“Yeah, yeah,” I grunt.
Eden leans in close to me, so her lips are less than an inch from my ear. When she talks, her breath tickles my skin, warm. And all I want to do is sink into bed with her and feel the tickling breath for the rest of the day.
“This is a record of Mason and Cassandra embezzling millions—millions, Maddox!—from investors in Mason’s company! If this got out, they’d go to prison—”
“That’s the point,” I whisper back. “There are two files on the disc. Did you only run the—”
“Yeah, just the embezzling records,” she says. “I was too stunned after that to run the second one, to be honest. I’ll run it later?”
“The second file contains instructions on who to send this to and how to reach them. They’re my hacker friends. That’s why we had to wait a week; they told me they’d be ready for this date, and this date alone. The Cassandra additions are recent. I didn’t even know they were together until just before the party, but there’s enough on her to make her an accomplice.”
“Enough to get the heat off of you and onto her,” Eden says, the excitement bubbling beneath her voice. “Yes, Maddox!”
“Expose them,” I growl. “Expose them and show the goddamn world what seedy fucks they are.”
She flinches at the anger in my voice. “Revenge,” she says, tasting the word.
“Revenge,” I agree.
She leans back, and I do the same.
I smile at her, but her face is suddenly uncertain. She taps her knee with her fingernail with one hand; with the other, she scratches the disc case up and down, leaving faint marks in the plastic.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Just all those things Cassandra said,” she says. “I know they’re not true, but they go around and around in my head. Why would she say that? Just because you left her? Just out of anger?”
“Not just that, no,” I say, wishing these cuffs would turn to sand.
“Two minutes,” Officer Richards says.
We ignore him.
“Why, then?” Eden asks.
“Because she wanted me back,” I say. “She’s crazy, Eden. She came up to me at the party and asked me to leave you. She genuinely thought I would drop you in a second and ride off into the sunset with her. Look at me.” Eden raises her bright red-brown eyes to my face. “I have never – never – cheated on, or hit a woman. Never in my life. Once, when I was a kid, a social services woman came by the house to check on me. I’d gone to school with a black eye the week before, and I guess one of the teachers was concerned. So they sent this woman around . . .” I swallow, my tongue dry and stuck to the floor of my mouth. The past can be a painful thing, can’t it? “She was a birdlike woman, all thin and dainty-looking. When she knocked on the door, I watched out of the window. I watched my old bastard of a father grab her, shove her up against the wall, and jab her twice in the belly. Then he whispered some mean shit in her ear. I know it was mean because she never came back. Nobody did.”
“He threatened her,” Eden says.
“Yeah.” My eyes sting, and for a terrifying moment, I think I might cry. “When I saw that, I went down the stairs, and I threw a pan at the old man’s head. Bounced right off like nothing happened, and he gave me another black eye and a broken finger in the bargain. But even then I knew . . . A man never hits a woman. Never.”
“I believe you,” Eden says, and her eyes are watering, too. “I know you’re telling me the truth.”
“Cassandra is more than capable of hurting herself to screw me over, anyway.”
I blow air through clenched teeth. “Anyway, I can see Officer Richards is about to have a goddamn aneurysm if we don’t finish up. Listen, after you’ve sorted the disc, go somewhere secret. Don’t tell any of my men, and don’t tell me.”
“Move again?”
“Just for a little while,” I say. “When this thing hits, Cassandra is going to be on the warpath.”
Eden shivers. “And Cassandra on the warpath might even be capable of getting to me at the club, or at one of your men’s house?”
“Exactly,” I say. “She might play the sweet girlfriend well, but Cassandra Caraway is a vicious creature.”
Chapter Forty Seven
Eden
Maddox stands up, and the ginger-haired officer moves toward him. My body wills me on; I have little say in it. I jump to my feet, grab Maddox by the back of his jumpsuit, and pull him toward me. He turns around, looking down at me with that smirk of his. I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him on the lips.
“Hey!” the officer grunts. “None of that!”
I kiss him hard, our teeth mashing together, and almost two weeks without him makes the kiss all the sweeter. I feel his body reacting to mine, both of us hungry to fall into familiar pleasure. His shoulders shift and his arms strain as he instinctively tries to move his hands to my body, stopped only by the handcuffs. Then he steps away as the officer tugs at him.
“We’ll be together soon,” he says, backing out of the waiting room. “Sooner than you think, Eden. Just be patient.”
And then he is gone, being led back to his cell.
I leave the station and emerge into the mid-afternoon sun, walk across the car park, and climb into the car beside Markus. “Looks like I’ll be leaving you for a while, big guy,” I say.
“On the boss’s orders?”
“Yeah.”
I shut the car door. “Can you take me to Nat’s place? I have something I think she’ll want to see. And then we’ll go back to yours so I can get my things, and then you’ll leave me. Maddox said nobody can know where I’m going—not even you guys.”
“Must be serious,” Markus says, starting the car. “But I know better than to question Boss. He’ll sort this thing out. He’s up against it, though. I swear half the people who were at the party are bribing the police.”
The car pulls away from the police station, and we drive into town, past streets of hipster chicks with chunky-framed sunglasses and skater boys with low-hanging jeans and baggy tank tops and tattoos, past interns tapping madly at their phones as they cross the roads blindly and stay-at-home moms powerwalking their strollers. We stop outside of Nat’s apartment building.
“Mind waiting here?” I say.
Markus shakes his head and smiles shyly. “I was thinking while you were in there. Being a chauffeur doesn’t seem like such a bad job. You drive here; you drive there. You wait. You drive some more. Lots of time to think.” He stops, as though realizing he’s been talking and is embarrassed by it. “Anyway, I’ll be out here.”
“I’ll say hi to Nat for you,” I offer.
Markus smiles and then nods briskly. “Yeah, please do. I should be seeing her later, anyway.”
“Oh, so that’s where you’ve been sneaking off to!”
He blushes, and I climb out of the car.
I press the buzzer, and Nat’s chirpy voice sings from the intercom.
“Hello!”
“It’s me,” I say.
“Eden!”
“Let me up, will you? I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”
The door beeps, and then cranks as it unlocks. I push it open and walk up the staircase, the disc in my hand, heart thumping. This is huge, I think. This is huge, this is huge.
But it’s worth it, for Maddox. Hell, anything is worth it for Maddox.
***
Nat and I sit on the edge of her bed, the laptop on my knees.
“It’s so good to see you!” Nat chirped when I entered the apartment. She danced across to me in her bare feet and threw her arms around me, a wide grin on her face. I knew some time had passed by looking at her skin alone: fake tan, freshly applied, chipping away. She hugged me tight to her and then I said, “I need your laptop.” She led me into the bedroom to where we sit now, but she’s still grinning at me, a big ear-to-ear grin. It warms my heart, seeing how happy she is just to see me.
First of all, I open the file I glanced at in Maddox�
��s apartment. Nat scans it with her eyes, moving down the figures, the transcripts, all of it. Fifty-nine pages of damning evidence against Mason and Cassandra. Most of it is related to specifically Mason, but at the bottom, there is a section devoted to Cassandra, the most conclusive piece of evidence being an online chat in which Cassandra stripped down to the waist and touched herself for some businessman to give his okay on a deal.
“Millions,” Nat whispers.
I turn to her, smiling. “Who would’ve thought waiting for a biker outside of a café would lead to this, huh?”
Nat grins back. “Not me,” she says. “I wouldn’t have guessed that for all the money in the world. Will this end the whole show?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I hope it does. Maddox has been in there too long already. There’s only so much those rich ladies and gentleman can bribe away, isn’t there? It gets to a certain point where they can’t just pay their way out of it anymore. Once this is out there, they can’t hide it.”
I give her a quick outline of my conversation with Maddox in the police station, minus the personal details.
“And Maddox has hacker friends, does he?” she asks.
“He’s a man within a man, isn’t he?”
“Don’t get dreamy on me, Miss Chase.” Nat nudges me playfully. “I thought you were Miss Hardcore Feminist.”
I shrug. “I still am.” I think I am, anyhow. “But this is bigger than feminism.”
“You once told me nothing is bigger than feminism.”
“Then I am proven wrong, I guess. I can’t give Cassandra any slack just because she’s a woman. Yes, she clearly has problems. And yes, those problems are upsetting. But she accused my man of being a rapist, a woman-beater, a cheater, and I believed her.”
“My man,” Nat giggles. “Never thought I’d hear that from your lips.”
“Nat, I love you, really,” I say, “but please do shut up.”
I smile to take the sting out of my words, and she smiles back.
“What’s the next file?” she asks.
“Instructions,” I say.
I open it and I’m met with a simple paragraph of text:
Go to www.dailyblogbusynessforamanonthemove.com/dailyblog/1134, go to the comments tab, find the comment posted by MrSkeever86, and reply to it with these words: ‘Yes, I agree, cooking is so difficult!’ Attach the file to the comment. My people will take it from there.
“I feel like we’re in a spy movie,” Nat whispers.
“I know the feeling,” I say.
I open the web browser and copy and paste the address into it. I’m met with a boring daily blog, a blog designed to be as boring as possible to attract the least amount of traffic, I guess. The background is a picture of a nondescript street, and the text is so small I have to squint to read. The actual blog post is a mundane rant about how difficult it is to find the time to make decent meals when you’re an on-the-go businessman. I scroll down the page to the comments, find the right one, and post the reply, word for word, along with the attachment.
Text appears: Comment added.
A moment later, more text appears: Comment removed.
And then MrSkeever86 writes: Sorry, had to remove your comment for spam!
Nat and I glance at each other. “Is that it?” Nat asks, biting her lip. “It doesn’t seem very dramatic.”
“I hope that’s it,” I say. “Otherwise—”
The computer lets out a squeaking noise, all the programs shut down, and the screen goes black. Nat and I watch it, bemused. We’re both tech-savvy, and I know we’re both thinking that a virus has infected the computer. A moment later, green text appears on the screen: Thank you for the files. Best wishes to Maddox. We’ll take it from here.
Then the text disappears, and the screen blooms back into life.
“Holy crap!” Nat squeaks. “This is really like a spy movie, isn’t it?”
“It really is,” I agree. “I think holy crap is right.”
I set the laptop aside on the bed and stand up, pacing up and down. “Okay, so hopefully things will be clear sailing from here. Cassandra and Mason will be arrested, the charges against Maddox will be dropped, and life will go on. Easy.”
“Easy,” Nat laughs. “Since when is anything with The Miseryed easy?”
There’s no bitterness in her voice. In fact, she sounds like she’s having the most fun she’s had in years. She watches me with wide, excited eyes as I pace up and down.
“You’re enjoying this,” I comment.
She shrugs. “Maybe a little. Sure. A little.”
I walk back to the bed and slump down next to her. “I have to go away for a little while,” I say.
“Where?”
“I can’t say.”
“Not even to me?” she asks hopefully.
“Not even to you,” I say. “Sorry, but—”
“I guess Maddox knows what he’s doing?”
I hope so, I think.
“Of course he does,” I say.
“Does that mean I can go around to Markus’ now, instead of him coming here?”
“He told you?” I say.
She looks at me under her eyelashes, and I’m reminded of the way a professor looks at you over their glasses when you’ve just said something silly. “He’s not the best storyteller, you know. Every time I ask him why I can’t go around to his place, he comes up with such silly things. Once, he panicked and told me a raccoon had burst through the window and shit everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, in the bed.”
I laugh loudly. “Are you serious?”
“Oh, yeah. The next day, it was something with the plumbing. You weren’t at your place; he was making up these stories. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out.”
“Which is why I have to go somewhere else,” I say.
Nat grows serious. “Does Maddox think she’ll come after you?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “But he knows she’s capable of it, and—”
“That’s enough,” Nat finishes.
“That’s enough.” I nod.
Nat stands up and spreads her arms. “One last hug till who-knows-when?”
I stand up and wrap my arms around her, squeezing her close to me. “It’ll work out okay,” I say. “One day we’ll have a double date, me, you, Maddox and Markus. We’ll go to a restaurant like real grownups with real boyfriends and order something fancy like octopus. We’ll discuss interest rates or whatever it is normal boring grownups discuss when they’re on double dates.”
“And then Maddox and Markus will go round back and have a nice chat with the owner and we’ll get a free meal?” Nat says, grinning.
“Oh, no, Miss Smith. Maddox is a real gentleman.”
“Yeah, right,” Nat says. “And Markus is a prince.”
We hug one last time, and then Nat leads me to the door of the apartment. She looks at me, and I look at her, and then we part ways without saying another word. When I get into the car, I glance over at Markus.
“A raccoon?” I say, and he blushes up to his ears. “A raccoon?”
Markus looks at me, lips trembling, and I’m about to apologize when he bursts out into a booming laugh. I join in with the laughter, and when we’re done, I pat him on the back.
“Alright, big man, back to your place. And then you’ve got to take me to my car and forget about me for a while. I’m going incognito.”
“Okay, Miss Bond. Right away.”
Markus grins, starts the car, and drives away from Nat’s apartment building.
Miss Bond. On a spy mission for a dangerous man. Yeah, there’s some truth in that, isn’t there?
Chapter Forty Eight
Mom lives in a two-bed house without another house for half a mile around it. It’s built with old planks, planks that haven’t been painted in a long time; beaten at by dust and wind. The windows are cloudy, and the front door is bare of paint, with only chipped pieces here and there. It’s the kind of house you’d expect to see
in an old Western eighties film: the house of an old spinster.
When I pull into the driveway, the sun is setting, and I see the face of an old woman peering out from the front window.
Mom. How long has it been? A year?
Perhaps the worst part about that is that we didn’t part over anything serious. We had an argument, a fairly typical argument, and Mom threw a dish, and I screamed at her, “Don’t be such a bitch just because Dad left!” And Mom shoved me in the chest, and I fell back and slammed into the wall. She growled at me that I was a mistake, and I growled back that she’s an old haggard bitch who nobody wants. I wanted to call, and I’m sure she did, too, but neither of us did and a year whooshed by.
PREGNANT FOR A PRICE Page 42
