Page 54 of Unmasking Her Shadow

I nod. This has already crossed my mind, but I don’t want the sting of rejection to cut deeper than it already has. Sure, she messages me and forces me to watch her come, but she still hasn’t told me to come back. There’s a voice in the back of my mind that keeps telling me she won’t come back to green. That she can’t see herself being with a woman and I’ll have to watch from the shadows again. Watch her be with someone else that doesn’t love her the way I do. The way she needs to be loved. I’ll grovel. I’ll crawl on my hands and knees to her if she wishes. I’ll do anything as long as it ends with her in my arms.

“You know what you need?” Ryker blurts out when we get into my car.

“Besides the obvious?”

“Ever since we moved here, we haven’t had any after-hours fun. You spend all your free time with little miss sunshine or watching her.”

“Find a fucker that deserves a visit,” I laugh. He’s right, but it’s not just because my focus and time has been spent elsewhere. It’s also because I didn’t want a single obstacle in my way to her, but revenge for a victim will be a great outlet for all my pent-up emotions.

“Already have one in mind. I’ve just been waiting until you had free time.”

Guilt for being a shitty friend piles on top of the rest. “I’m sorry, Ryk.”

He squeezes my shoulder. “You’re in love, Ki. And as annoying as some of this shit has been, I like seeing you happy. We aren’t twenty anymore. It was about time one of us found their person. She will come back. And when she’s yours for good, you won’t have to keep such a watchful eye on her.”

That’s doubtful. I’ll always know where she’s at 24/7.

“Taylor seems fun,” I say, testing the waters, wondering if he will finally tell me what happened in that hotel room and who snuck into his bedroom window the other night. His phone has been blowing up since we met her. Just because he has it on silent doesn’t mean I don’t notice.

He huffs out a laugh, but the corner of his lips turns up. “I’m not sure fun is the correct word for her. Crazy, obnoxious, and infuriating is more like it.”

I wonder if Sam is aware her sister is fucking my best friend?

“Did she give you a hard time after me and Sam went to our room?”

“Ki, I already told you I don’t want to talk about it.” He turns his gaze out the window, and I burst up laughing.

“Damn. That bad, huh?”

He grunts, not looking at me.

I think he needs this tonight as much as I do. When we get home, we change and get our gear on, disguise his car, change his license plate, and then we go hunting for a pervert. Ryker had already planned everything. He just needed a night for me to tag along. Rafe Hadley is a lawyer’s son who assumes that gives him free rein to do whatever he fucking wants. It’s kind of true. His daddy always finds a way to make all the charges go away.

When I say I trust my partner, I mean I fucking trust him. I know shit about his plan, but I’m along for the ride anyway. If he says he has it all planned out, I have no reason to doubt him. The scum parked his car in the far back parking lot of the strip club, out of sight of cameras and windows. Getting into his car is easy. Ryker made a copy of the key fob when Rafe was last arrested.

I bring up his cameras and put them on a loop as we approach his driveway and enter his garage. Ryker also knows the man’s code to his door. He really had a lot of free time on his hands lately. He needs a girlfriend.

Cocky motherfucker didn’t even try hiding his safe. It’s in plain sight in his office. Ryker fails to open it the first time, and panic bubbles in my chest. His shoulders rise with a deep inhale as he makes a second attempt. I release the air I was holding onto when it opens.

“Don’t do that to me,” I tell him, holding my chest. We don’t need any alarms going off. Ryker has the lead on this one. I’m just here for moral support.

He reaches inside and freezes. “What would you say if I told you Rafe has offshore accounts under an alias, and I accidentally found all of his information?” Ryker asks in a hushed tone, pulling out a piece of torn paper from the safe.

We stare at each other for several seconds.

“Do we?” I ask.

“I think we do,” he answers and opens Rafe’s laptop while I place the cash from the safe into the leather bag on my shoulder.

“This is a shit ton of money,” he whisper-shouts, transferring everything from Rafe’s accounts into our friend’s. There will be no red flags or alerts. Giles will make Rafe’s accounts vanish without a single trace. It will be as if they never existed. He will take his cut before transferring the rest of the money into ours, which also doesn’t exist. A simple act to be a thorn in Rafe’s side turned into completely fucking him. Good.

I keep watch out the window until he shuts the laptop and stands. “It’s done. Let’s get out of here.” He chuckles under his breath the entire way out of the house. “You don’t even want to know how much money we just…obtained,” Ryker laughs when we are backing out of the garage. “That fucker made it too easy. Who in their right mind would put all of their account information on one piece of paper?”

“The same idiot who just got their fifth rape charge dropped by daddy and is currently high in an STD-riddled strip club known for illegal activity. He got cocky,” I explain what he already knows. We turn the GPS back on in Rafe’s car and make sure everything is in the right spot before abandoning in where we got it and hightail it back to our vehicle. I love the dark. It conceals so much. He drives to the charity we used to take our earnings to an hour away to discard the money. They are a don’t-ask don’t-tell organization.

“So…how much money did we just steal, not counting the cash?” I ask once we are finally on our way home.

His smile is huge when he answers, “Six million dollars.”