Page 73 of Take Her

I shook my head. “I’d need you to vote my way in an upcoming proceeding, to be determined—and to buy in at twenty-five.”

He did the math in a millisecond. “Two hundred million more dollars? Fuck you.”

“If you want what you want—you’ll take what I give you.” If his investment group bought forty percent of the stock we would offer, it’d make other people jump in—we’d be profitable no matter what. Especially at that price. Hell, he’d help me drum the price up along the way for other investors, so he wouldn’t be made to look like a fool.

“That’s obscene, Rhaim.”

“If you knew somebody else who could do what I do, you’d already be paying them. Professionalism costs. So does discretion.”

Samson considered me. “Two hundred million more dollars—but into Corvo’s pocket, not your own?”

“What better way to wash it?” I asked. It wasn’t like I could dump a fifth of a billion dollars into my personal bank account without someone noticing. Which wasn’t to say that I didn’t already have offshore caches of money I’d stockpiled away like someone who might someday need to avoid extradition. I shrugged subtly. “I’ll get mine eventually.”

Samson snorted. “I feel certain that you will.”

I wrote down an email where he could send over whatever information he wanted anonymously and it wouldn’t be traced and handed it to him. He pocketed it.

“It might be awhile,” I said. “Listing’s hard work, and I’m going to be very busy.” I didn’t want him under any illusions that I was going to go out and murder anyone tonight.

Perfect crimes took time.

He nodded his head in understanding. “I’m in no rush, as long as it happens. I’ll get the information you asked for later to you today.” He pushed back from the table. “What’s Nero want the money for anyway?” It said a lot about the state of commerce that that was of secondary concern to him—that under certain conditions, getting to sit at the table and move the chips around the board counted for more than knowing what the chips were for.

“One of the new casinos the state’s allowing.”

He chortled. “Isn’t that a bit on the nose for you all?” he asked, giving me a look that said he knew all of our last names were Italian.

“What can I say?” I told him, also standing, while spreading my hands. “None of us can really escape our roots.”

I watched him make his way out of the restaurant, and waited for him to leave before I sat back down and reached for my phone. It’d buzzed three times during the course of our conversation, and I was curious what pictures Lia had decided to send me.

What I got instead though was a text and only two photos.

I scrolled back to double check I’d told her three. I definitely had—so I felt a note of concern. It’d been well over an hour and thus far Lia had been well behaved. I didn’t want to assume she’d forgotten to send me a third photo on purpose—but reasons why she might not have worried me.

I brought up my link to the private camera in her office and hopped back to the timestamp when I’d gotten the other texts.

I didn’t have a camera in my own office, so I couldn’t see her—but I could see one of Freddie Junior’s known associates coming into Mrs. Armstrong’s office, looking through her desk, and then Lia rushing out to confront him. And then when Freddie Junior came in?

Lia swayed.

Why?

Was she just easily overwhelmed?

But she’d been relatively unfazed—feisty even!—when I’d taken her to a fucking grave the prior night.

I needed to know so much more about her if I was ever going to get her to think straight.

Be strong, little girl.

I could tell how they were playing things from here—Junior coming in like he was her knight in white armor, while Bobby, his punk asshole friend and suck-up was playing the bad cop—but she was smart enough to know that. I saw it in her eye roll when she turned away from them briefly, unwittingly facing my camera. And then after a little more back and forth they’d left and she’d sunk down to her desk, holding her head in her hands.

I didn’t bother hopping back to the current time, I just texted,

You okay?

A third image from her set came in immediately thereafter. A photo of the cubby beneath my desk, presumably the final destination on her “places she wanted to visit” list.