Page 100 of Velvet Vaughn

She hesitated long enough that Remi’s eyebrows climbed, delighted, waiting her out with the patience of having absolutely nowhere else to be.

“He told me he loved me,” she admitted. Why she was unloading on Remi, a man she’d barely known before this case, she had no idea. It didn’t stop her. “In the lobby. He casually dropped it on his way out the door.”

“Oh, that’s good.” Remi’s grin widened, all the teasing gone. “That’s fantastic, Anja.”

“I didn’t say it back.”

“Did you want to?”

The question sat there, simple and unbearable, and Anja found she didn’t have a ready answer for it. At least not one she was prepared to say out loud to a man two doses deep into hospital-grade pharmaceuticals, however gentle his eyes had gone.

“I froze,” she admitted. “He said it, and then he was gone, and I just stood there like a stone statue.”

“You’ll get another chance.” Some of Remi’s loopiness was burning off. “A man like that doesn’t say it once and let it drop. Trust me. I’ve got a good read on people, even sideways on painkillers.”

Her phone chimed against her palm before she could answer, and her pulse jumped straight into her throat before she’d even looked at the screen. Leo.

At Curtis’s house. Lydia let me in. He’s in his office. Going to tell him now. Miss you already. Talk soon.

Her insides twisted at the ordinary sweetness of it. Miss you already was tacked on at the end with the ease of an afterthought that wasn’t one at all. She found herself smiling down at the screen despite everything, including the ache lodged in her heart from three words she hadn’t managed to return.

“Is that him?” Remi asked.

“Yes. He’s telling Curtis now.” She typed back a quick response, be safe, call me after, and set the phone face-up on her knee so she wouldn’t miss the reply, if there was one.

It took another forty minutes for the discharge nurse to reappear, a fresh stack of papers in hand. She ran through the same thorough warnings a second time, apparently guessing correctly that they hadn’t absorbed a word of it the first time. Anja signed where she was told, gathered Remi’s prescriptions, and got him upright and moving with one arm braced under his good side, ignoring his half-hearted protest.

“I can walk.”

“You can wobble,” she corrected. “Let me help.”

The parking garage air hit sharp and cold after the hospital’s climate-controlled warmth, and Anja boosted him into the Escalade’s passenger seat, tucking the seatbelt carefully across his bandaged side before he could yank it tight himself.

“You’re worse than my mother,” Remi muttered.

“Your mother sounds like a woman of excellent judgment.”

Remi glanced into the back seat and winced. “I’ve got to get that cleaned.”

They exited the garage a little past 6:30, the sky mellowing at the edges with the promise of dawn. Anja kept the radio off and her eyes on the road, running through a mental list of everything they needed to do. Quietly persistent underneath all of it were three words she still hadn’t found a way to answer.

They were fifteen minutes from the safe house, deep into a stretch of county road that wound through Wildwood’s tree cover, when her phone rang through the SUV’s speakers. Tyler’s name lit up the dashboard display.

“Tyler.” She kept her eyes on the road. “You’re up early even for you.”

“I never went to sleep.” Tyler’s voice came through with a wired, exhausted edge that told her how many hours he’d logged since Brad Hatton’s photo first hit his screen. “I kept thinking about how long it took me to find his accounts. Nine hours, Anja. I told you that bothered me, and it’s been sitting wrong ever since, so I kept digging after we hung up.”

“You didn’t sleep at all?”

“Sleep felt optional once I found the second layer. Here’s the thing. Brad’s concealment was good. Professional-grade. But there’s always a signature, a fingerprint the person doing it doesn’t even know they’re leaving behind, because everybody who builds something builds it a little bit like themselves whether they mean to or not.”

“Tyler.”

“I’m getting there. I promise. I started backtracking the registered agents, the shell structures, and the rotation schedule on the holding entities, looking for anywhere the same fingerprint showed up on money that wasn’t Brad’s. It took me more hours than I care to admit, but I found it. The exact same concealment architecture and rotation pattern was moving a completely separate stream of money that’s been running for years longer than Brad’s ever did.”

In the passenger seat, Remi sat up straight, the drugs burning off fast under the weight of Tyler’s tone.

“Whose money?” Anja asked, though something cold had invaded her limbs before she’d even finished asking it.