Chapter Sixty-Eight
Fox
We had a busy couple of days. Jenny wiped any CCTV showing any of us anywhere near the charity shop.
She’d also arranged for an incredibly generous cash donation to be left there with a note “for the damages.” Freddie, the volunteer I’d wrongly been so suspicious of, had raved all over Facebook about the mystery benefactors.
We were good people. We made a mess. We cleared it up.
We looked back over the last month and were able to make everything make sense.
Drake had come to the UK for the keyring. That was all he’d wanted. And then we’d killed Clark Dixon, and The Corporation was back to wanting us dead.
I knew now wasn’t the time to mention it to Haze, but Drake was impressive.
It was no wonder he’d had such a long, illustrious career.
For more than a year, he’d been behind the scenes pulling the strings like some kind of chess Grandmaster.
And he’d succeeded. We were alive and he’d got his retirement fund.
Throughout, he’d had people watching us.
Logging our movements. Proving to himself and to The Corporation that we were just a couple with a penchant for killing.
No big boss. No gang affiliation. I should’ve seen this sooner.
I remembered the constant yelling of “Who are you working for?” by the men who took me in Ivrea.
That was all The Corporation really cared about—that we weren’t working for the competition.
The people Drake had watching us were good enough that we’d never noticed them. They were individuals who’d been able to merge into the background and not arouse our suspicions. Everywhere we went, people looked at us, assessed us, judged us; how were we meant to know who was doing it for money?
When The Corporation began to suspect that Drake’s motives didn’t align with their own, they hired the useless Rob and then Mario and his black moped.
The mystery of Frederica and her husband had been solved by Jenny, who frequently did image searches for us in case we’d been captured anywhere we didn’t want to be seen.
A photo of us taken at a school fete had come up on a private swingers’ website.
Someone had been catfishing using our image to look for “like-minded local couples wanting excitement away from the status quo.” Frederica must have been taken in by it.
Despite everything, it still wasn’t over. It was hard to know how much we could trust my father-in-law. The men who’d chased us at Balgray had clearly wanted it to be the last party we ever attended. We still needed to convince The Corporation to back off and leave us to live in peace.
Everything felt in limbo. We were going through the motions of everyday life but were braced for impact.
I was making dinner when the doorbell rang. Haze was putting the kids to bed.
“I’ll get it!” Haze shouted from upstairs.