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Daphne had a soft pink flush on her cheeks. Hard to tell with her coloring, but I knew it was there.
Reginald just gave her shoulder a squeeze and took the plates from her, and she went to get the utensils. And then we sat down and had breakfast like a bloody family.
Goddamn it.
Reginald started asking her questions about her sister's wedding. And that was when my phone rang.
Drake
"What part of keep your head down and don't do anything rash do you not understand?"
Gabe Webb.
He’d been clear when he pulled me out of that hell hole that I was supposed to lay low. I hadn’t exactly listened.
"It's been a long time since someone admonished me like a teenager, Gabe. Please do your best. I probably won't listen any better than I did back then.’
If I was being honest, I should have expected the call.
The man wouldn't have been very good at his job if he'd saved my life a few months ago and then just left me in the ether.
I'd expected him to be watching me. And most of the time I'd been careful. But when Igno didn't react when I took Daphne off the board, I had to step it up.
I needed to force him into an error.
After weeks of research, I had already guessed that he wanted something Daphne had access to. And since she didn't know what it was, things were about to get a little more dangerous.
It would be one thing if she knew what to protect, what to keep hidden. It was quite another that she still didn't know what he was looking for.
Of course, there was also the fact that she was damn beautiful and I wanted her all to myself. That made the situation a powder keg.
The last few days she'd been with me, I'd been digging deep into Baines's files. I had narrowed down the likely targets for Igno to three clients. All of which Daphne worked on. Her boss, Christopher, wasn't as good as she was. He didn't have the technical background.
He'd been hired for business development. So for the most part, he didn't even know how to access the sensitive data, and that made him a useless target. The other transition manager, Adam Bailey, was a possibility. But from my research, as far as I could tell, Igno wasn't interested in Bailey. And frankly, Daphne handled more high-profile clients. They asked for her by name.
She was good at her job. There was no denying that. So her client files were the place to start.
I took a look at the most secretive, high-profile clients with the most creative bank records. The ones with more offshore accounts and hidden shell companies rolled up under them. I'd narrowed the list down to three. That meant I needed to have a looky-loo around the companies and where they kept their primary assets. That would require physical access.
While I was worried about Massimo's money trail and exactly what he was looking for from Daphne, I was also worried about something else. Something Gabe had said when he was hunting down Igno Senior earlier this year.
Massimo's father, Antonio, had a set of documents that contained the names and dealings of everyone in the Syndicate. Basically, his terrorist Ledger.
But after the Rogues had retrieved both the Ledger and the cipher, they discovered that they still couldn't identify the names of all the Syndicate members. There was another piece. A secondary cipher.
While Massimo had taken over his father's role, it probably only gave him access to another level in the Syndicate to know who these people were. To get access to them, he would need this secondary cipher.
If my hunch was right, one of Daphne's clients was Syndicate and they had the cipher. Antonio Igno had been a key part of the Syndicate for so long. But often, he’d acted against the Syndicate's best interests, seeking to elevate his own position.
Many of us in the intelligence community had wondered if and when they would ever try to take him out.
And when they hadn't, it had occurred to me, at least, that he had something on them. Cue the ledgers.
If he held those over their heads, they couldn't touch him. But they could certainly take him off the field in other ways.
Even when he had been taken off the map by the Rogues, his son had appeared like a bad penny, eager to prove himself and with no compunction about how these things were done.
Massimo was reckless and bloody. He'd already proven himself deadly. Which meant that innocent people like Daphne would be caught in the crossfire.
