by Cj Howard
Apparently it was something to do with Claire’s father; that answered one aspect of the question. The threat that the man levied was clear, and Benjamin had to wonder who the man represented to be able to make the threat that he had: that she wouldn’t be able to leave the casino on her own safely.
It could be any of a number of people in the city, and there was no real way to narrow it down without a little more knowledge as to who else Claire’s father might have run afoul of during his downward spiral. As he watched Claire being blindfolded and helped into an unmarked SUV, Benjamin’s anger spiked again.
She clearly was doing something she didn’t entirely want to do, and he had no way—at least not immediately—to know where she’d been taken, or what the people who had taken her would do with her once they got her to their destination.
But it was a start. Chavez could get pictures from the footage, and those could go to the private investigator. Maybe Joe could come up with something, Benjamin thought, as he nodded to Chavez’s question of whether to get multiple angles of the people he could screen-capture from the films.
Benjamin texted his private investigator and the other person he thought might be able to come up with a few answers: Harold, his attorney. Somehow, between the two men, they would be able to narrow down who had taken Claire, why they might have taken her, and where they might have taken her to. Benjamin didn’t have much faith in the notion that she would be back within two hours.
He got the process started and went back to his room, feeling useless while others went to work trying to find out what had happened. Benjamin paced his living room, considering even the possibility of calling Shawn Stevenson himself—the man would probably know who all would be after him in the city, after all.
But thinking about it further, Benjamin didn’t have much faith in the gambling addict being willing to do the right thing and admit to all of the trouble he’d managed to get into in Vegas.
His intercom chirped again just as Benjamin was considering calling Shawn Stevenson anyway, and Benjamin cursed under his breath at the interruption. “Yes?”
“Mr. Minken?” Benjamin sighed. It was Claudia, from the lobby.
“Yes, Claudia?”
“Claire Stevenson has returned,” Claudia said. “Chavez said that I should notify you if she was seen.”
“Where was she seen? She’s back?” Benjamin checked the time on his phone. It had been just under an hour and a half since the timestamp had said that she’d left the casino in the ghost-SUV.
“She just came in through the main entrance and went by,” Claudia said. “Not everyone is in the know to be on the lookout for her,” she added apologetically.
“Did she look like she’d been harmed?” Benjamin made sure he had his wallet, his key card, his phone—the things he’d need to navigate the hotel area of the casino.
“Not that I could see,” Claudia said. “But…”
“Yeah, I know,” Benjamin agreed. “Thanks for letting me know, Claudia. Tell Chavez she’s returned.”
“Sent him a text while I’ve been talking to you,” Claudia confirmed.
Benjamin smiled, somewhat relieved for the first time since he’d gotten the news that Claire had been taken from the casino; he had to remember that he had excellent employees. “Thanks again, Claudia,” Benjamin said, finishing the conversation.
He checked once more that he had the things he needed and left his suite, headed for the elevator that would take him down to Claire’s level. Whatever the situation is, she’s moving in with you. You have the guest room. She’ll be safe if she’s not separated from you at any point.
In the back of his mind, Benjamin had to wonder why he was so invested, so soon, in Claire’s safety; even though he knew he was more attracted to her than he had been to any other woman he’d met in years, it didn’t seem like enough. The prospect of her being harmed so much—or, god forbid, killed—that she couldn’t work off her father’s debt didn’t explain it either.
Benjamin shook the thought out of his mind, promising himself he would answer the question later, and got off of the elevator on Claire’s floor. He could only assume that she’d gone back to her room on arriving at the casino—he would have thought that if she seemed to be headed anywhere else, someone would have notified him, and anyway, after whatever it was that happened to her, he couldn’t imagine her wanting to do much of anything else. He considered just going into her suite, using his master key card privilege to do it—but she would, he thought, be jumpy. It would only stress her out more to invade her space that way.
Instead, Benjamin stopped outside of Claire’s door, took a deep breath, and knocked. “Yeah?” It was Claire’s voice, which at least proved that she was in there.
“It’s Benjamin,” he called back through the door then waited as silence greeted his comment. He wondered if there was something worse going on, if Claire was—somehow—suddenly against him, or resentful of him in some way.
The next moment, though, the door opened to reveal her in the dress she’d been wearing when she left his room that morning, her face set in troubled lines. “Hey,” she said quietly. “I guess you heard about… whatever it was that happened here.”
Benjamin nodded. “Can I come in?”
Claire raised an eyebrow and smiled wryly at him. “It’s your hotel,” she pointed out. “You don’t have to ask.”
“I do have to ask,” he said. “Unless you’re committing a crime in here that I don’t know about, I don’t have any right to enter without your permission.”
Claire chuckled, a little bitterly, Benjamin thought, and opened the door wide enough to let him in. He brushed past her and kicked off his shoes in the vestibule area of her suite, musing—absently, irrelevantly—that it was the first time he’d been in her space since she’d started working for him.
She’d be more comfortable in my suite, Benjamin thought, comparing his full kitchen to the limited options available in her suite. The level of room that Claire had been assigned as an employee was generally meant for mid-tier patrons who would be eating most of their meals either in the restaurants on-property or elsewhere in the city.
“So you’re here to check up on me?”
Benjamin turned to face Claire and nodded. “I was wondering what the hell happened, and I wanted to make sure you’re safe,” he replied.
“No one roughed me up or anything like that,” Claire said, stepping towards the couch in her living room area and sitting down. “But I’m pretty fucking scared all the same.”
“From what I saw, they’ve got something to do with your father?”
Claire nodded again. “They need him for something,” she said. “They’re not all that happy that he got kicked out of Vegas.”
“They blindfolded you,” Benjamin prompted her. “I’m guessing you don’t have any idea where they took you, who they were?”
Claire shook her head. “Why don’t I give you the full run-down?” She sighed and scrubbed at her face.
“As much as you feel comfortable talking about right now,” Benjamin agreed. “Do you want me to sit next to you, or away from you?”
“Next to me, please,” Claire replied.
Benjamin sat down on the couch next to her and hesitated in the act of reaching for her hand. “So, tell me what happened—at least, what you’re comfortable telling me,” he suggested.
Claire took a deep breath. “I am guessing you know about them getting me out of the casino, or you wouldn’t be here right now,” she said. She exhaled. “So they drove me somewhere—I have no idea where—about thirty minutes away, I guess. I wasn’t allowed to take the blindfold off until after I was already inside, and they made me put the blindfold back on before I left the building. There was some kind of office, lots of hallways… it felt like a pretty big place.”
“Do you think it might have been maybe belowground at a casino somewhere?”
Claire shrugged. “I have no idea. Perfectly anonymous place,”
she said wryly. “I’m sure on purpose.”
Benjamin nodded. “Yeah, if you’re up to no good and kidnapping people, it’s best to be anonymous if you can,” he agreed.
“So they sat me down with some guy—I could probably describe him later—and he told me that they needed my father to be in town. They had an arrangement with him for a few different things, apparently, and his leaving basically meant that he went back on their deal.” Claire closed her eyes and Benjamin saw her face wrinkle up and twist with bitterness and resentment.
“What sort of things?”
Claire opened her eyes and looked at him, meeting his gaze levelly. “They needed him to do a few things: get dirt on you, on something I have no idea about, testify on their behalf in some kind of case, and—I gathered—essentially extort some other people out of money,” she replied.
“That’s quite the list of things to do,” Benjamin said, letting out a low whistle. “Did they say what their end of the deal was?”
Claire’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “Apparently his losing streak was more extreme than anyone knew,” she said. “He took out a loan of twenty grand from them.”
Benjamin cringed. “So in total his debts in the city are at least seventy grand,” he said. “What did they want you for?”
“They said that I could either take care of his debt to them in some way—render the services he agreed to render—or they would use me to get him here,” Claire said.
“Well obviously you can’t testify on their behalf, you don’t know them,” Benjamin pointed out. “Dirt on me we can talk about. Extorting some other people out of some money…” he shook his head. “What kind of money are we talking about?”
“Twenty thousand,” Claire said. “That essentially was paying back the ‘principal’ on the debt he owes them. The dirt on you and the testimony is the interest.”
He nodded; he had thought that might be the case. “Obviously they intend to hold you hostage—maybe even kill you—if you don’t get Shawn here, or do the other things,” Benjamin said gently.
“Yeah that was about what they said,” Claire agreed. She sighed. “My father…” she shook her head. “I cannot believe how much shit he has gotten me into.”
“Well part of it might just be that they know you’re working for me,” Benjamin pointed out. “If you’d left him high and dry, he’d be in jail now, waiting for his trial, probably not even able to make bail. The rest of it wouldn’t even be something they could expect from him under those circumstances.”
“They obviously expected him to get some kind of dirt on you, somehow,” Claire countered. “And if he was on bail—I’m sure they’d probably front it—they’d expect him to go forward on the extortion.”
Benjamin thought about that and nodded. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded. He reached out then and took her hand in his, admiring—for a fleeting second—the beauty of her dark sepia skin against his paler complexion as their fingers intertwined. “I want you to know that I am going to keep you safe,” he told her.
Claire chuckled again, bitterly. “Yeah, but if you keep me safe, they’re going to send people to kill him,” she said. “They have hit men out—bounty hunters, I guess—looking for him wherever he’s gone.”
“Ah,” Benjamin said. The behind-the-scenes of the threats the unknown people had made against Claire came to life in his mind: they would get Shawn Stevenson and hold onto his daughter as surety for him following through with their demands. Then, once everything was done, probably father and daughter both would be “disposed of.” No need to have people around who could recant later, come forward and go to the cops with information about the highly illegal things they’d been made to do, and that had been done to them.
“I think you need a glass of wine,” Benjamin said. “Let me order something to your room, and we’ll get you in the bath, and I’ll think about how we’re going to fix this.” Claire looked at him for a long moment, and Benjamin worried that he’d somehow overstepped his boundaries.
“Why are you going out of your way to help me like this?” She licked her lips, and he could see the gathering moisture in her eyes.
“Because one, you’re my employee, and no one fucks with my employees,” Benjamin said, giving Claire a quick smile. “Secondly, there are certain goddamn rules that we all agree to, working Vegas. Third, I like you.”
“You like me?” Claire raised both eyebrows, looking at him doubtfully.
“We haven’t been around each other long enough for me to have any clue of if I love you,” Benjamin said, “but I like you. I like your spirit. I like your intelligence. I like the fact that you’re tough. And of course, I like how good you are in bed.” He grinned again.
“But how in hell are you going to be able to get me out of this mess?” Claire shook her head, sighing again.
“I know people,” he said. “I may have to call on your toughness at some point—it’s going to depend on how we solve this—but I know people who can help us figure out who the hell this is, and how to put them all away.”
Claire held his gaze a moment longer before nodding her acceptance of his point. “I would really like a glass of wine,” she said. “And a long, hot bath.”
“One more thing,” Benjamin said. “They obviously have someone working with me, somewhere in the rank-and-file.” Claire frowned. Obviously that had escaped her thinking—or maybe she’d just forgotten it, but Benjamin had put together how the group could have organized their kidnapping: they would have to have someone on the inside in order to get in and get out almost completely unnoticed. They would also have to have someone on the inside to know that Claire was there and that she was in any kind of position to fulfill her father’s debts.
“Yeah, now that you mention it, it makes sense,” Claire agreed.
“So in light of that, we’re moving you out of this room today,” Benjamin said. “You’re staying with me. I’m not willing to risk them coming for you here, helped by someone in my organization.”
“You...you’re making me stay in your room?”
Benjamin frowned slightly. “I don’t want to force you,” he said. “In anything at all. But it’s safest there for you.”
“Do you really believe that?”
Benjamin nodded. “The security details on my level are way better than they are here,” he pointed out. “And they can’t afford to make a move directly against me. If you’re by my side, you’re guaranteed safe.” Benjamin watched Claire consider that. After a moment, she nodded.
“I can see that,” she said. She closed her eyes and groaned in frustration. “You know, if I see the other side of this, my father is not going to need a bunch of thugs to kill him. I’m going to kill him.”
Benjamin gave her fingers a squeeze and brought her hand up to his lips. “I’ll be your alibi,” he suggested playfully. Claire laughed, and Benjamin felt better about the whole situation— between them, and in general; it couldn’t be too wrong, too fucked up, if Claire was willing to laugh. “Let’s get you that wine and that bath, and we can start moving you up to my room,” he said. Claire hesitated for just a moment, and then nodded.
Chapter12
Claire tried not to fidget too much as she stood off to the side of the entrance to the MGM Grand casino floor, glancing around and trying to decide where she would take up her post. She had thought she’d been prepared for what she was going to do, but the reality of standing in the huge, vaulting space, full of people she didn’t know, without Benjamin at her side was intimidating.
They had agreed that it was the best way to take the next step in getting to the bottom of the threats against her—and against her father—but Claire still didn’t know if she could trust the arrangements.
You’re never going to get to the bottom of it, otherwise, she reminded herself, moving toward one of the banks of slot machines. Benjamin had set his private investigator and his attorney to the task of figuring out who it had been, but after two weeks th
ey’d come up dry—even with her description of who she had met with, and who it was that they’d wanted her to extort money from. There were just too many people who could have wanted money from the particular two men in question; they were very wealthy, barons of the hospitality industry, though not the gambling industry, and had stakes in multiple operations in the city.
They’d chosen the MGM Grand because Benjamin knew the men who owned it and had been able to convince them to help him in setting up the operation: they had part of their own security detachment monitoring the situation, including the cameras positioned all over the casino.
Benjamin was, Claire knew, still working on getting to the bottom of the question of who at his own casino was compromised. He was having Human Resource screen every single person who might have let the men into the building, who might have aided and abetted her kidnapping. Of course, that screening was not—strictly speaking—within the normal scope of Human Resource responsibilities, but that was why Benjamin had other people providing contributing information.
Claire sat down at the slot machine and put in some money. She tried not to look around, tried not to be obvious in her suspicions. The plan was simple: she would be somewhere without obvious guard, without Benjamin near her, so that the people who had abducted her before would—hopefully—attempt to take her again, to get her answer to their proposition.
But what the people who were going to take her would ideally not know is the fact that the MGM Grand security detail would be watching for them, waiting to signal the people that Benjamin had hired to discreetly follow, to get as many details as possible about who it might be.
The real question was what would happen when she turned the people down. To maximize my safety, I should try and give them the answer in public. It wasn’t what she and Benjamin had discussed, but Claire didn’t like the idea of what they would do when they had her alone, far away from any witnesses, and she said no.
