Page 33 of Devil's Retribution
“That’s understandable. And Charles did not get along with him. What does that say about Charles?”
She was staring at me suddenly. “What is your angle, Viktor?”
Damn. I must have overplayed my hand somehow. Maybe I’d sounded too much like someone in her line of work. “My point is that you need to be prepared for the kind of things you may find out about him. I doubt that arranging my brother’s murder or abandoning you, were the first wicked acts he’s committed.”
She looked up at me, chewing her lip slightly. “I…” She let out a low sigh. “I’ll be as prepared as I can be. There have been a lot of ugly revelations in my life lately.”
The sharp look she gave me included my actions in that statement. There was no doubting it. “I can hardly blame you, especially under the circumstances.”
Her typing slowed, and then she took her hands off the keyboard and looked up at me. “I- I don’t get you. Viktor.”
“What don’t you get?” I met her gaze calmly.
“You kidnapped us. But you did it in our sleep. You kept us hostage and threatened our lives. But when my uncle bailed on us, you- you didn’t hurt us. You didn’t follow through on your threats.”
“There was no point in punishing you for what your uncle did. If consideration for you has no power over him, at least above his need to save his own skin, then using you as a hostage was pointless to begin with. Though of course, we only learned that after the fact.”
She stared at me, then let out a little, high-pitched laugh. “I’m sorry, I just- that almost seems reasonable.”
I smirked and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I would hope so, I’m known for being a reasonable man.”
“I just don’t know what to think of you,” she breathed. “One minute you’re the only Big Bad I’ve ever met in my life, and the next you’ve got the moral high ground on my uncle somehow.”
“I am not a good man, Emma,” I murmured, glancing away from her. “Do not be fooled. The life I live prevents it. But I have my honor, and that is something that your uncle clearly does not have.”
“Honor.” She said it in a flat tone, not sarcastic but with no warmth to it either. “You know, I’ve met a lot of people in my line of work who thought they were good, but then did terrible things. Beat their wives, stole from work, one guy drove drunk and mowed down a homeless woman. Didn’t stop.”
I made a disgusted noise.
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I had to sit there and listen to this guy rationalize day after day while I wanted to slap him. He couldn’t understand why he was going on trial for vehicular manslaughter. He kept talking about how he went to church and was almost never out sick at work and had never even gotten a parking ticket before. Like any of that mitigated drunkenly killing someone.”
She paused and looked like she was wrestling with something important. Letting out a resigned sigh she said, “I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t trust you much. But I’d trust you a lot less if you came to me and claimed to be a good man. As for your honor, I guess we’ll see.”
“Yes, you will,” I replied simply. “You will see soon enough that I am a man of my word.”
“Well, I’m not dead yet,” she murmured, not quite able to meet my eyes. “So I suppose that’s a pretty good sign.”
Chapter 14
Emma
Half an hour later, I was starting to think we wouldn’t find anything incriminating or useful in Uncle Charles’s office. I had gone through file after file on his computer and found nothing that I could point at and say for certain that it was illegal or shady.
Meanwhile, Viktor had gotten very involved in some of the financial and real estate paperwork my uncle had left behind. I wasn’t quite sure why, but he kept glancing through those printouts and mailings and sometimes setting them aside, instead of putting them back. It was a small, thin stack, but getting larger.
At first, I was worried that he would punish me somehow if I didn’t find anything. He talked a big game about being honorable, and I was attracted to him, but neither of those things would stop him from doing us harm if he decided to.
But he hadn’t so far, and I couldn’t search through ten years’ worth of computer files while both shaking with fear and distracted by his nearness. Despite how he had come into my life, I couldn’t help but find Viktor likable, and given he seemed to be a man of his word I had to believe that he meant me no harm. I didn’t exactly convince myself to trust him, but I did manage to talk myself into putting my worries aside so I could do the work.
Ten minutes later, I stumbled on something strange. “That’s weird.”
I heard Viktor turn around. “What is it?”
“I’m seeing a lot of references to files that don’t actually exist on this computer.” I started looking around the desk, opening the drawers and poking through them.
“What does that mean?”
“Very likely it means that he’s keeping some of his files on removable storage. A thumb drive, a portable hard drive, maybe an SD card.” I kept looking. “Apparently he’s just a little more competent with computers than I thought.”