by Moriah Jovan
He caught my wrist as I walked by the bed, and I looked down at him, naked, beautiful. Serious.
“I love you, Cassandra.”
It took me almost four hours to get to Baltimore, to a small community credit union in a seedy part of town. I retrieved the boxes of files I had stashed in four separate safe deposit boxes, asked for directions to the nearest Kinko’s, and left.
I copied every piece of paper in those files; it would take Mitch hours to get through it all and when he was done, he’d know every detail and dirty little secret of some of the most powerful people in the world.
I barely made it back to the credit union before five. I was at their door by eight the next morning to retrieve it all for the last time and close my account. Then I set out for a bank in Manassas, Virginia.
All that driving gave me time to think, but I didn’t want to.
Mitch would be the only other person who would have ever seen these records, but it was only fair.
None of my clients knew I’d kept complete dossiers on each of them, or rather, how complete, until I’d finished destroying a few lives. People said things in the heat of the moment, in the afterglow of a session with a sexually accomplished, seemingly sympathetic and not-terribly-clever or interested woman. They also talked on their phones in front of “the help” and especially when “the help” had left the room for any reason.
I had wired The Bordello with the most sensitive recording equipment on the market. When the girls were at school and I had no clients or classes, I transcribed every sound file myself, painstakingly, learning how to type on a freeware program.
When I could afford it, I’d hired investigators to find out more with clues based on my transcripts. Yes, I knew how to protect myself: from disease, pregnancy, blackmail, extortion, financial ruin, arrest.
Assassination.
I sighed, feeling some guilt at having dragged Mitch into the dark well of my life, but it had seemed so simple at the time. Innocent. Of all the people I’d ever investigated, Mitch was the only one whose background squared with the way he lived his life, with honor and integrity, who had no deep, dark secrets. Thus, I had no qualms about entrusting him with it.
It didn’t matter now anyway. He wouldn’t let me go without a fight.
I love you, Cassandra.
My eyes watered and I sniffled, and no wonder: Everything was starting to bloom. My eyes leaked all afternoon.
Yet another bank. Yet another random set of four of the biggest safe deposit boxes they had. Yet another road trip to relocate my records, as I did periodically anyway.
Mitch met me when I drove onto the estate that night and his mouth dropped open when I popped the trunk to reveal four bankers boxes full of files.
“State secrets,” I said matter-of-factly. “Career-destroying confessions. Peccadilloes. Business deals clean and dirty. Insider trading, fraud, deceit, murder. I’m sure you’re actually friends with some of these people, so be very careful about what you choose to read. If you only want the list of names, this is it.” I handed him two sheets of paper stapled together. “You are the only other person besides me who will have read this. I am trusting you with my life.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“You heard me right. My life. Even though you have been known to go behind my back, you sneaky bastard.”
“Oh, Cassandra,” he whispered helplessly, turning his attention back to the contents of the trunk. “You’ve done everything you wanted with it. Why do you keep it?”
“Insurance. There’s a dead man’s switch on it.”
“Who?”
“Morgan Ashworth.”
Mitch gaped at me, and I smiled, albeit sheepishly. “He’s unassailable. I cultivated him years ago when I figured out the scam Hilliard was running. I gave him a rundown of what I wanted to do to whom. He didn’t have to be told why because he has spies in every corner of every back room in Washington.”
“Does Sebastian know this?”
“No.” I shrugged. “Everyone knows I have an executor. No one knows who—except you, now—but they know it has to be someone powerful enough to flip the switch and come out unscathed. And they don’t want to find out the hard way.”
“A lot of people fill that bill.”
“None who are that autonomous and don’t hesitate to act. Your...pack. They seem to feel that they have some— I don’t know— Moral high ground? They’re honest. They aren’t Mafia. They mind their own business. They have no interest in taking what other people have. They don’t have any connections that can be used against them and they don’t grant or take favors that might come with strings. Their first loyalty is to each other and to anyone else they consider family. Like you. They do what they feel they have to when they’re pushed, and then they deal with the fallout. And if they all went broke tomorrow they’d just roll up their sleeves and start rebuilding.”
Mitch looked at me speculatively. “I didn’t think you liked them.”
“I like Morgan,” I said, then paused for a minute to think. “The rest— I don’t know them well enough, and I may not ever like them, but I do admire them.”
“What did he ask you for in return?”
I looked at the moon rising just behind Mitch’s ear and slowly shook my head. “Not a thing,” I whispered, and my eyes began to sting. “He was the first and only man who has never wanted anything from me. I still don’t know the real reason he agreed to do it.” My lip curled as I looked at my husband. “Fed me some bullshit answer about feeling impressed that he should.” Mitch’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and I blinked away my tears to focus on his eyes. “Why is that significant to you?” I demanded.
“It’s...not,” Mitch muttered, turning away to pull a box out of the trunk. I didn’t buy that, but it seemed that I had been dismissed, and I had no wish to pursue it.
Mitch didn’t come to bed at all. I tossed and turned, wondering if he’d been so disgusted that he’d decided to sleep somewhere else, but I refused to go looking for him.
“Mitch,” I murmured as the sun came up through the library window, and touched his shoulder, the only thing keeping him from sliding from his desk chair to the floor in his sleep. He started awake and looked up at me blankly, then around at the library, his desk strewn with documents and empty boxes everywhere.
Indeed, he had slept elsewhere, but not, I was far too happy to know, in a different bed.
“Go to bed,” I said. “They aren’t going anywhere.”
“I—” He cleared the frog out of his throat. “I may never be able to look at some of these people again.”
I nodded. “And me?”
His face betrayed his surprise. “You?”
“I’m no better than they are.”
He laughed with no humor whatsoever, caught my hand, and pulled me down onto his lap. “Better or worse. Richer or poorer. Sickness and health.”
“I see. Falling back on your wedding vows to justify to Bishop Hollander keeping me around.”
“No. I’m not going to lie and say I would’ve gotten involved with you if I’d known all this up front. I wouldn’t have. But it would’ve been my loss because you— You are the most fascinating and exciting woman I’ve ever met. Not having the opportunity to fall in love with you... I— I can’t imagine that. I don’t want to.”
I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat, and waved at the boxes. “But you said you couldn’t look these people in the face.”
He laughed bitterly. “Do you remember any of what’s here?”
That caught me up short. “No,” I said slowly, wondering what he was getting at. “I haven’t read it in years. Didn’t need to.”
“Some of these people have cheated me, cheated the Steelworks. And I never knew it. They played me. Early on, I mean. They wouldn’t be able to do that now.”
I stared at him. “Because you were young. Naïve.”
He nodded slowly, his mouth twisted. “A Mormon.”
> Does Hollander seem like a nutjob to you?
Well, no. He’s such a brilliantly sneaky bastard I assumed he was an anomaly.
“What they did, I— I shouldn’t have been able to survive. I’m having flashbacks of my mission. If I’d made just one wrong move...”
The only thing that stood between his Steelworks and total financial annihilation was the loyalty of Sebastian Taight, a man whose wrath no one wanted to incur.
I didn’t remember that Mitch had his own place in my black book. He was an insignificant speck amongst the constellation of secrets in this pile of trash that I touched only when I wanted to move it.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I should’ve just brought you the list.”
“No,” he hastened to assure me. “It’s good. I needed to know.”
“So you know who to stop doing business with.”
“The more they need my products, the sweeter the word ‘no’ gets.”
“Without explaining.”
“I don’t have to.”
I loved it when he got arrogant.
We spent the day going through the records, spreading them out, laying out paper pathways all over the library floor, into the billiards room, on the billiards table, to give us a visual, physical representation of any conversation we found that pertained to Mitch or the Steelworks.
By dinnertime, the picture was clear:
The people who had wanted Jep Industries to fail only because they hated Roger Oth had never looked beyond King Midas having taken it over and dismantled it.
The people with competing—inferior—products had an investment in Jep Industries failing, and had stepped up their own operations to attempt to fill the void. They couldn’t figure out why they’d never made any inroads in the market.
And then a couple of those people had started digging to find out how factories that couldn’t function without Jep Industries products were, in fact, still functioning.
They suspected Hollander Steelworks might be involved somehow, but couldn’t make the connection, as much of it had been filtered through Ashworth’s name. That was a common trick the Dunham family used, running their money and property through his squeaky-clean name and bank accounts. In most situations, one had to be a veritable bloodhound with a load of evidence to start sniffing in his direction, but because Morgan hadn’t bothered to hide his connection to the Jep Industries takeover, he’d made enemies—enemies who could get to him, yet leaving his cousins untouched.
“He sacrificed his career to get J.I. and the Steelworks consolidated,” I murmured, feeling that sacrifice as I never had before.
“Yes.”
He continually sacrificed his human needs for the lonely and adrift in his church.
He had sacrificed his intellectual love for the sake of thousands of people who’d have lost their livelihoods.
He was willing to sacrifice his last bit of political power for me for reasons I still didn’t know.
Oh, yes, I’d chosen my executor well. In retrospect, it was spooky that my inexplicable conviction that Ashworth—a complete stranger I had lured to a suite at the Watergate with the promise of a tantalizing story—was the right man for the job.
Mitch and I looked at each other. We both knew every detail of the elaborate scheme to consolidate J.I. and Hollander Steelworks, and how few people were capable of getting it done so an entire sector of the economy wouldn’t collapse.
“Talk to me,” I whispered, watching the play of agony over his face.
“I didn’t have the resources to absorb it,” Mitch said after a moment, “but Sebastian was at war with the only man in the country who did. I’d have gone under for sure if I didn’t take over J.I., and if the Steelworks went down, it would’ve killed another five hundred jobs. That wasn’t to mention the rest of the companies that needed those products, and there were dozens. I was stuck. To go forward with the absorption meant walking through fire and the possib—probability—of failure, but I had no other choice.”
Forget seventeen hundred jobs between the two companies: The real collapse would have happened with the hundreds of dependent businesses. Most of them were microscopic in the scheme of things, but collectively...
A knot developed behind my sternum. Mitch Hollander wasn’t just a name, some faceless victorious steel mogul, the savior of the US steel industry—he was a man with serious family problems, church obligations, and the weight of possible economic devastation on his shoulders if he failed.
“But I also had a sick wife I couldn’t bear to turn over to twenty-four-hour nursing, two teenage girls and an eleven-year-old boy who needed my time and attention, and I’d just been called as bishop for the second time. On top of all that, if the Steelworks went down, it would’ve bankrupted me and I wouldn’t have been able to get Mina the medical care and domestic help she needed. I didn’t know what to do, how to do it all. I don’t think I slept for two years.”
I couldn’t imagine that kind of pressure.
He gestured to the floor and its haphazard pattern of papers leading straight to a concerted effort by many powerful people to make sure the few failed. “If I’d known any of this— Other than Fen Hilliard, I was the only one.” Indeed, Knox, Morgan, and Sebastian’s uncle had had the cash and the connections and the political clout, but Sebastian would have never let that happen.
I said nothing as there was nothing to say. The what-might-have-beens were too awful to contemplate.
“I’m going to assume Sebastian doesn’t know about any of these schemes, either.”
He shot me a look. “They’re still in business, aren’t they?”
“More bloodshed on the horizon, then. Can I play? Any of this help?”
“I think it may, but not quite sure how. Yet.” He pointed to one trail across the room. “I can see where Tye Afton had a large financial stake in making sure J.I. failed completely, but Eric—Knox’s protégé—” I nodded. “—took care of him, so I don’t have to worry about that.”
“And put the fear of God into the rest of the Republican party.”
Eric Cipriani, a young, small-time prosecutor in a semi-rural county in a midwestern state, had successfully steamrolled an entrenched senator into resigning his seat. Senator Afton had left Washington under a cloud of suspicion and a grand jury indictment. Whatever Afton had done to spur Cipriani into taking on a powerful senator and exposing his career-ending secrets, Cipriani’s arsenal and his willingness to use it had been enough to serve as a warning to others like Roger Oth and his cronies.
They were terrified of the damage a brilliant, charismatic self-proclaimed libertarian could do to the party from the inside—especially one financed by Oth’s biggest enemies—and were doing everything they could to keep him out of Washington. He was no less feared by the rest of the party, but the Republican National Committee would keep its friends close and its enemies closer.
Because the enemy had a trump card: They desperately wanted Morgan back in Washington as the chairman of the Federal Reserve or, at the very least, Treasury Secretary. And, because Cipriani was yet another unrelated member of the Dunham family, he was the only politician in the country who could make that happen.
“That kid’s fearless,” I said. “I like him.”
“Me, too.”
I sighed. “Too bad about him and Vanessa.”
“Oh, that’ll work itself out,” Mitch said absently.
“How do you know?”
He shrugged. “I just do. I didn’t see Afton on your list,” he said abruptly.
“God, no! He’s a filthy pig. I wouldn’t even attend dinner parties if I knew he’d be there.” I paused. “There’s another senator in here somewhere—not one on my list. J.I. was mentioned, I think. I vaguely remember one of my clients being really upset with him and trashing him.”
“Oh?”
My mouth twitched. “His wife.”
Mitch closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. I mig
ht have laughed, but we were still too close to the issue to make light of it yet. I wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to.
I changed the subject. “Life is just one big chess game for your family, isn’t it?”
He slid me a look. “And it’s not for you?”
He had me there. “Birds. Feathers. But you don’t play the games.”
“It’s because I produce something,” he said as he grabbed a blank piece of paper and a pen to start mapping the trails we’d made. “Real things. I don’t have time to play the games the way they do because what I do is more important than what they do. They shift money and power around to clear the way for me. They’ll always defer to a producer—any producer—and the only games I play are to make sure I get the best deal I can and pay my people well.”
I stared at him. “The pack sees you as superior to them?”
He looked up at me. “Yes. They can’t do what I do. Except Eilis. And Vanessa. They’re both producers. And the three of us aren’t the only ones. A few more of their cousins, random people, producers they’ve collected along the way. We’re the kings on the chess board. Everything they do— All to protect the producers and keep us producing.”
The testosterone I’d dropped into that day, wondering who was the alpha, never giving any credit to the man I’d brushed off as ordinary and unassuming—
“So that’s why Sebastian does what he does.”
Mitch nodded. “He sees himself as a servant of the producers of the country, the world. It doesn’t matter if they’re bad at it. He can fix that one way or another.”
Why had I never dug that deeply into Taight’s psyche? Too late now, anyway. I’d had enough trouble just getting the surface theory through with a passing grade without adding Rand-laden armchair psychoanalysis on top of it. It did, however, add another dimension to my long-distance observations and explained a few things I had never been able to figure out.
“The warrior class,” I murmured. “Guarding the king. Their moral high ground.”
“Yes. Whatever it takes.” He cast a pointed glance at me. “And they are unrepentant.”
Ah, touché, lover. Any man who claimed people like that clan as family, and could love them for who they were had a larger capacity for tolerance than I’d given him credit for.
