” I asked.
“They headed straight for the main office,” Stefan replied. “Everyone believes money is kept in the old safe cemented into the wall in the corner.”
“We changed the security setup a few months ago when you took over the business,” Jake concluded. “You had wanted a new system.”
I remembered the meeting about it, and the objections to such a massive change.
New discrete safes were installed where would-be robbers would least expect it.
Most of our regular clients now used subscriptions that went through our accountant, who was a wizard at keeping us legal, and our taxes at a minimum.
“Did they find the new safes?” I queried.
“Nope.” Jake made the word pop. “They survived the fire.”
“Anything else kept in that club?” I asked.
“We used to keep all the paperwork pertaining to our clients,” Stefan replied. “But we now scan everything onto a cloud, and destroy the paper copies.”
A lot of our clients didn’t like a digital profile that linked back to them, so they filled in paper forms to create their fantasy profiles.
They each received a number, and they became anonymised in the system.
No one knew we had digitised the system apart from the men in this room.
The scanned forms were on one server, and the anonymised number on another to ensure privacy.
“You think they were looking for data?” I asked.
Jake shrugged. “It would make sense. It would take a lot of money to bribe a staff member, and then hire people with the ability to break into that old safe before setting a fire to cover their tracks.”
I leaned back, staring at the ceiling. “Have you all viewed the footage?”
“Yeah,” Jake replied. “I’ve forwarded it to your personal cloud.”
I nodded once. “Any idea who decided to sign their own death warrant?”
“You’ve pissed off a lot of people lately, Max. Take your pick,” Jake said, chuckling. “Then multiply that figure by three.”
“Fuck off,” I muttered. “I’ve had a stressful time.”
They had no idea how much it had taken to manipulate the situation to ensure that Olivia was within my reach. Roberto would be calling for my head on a spike if he found out how I had interfered in his deals.
“Let’s shake a few trees,” I said, grasping the arms of my chair, and pushing myself up. “We need to set a trap since someone was looking for something. They need to think it is still within their reach.”
“Normal set-up?” Jake asked.
“I think that would be best. Tweak the details to ensure we know who takes the bait,” I replied. “Whoever the rat is, we need to trap them.”
“I’d like to be the first to speak with them,” Stefan commented. “That club was under my protection. The code they used belonged to one of my employees.”
My head snapped up, and I met his gaze. “Do I need to ask if they’ve been brought in?”
“They are currently enjoying our hospitality,” Stefan confirmed, nodding slowly.
In other words, they were hanging from chains in a dungeon, and not in a kinky way.
“Let me know where that takes you,” I said. “I want the head of whoever authorised this. I’ll happily send it to their nearest and dearest gift wrapped.”
Jake’s lips twitched since the last head I sent was sealed with a red bow. “You’re going to get yourself a reputation,” he said.
“Good. It will make them think twice before they shit on my doorstep,” I grated out, pacing across my office to pour myself a drink.
“Increase our presence in the clubs, and make sure that everyone knows that we are aware this wasn’t an accident like the police report says.
A fucking dodgy light fitting – bullshit! ”
“It means whoever is involved has contacts in the police,” Jake replied. “I’ll reach out to our people, and see if they can find anything in the reports.”
We all had people in our pockets, it just depended on the rank that resided there. Our organisation paid a lot of money to make sure we had high ranking officers on our payroll who could control an investigation and the evidence in a case.
“We tighten everything down until this is over,” I said. “Check all the security records of every entry and exit. I want to track who goes where.”
Jake’s phone pinged, and he swiped up to check his messages, his eyebrows rising at whatever was on his screen.
“This is the alert for our storage unit downtown,” he said. “Someone is trying to break in.”
“Are you fucking serious?” I asked, already on my way to the door. The others fell into place behind me, knowing we were heading to where someone was stupid enough to fuck with us.
“I’ll drive,” Jake said when we reached the basement. “You’ll drive like a maniac, and my nerves can’t cope with that.”
I glared at him, but he was unrepentant, merely standing beside the driver’s door, and staring at me.
In the end, I got into the front passenger seat as I knew there was little point arguing with Jake when he got that look on his face.
Technically, he was probably right about my driving as I tended to focus on the upcoming fight, and didn’t care who got in my way.
Lewis and Stefan took the car behind us.
Each of our vehicles were stocked with guns and ammunition, with armour plating to turn them into small tanks.
Jake sped through the city, while I watched the assholes on his phone as they forced the door into our storage area.
Lights flashed past us in my peripheral vision, red and green denoting our route.
The warehouses were in my company name, but that didn’t mean I kept anything of any value in them.
Items of value were in underground vaults, and we had gone paper free with everything scanned and on special servers about a year ago.
What paperwork needed to be kept, were in specialist safes that were built into the foundations of buildings under a pseudonym.
“They’re inside,” I said, changing to a different camera to continue viewing them. “They seem to know their way as they are heading straight to the offices. Someone knows too much about us.”
I couldn’t shake the feeling that for once I wasn’t controlling the game, and that someone had been watching us from a distance and plotting.
Considering that Olivia was sitting alone in our house sent a shiver rippling down my spine.
She was a vulnerability I had never had before, and it didn’t sit well with me even though that house was the equivalent of a fortress with the security system that I installed in it.
I set Jake’s phone in the centre console, and pulled my own phone out, opening the App connected to my home.
Olivia was sitting in the living room watching a movie, her feet tucked under her as she nursed a pillow.
I activated the additional security that ensured she couldn’t open any of the doors or windows, which had already been reinforced to prevent bullets being able to pierce through them.
There was a panic room in the house that I would show her when I got home.
“Problem?” Jake asked.
“Yeah, I never had a wife to worry about before.” I lifted his phone again to watch the progress of the burglars through our building.
“Considering you’ve watched over that woman for years, we both know there would only ever be one outcome.”
I move my focus to Jake. “You’ve taken a great deal of interest in my personal relationship,” I commented.
He shrugged. “I’m your chief security officer and right hand man. It’s my job to join the dots together from the shadows. I doubt anyone else knows what you’ve done or Roberto would be baying for your blood.”
“And what have I done?” I queried, my back molars grinding together.
Jake glanced at me briefly. “What I wish I’d done for Poppy a long time ago. None of us choose who we love.” He said it so matter-of-factly that the panic that had started inside me calmed.
“No, we can’t,” I replied, sucking in a deep breath. “Promise me that if you get the chance, you’ll let Poppy know how you feel.”
“We both know that there is no place in this world where we would work. We come from different spheres.”
We turned into the area our warehouse was located, and I lifted extra ammunition from the storage area in the door.
“The world is not so big anymore,” I replied. “Willow has shown all of us that we need to look outside our insular existence and find our own route to happiness.”
I slammed a magazine into another gun and slid it into the front of my belt as we swung into the parking lot.
I touched the communication device at my ear, which connected all of us together. “We need one to question. The rest have an incinerator waiting for them.”
“Roger that,” Stefan replied, the lights of their car going dark behind us.