Page 65 of Velvet Vaughn

“It’s spotless.” Anja didn’t smile.

That was the trouble. She sat back in the chair and studied the board. Anja could trace a tidy line from Webb to Reyes to a Cayman shell to a dead man’s bank account, but the Office Breach heading still sat off to the side like a fact that refused to be filed. The wrongness of it settled in her gut before she could put words to why. Years of homicide and protection work had taught her one unshakable thing about a case that assembled itself this neatly, this fast, with so many corners squared off on the first real day of looking.

Somebody had built it that way.

“What?” Leo caught her expression. “That sounds like good news. Great news.”

“It’s a beautiful answer.” Anja continued studying the board. “It’s got motive, a money trail, a courier, and a villain four states away who’s easy to hate and impossible for any of us to know personally.” She turned to face him. “We went looking yesterday morning. It’s not even dinnertime on day two, and the entire thing has wrapped itself in a tidy bow and set itself on our doorstep.”

Remi reached the same conclusion a half-second behind her, and she watched his jaw tighten. “You think someone planted it.”

“I think,” Anja rested the marker against the board, “that in all the years I’ve been doing this, I have never once been handed the answer this fast unless somebody wanted me to stop looking.” She picked the marker back up and, under the tidy Vegas thread, wrote a single word and circled it twice: convenient. “We should still chase it hard enough to make everyone believe it. Maybe it’s real and I’m paranoid. But nobody closes this board until I understand why it was so eager to be solved. A betting syndicate doesn’t need to walk into Leo’s office on a Sunday and read his files by hand. Somebody local did that. Somebody who could.”

The Vegas thread glowed on one side of the board, orderly and complete and four states away. The office breach sat on the other, small and ugly and very, very close. Anja glanced between them and knew the answer to all of it lived somewhere in the middle.

Later, after Tyler had signed off and Remi went to walk the perimeter, Leo lingered in the office with Anja. “One more thing. Not for the board. We lost a partner this weekend. Tim Hargrove. Heart, they think. He’d been ignoring the warning signs. His wake’s Wednesday, and the whole firm’s expected.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “He was a good man. Spent thirty years with Curtis. It’s just sad. I wanted you to know in case it changes anything for the week.”

Nothing in it touched a betting syndicate, a thumb drive, or a rifled drawer. “I’m sorry, Leo. We’ll figure out the logistics. You should go. People would notice if you didn’t.”

#

Leo followed Anja up the stairs that night without either of them pretending it was a question.

She didn’t slow at her door or even hesitate. There was no flat we’re working like she’d led with twenty-four hours ago. She caught the front of his shirt on the threshold, walked backward, and tugged him in after her. The only words she uttered were a low warning against his lips.

“Quietly. Remi’s one floor below.”

“You’re the one who was loud last night.”

She broke the kiss, offended. “I was not.”

“You were a little loud.”

“Shut up and make it worth being quiet for.”

He did his level best.

It was fast and it was furious, a comedy of two competent adults trying to keep silent in a house with apparently thin floors and a former Army Ranger with bionic hearing sleeping below. She bit down on his shoulder to muffle herself, and he felt her shaking and realized she was laughing. Then he was laughing too. They went helpless, breathless, trying not to make the bed creak, which was its own losing battle. In the middle of it she pressed her face into his neck and hissed, “Stop laughing, you’re making it worse,” which only made it worse.

Afterward, they lay tangled beneath the covers, her head on his chest, both of them catching their breath and grinning like a couple of teenagers who’d gotten away with something.

“We’re terrible at this,” she murmured.

“Speak for yourself. I think we showed real restraint.”

“The headboard hit the wall.”

“Once. Glancingly.”

“He’s going to look at us funny at breakfast.”

“Eh, he looks at us funny anyway.” Leo traced a slow line up her spine, just to feel her go liquid under his hand. “Remi looks at everything. It’s his entire personality.”

She laughed at that and snuggled deeper against him. Leo was absurdly, dangerously content for a man with an evidence file and a criminal who’d walked through his office with a key. He decided not to think about it. There’d be plenty of time tomorrow to be afraid. Tonight there was only the warm weight of her, the dark, and nowhere either of them had to be.

“Tell me something not about the case,” Anja murmured. “I’m tired of dwelling on it.”

“Like what?”