by Chloe Cox
She was totally turned around. Fumbling, she turned a corner, and finally came across a light switch, right around the same time she stubbed her toe on something hard and heavy.
Bette stifled a yelp, and flipped on the light, hoping she was far enough away that it wouldn’t wake Cole.
What she saw next made her forget all about her toe. It even made her forget, briefly, about Cole.
There was a whole mess of papers spread out on a dining room table. Some part of her wondered whether this was another piece of trick furniture, and it had some delicious BDSM use she wasn’t aware of. But most of her was focused on a little patch of color in the midst of all those boring-looking papers.
She stared at it for what felt like an eternity before her brain put it all together. It was a matchbook. Purple and gold, with a distinctive design. She kept staring at it because she recognized it.
Magpie-like, Bette padded forwarded, her eyes trained on the matchbook.
It was from X-Pectations. A club where she worked. Where some friends worked.
Cole had been to…?
Shaking her head, Bette turned to the papers spread out on the desk. He had been working on something when she showed up unannounced. That case. He’d mentioned it. The case about the bad guy, the powerful one that Cole couldn’t let go. The one he didn’t want blowing back on her.
Without even making a conscious decision, her fingers were on the papers, her eyes darting about, reading random words, names. There were a few newspaper clippings of murders, suspicious deaths. But it was the names that got her.
Names she recognized.
Most of the papers looked like tax records. Financial disclosures. But the names were of other dancers she knew. Or had known. She kept sifting, her heart speeding up with every name, her brain trying not to panic. Trying not to think. Trying not to…
There it was.
The name.
Principal owner. Mark Duvall.
She stepped back as though she’d been burned, her eyes locked on that name. She stood naked, in Cole’s dining room, for an eternal minute as she put all the pieces together.
Mark. Mark was Cole’s big case.
Which meant none of this was an accident. Which meant Mark was much, much worse than she’d ever known, judging by those newspaper clippings, and it meant she and Lizzie were in actual, serious danger. And it meant that the only man she’d trusted…
She couldn’t bear to think that he’d been lying to her, just like she’d lied to him.
The whole world had turned upside down, and Bette couldn’t breathe. There was only one thing to do. Get the hell out.
26
Bette Liffey was, as her often-sedated mother used to say, in a state.
She didn’t even remember getting her clothes or her bag back at Cole’s. She’d just seen Mark’s name on those papers, and the names of all those girls she’d worked with at Mark’s clubs, and she’d just…blanked.
Next thing she knew she was in her car, her heart pounding, the sun coming up as she was speeding across Lake Pontchartrain in a hurry to get nowhere at all.
After she’d stopped for a breakfast she was completely unable to eat, Bette had finally gone home and made herself sit down to think at her lonely kitchen table.
It wasn’t much fun.
So obviously Mark was Cole’s big case. The one he wasn’t supposed to be working on, the one that was so dangerous that he wanted to keep their “arrangement” a secret, so none of it would blow back on her.
Again, the freaking irony.
Worse than that was the implication about Bob Faulkner. Faulkner had wanted her to get dirt on Cole, and Bette would bet her entire rent that it was because Cole was a threat to Mark. Which meant that Bob Faulkner, the social worker most likely to be voted “Most Bribable” by Social Worker Magazine (in Bette’s humble opinion anyway), was really working for Mark. Which meant that he was never, ever going to help her get Lizzie back no matter what she did. They had just been using her to get dirt on Cole. It had all been a lie, from the very beginning.
Bette didn’t technically have proof that Faulkner worked for Mark, but she didn’t need it. She’d been married to Mark, however briefly. She knew him, and this was exactly the sort of thing he would do. It would amuse him to mess with her, to send her after Cole like a little puppet, all the while dangling the promise of Lizzie’s custody in front of her. To try to degrade her from afar, just to show her there were consequences for embarrassing him by having the gall to leave him.
Too bad for Mark that Cole had turned out to be Cole, and not some easily blackmailed monster.
And too bad for Bette, too. Because she’d fucking fallen for him.
Bette had been working up the courage to tell Cole everything. She wanted to believe she would have done it. She wanted to believe that she had that much in her. But now…
Now he would know anyway. Even if Cole didn’t figure it out after she bolted like an idiot, her name would be on those lists somewhere. He’d know everything.
He’d know she was a stripper. He’d know she’d been married to Mark. And he would at least suspect that she’d come to the club looking to hurt him on someone else’s orders. And that she’d been keeping all of this from him, all of this time.
What would he think of her?
Bette knew what she thought of herself, and it wasn’t good. The image of Cole’s face when he talked about his ex-wife blackmailing him, or when he’d talked about Mark, or even when he’d talked about strippers floated into her mind, and she flinched away.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. What would happen if Mark found out that his ex-wife was actually sleeping with Cole? Or, worse, if he thought that Bette helped Cole’s investigation? If those newspaper clippings were any indication, he might have Cole killed. He might have them both killed. He might come after Lizzie.
She couldn’t take it. So she had to make a choice. And her choice would always be Lizzie.
Which meant she was going to have to kick ass all on her own.
Bette wrote the text she never wanted to write to Cole. A text was cowardly, but it was what she could handle. It was all she could handle. So she took a deep breath, braced herself, and hit send.
Then she allowed herself to cry for a full thirty minutes.
And after that? She got to work. She would need a real plan this time. No more hoping people would do the right thing. No more waiting for someone else to rescue her. Bette Liffey was going to have to deal with her monster all on her own, and then she was going to get Lizzie the hell out of this town. And for once she had an actual idea about how to do exactly that.
And it was only a little bit crazy.
When Cole woke up, Bette was gone. Just an empty spot on the bed where her body belonged. Where she should have told him about what she’d been hiding. He would have held her, fucked her, told her it was going to be ok, and made her breakfast afterward. His sub would be rewarded.
And now?
He was almost angry. As a rule, anger and domination didn’t mix well, and most Dominants didn’t feel threatened or vulnerable often enough to get angry about much.
But he was vulnerable now, for the first time in years. Maybe the first time ever. Because part of his heart was out there running around like a damn moron.
Well, he was going to fix that. He’d been moving slowly, building a case. No more. Now he was just going to nail Mark Duvall to the wall, and get his sub back.
He got dressed, made the call, got in the car. The whole time thinking about Bette.
Cole had known immediately what happened. He’d eyed his dining room table on the way out, still covered with the Duvall case files and tax records where he’d left them when Bette showed up on his doorstep, and he’d seen it. Just one thing out of place: a matchbook from X-Pectations. But it had been enough. Bette had seen all this, in the middle of the night, alone, and she’d freaked out enough to leave.
That told him almost as mu
ch as Bette would have told him herself. He’d been able to figure out the broad strokes on his own. All the pieces fit. Bette’s secrecy, her barely hidden guilt, the fake names. Cole had spent another few precious minutes combing through the secret IRS records he hadn’t had time to get to the night before, and he’d found it. A joint tax return for Mark Duvall and one Barbara Liffey Duvall. Duvall could make the parish and state marriage and divorce records disappear, but God himself couldn’t do a damn thing about the IRS. Mark Duvall was Bette’s bad ex.
What were the goddamn odds?
Not the odds that Duvall and his minions would send a woman to try to take Cole down. That was pretty much guaranteed the moment Cole started poking around Duvall’s shady empire, and given Cole’s past and Duvall’s proclivities, it made sense they’d send a woman to Club Volare to try to trip him up. The fact that Duvall had sent his own ex-wife was a particularly sadistic touch, but Cole didn’t think Bette was aware that Duvall was ultimately behind it all. Her disgust with her ex was genuine and visceral, and the woman he knew would have told her ex to get bent if she knew the whole story.
No, that part wasn’t remarkable.
What astonished him was that, of all the women they could have sent to take him down, the woman they sent turned out to be the love of his life.
It was some kind of twisted miracle.
Cole hadn’t seen many miracles personally. So by the time he arrived at yet another backwater records building, he was feeling protective. Fuck that. He was feeling ferocious.
“Miles,” he said. “You have it?”
Miles Johnson jumped at the sound and nearly dropped the file folder in his hands. The man turned, and rolled his eyes at Cole.
“How does a man your size move so quietly?” he said.
Cole glared. “Do you have it?”
“Ok, Mr. Grumpy,” Miles said. “Follow me into the stacks.”
Miles was a weekend club member at Club Volare, but he was truly at home among deep shelves of file folder boxes. Cole didn’t know everything they kept here, but this was where originals were often sent to be stored when things got digitized. They had all kind of state and parish records here.
But Cole was only interested in one thing.
“I got everything attached to the names you gave me,” Miles said. “What do you even need this stuff for?”
Cole thought about Bette, fleeing his house in the dark before dawn, afraid and confused.
“Miles,” he growled. “Give me the damn files. Now.”
Miles started, stared at Cole’s face for a beat, then turned and pulled a box off a shelf and pulled out a nondescript file folder. It looked like all the rest. But this one contained records of which social workers had been assigned which cases in the surrounding parishes for the past few years, narrowed down by the list of names Cole had gleaned from the tax records. Names and vital statistics only, no details. But it was enough.
Because Cole had a hunch about Duvall and the women he was exploiting. Duvall was finding women to prey on right here, in NOLA or thereabouts. And he was organized. There weren’t many people more vulnerable than those going through the court system for whatever reason. Always easy to exploit—if you had a man on the inside. And there had been rumors about social workers and parole officers on the take for years. It all fit.
Mark Duvall would have at least one in his pocket, feeding him vulnerable people, helping him disappear paperwork. And these records would give Cole a name.
He didn’t fucking wait. He grabbed the box and hauled out of there, back to his car, his arms full of records and his head full of Bette.
Cole got in his car and tore the lid of the box off, his eyes burning, his skin feeling feverish. Bette was out there, afraid, alone. Because of Mark Duvall, and because of the scumbag social worker whose name would be in these papers.
He’d just found the name he was looking for when his phone chirped a text message alert.
From Bette.
“I have to end this arrangement. I’m sorry.”
Cole looked up at the cloudy sky outside his car, and glowered. Yeah, she was scared, and she didn’t know what the hell to do. Cole was going to solve both of those problems. He’d keep his promise not to investigate her. But he’d also given her a long lead for long enough. Time to bring her in.
He placed the call, and didn’t bother with pleasantries.
“Holt,” he said. “I need a favor.”
And then he put the car in gear, and peeled out. He couldn’t get where he was going fast enough.
He was going to have a not-so-friendly chat with a social worker by the name of Robert Faulkner.
27
Bette had never put this much effort into her appearance before going to see Bob Faulkner, but this was sort of a special occasion. If her plan worked, she might be able to get Lizzie back without much fuss, and then the two of them could high tail it out of New Orleans. So, definitely a special occasion. An expensive special occasion.
Bette fished through her bag until she found the credit card that she had not used at the lawyer’s office, the one that still had money on it, and plonked it down in front of the creepoid weirdo leering at her from behind the cash register. She couldn’t tell if the guy was lusting after her or was afraid of her, maybe because it was both at the same time. Either way, she could not wait to get out of this very specialty electronics store.
“Just the SpyMic headphones with hidden microphone, please,” she said.
They were under display glass at the other end of the counter, and they were far from the creepiest thing in this store. A quick Google search had told her what equipment was available, and an even quicker search had told her where she could buy it within driving distance. Dustin Security was an appropriately unobtrusive store in a fancy looking building in NOLA proper, and it catered to a population that was extremely interested in surveillance. From the looks of things, it seemed like half their customers were legit private investigators or security people, and the other half were more…creepy.
But whatever. Bette wasn’t sure what category she fell into, and she didn’t care. She was not naive enough—at least not anymore—to think that anyone would actually believe her if she told them about Bob Faulkner forcing her to try to entrap innocent people in exchange for a custody recommendation. And they definitely wouldn’t believe anything she had to say about Mark. She was just the stripper screw up who’d temporarily lost custody of her little sister, after all. So she couldn’t just go to the police and expect them to take her seriously.
But they’d believe a recording.
She hoped.
“Would you like it gift wrapped?” the guy behind the register asked.
Bette stared at him. People got these things gift wrapped? Never mind.
“Nope,” she said. “But I’d be grateful if you removed the packaging. I’ll be using it right away.”
This time the guy stared at her. Bette smiled sweetly.
She got her hidden mic.
After fifteen minutes of fiddling with it in her car, Bette was ready. The powerful but tiny microphone was hidden in the cord of fairly stylish looking headphones, and the whole thing hooked up to her phone. So she could wear the headphones around her neck as part of an outfit and secretly record a conversation on her phone without Bob Faulkner ever knowing.
Now she just had to work up the courage.
That part wasn’t hard. Bette looked at the last of Lizzie’s little fast-food toys on the floor of her car, and put the damn thing in gear.
The drive itself took no time at all. Maybe a sense of purpose did that. She tried to ignore her heart thudding in her chest as she pulled into the lot next to the state’s ugliest building. And not for the first time, the hairs on the back of Bette’s neck stood up in protest as she descended the stairs to that warren-like basement. It was like the place was designed to remind you that no one could hear you, down here. Faulkner probably liked the effect.
S
he took a breath, and turned the corner to see Faulkner’s office door at the end of the hall.
Bette forced herself to walk forward. She had no clue what she was doing. She was a stripper, not a spy. At least with stripping there were rules. Expectations. And there were bouncers, for Chrissakes. And Bette had no earthly idea how to get Bob Faulkner to confess on tape. On the other hand, the world’s most corrupt social worker clearly had no respect for her intelligence, and he was already spitting mad at her, so maybe he’d just yell a full confession unprompted and she wouldn’t have to do much at all.
That almost sounded like a plan. It was good enough, anyway. And it had to work.
She crept as close as she could to Faulkner’s door, and then…
She stopped.
It was open. Just a crack. Enough for her to hear someone crying.
A woman. Crying. In Bob Faulkner’s office.
Bette stepped to the side, so she could see through the two inches of open door and maybe hear a little bit. Some part of her felt guilty, but a bigger, smarter part of her was all business. Whoever this woman was, maybe Bette could save her from some serious trouble. All she could see was the back of the woman’s head, the corner of the office behind her.
And then she heard the voice.
“Jesus Christ, give her a tissue or something.”
Bette blinked. Where had she heard that voice before?
Something moved in the office, and the woman bent forward, like she was accepting a tissue. When she leaned back, a figure walked past her to stand behind her, hands clasped in front of him, eyes hard.
Bette froze. That man. That was one of the cops from the other night. One of the dirty cops who had been beating up on kids just because he could, one of the ones Cole had tussled with.
And suddenly she knew where she’d seen him before. She even knew his name.
Mascolo.
He was a cop, all right. He was a cop who worked security for Mark Duvall. He’d started right before Bette left, so she’d never really gotten to know him.
