Page 122 of Corrupt Game
The Kelly family had found the connection between me and Andrew, and the bodies had been a message about interfering with Kelly business. Don’t mess with things or we’ll do the same to you. I was supposed to back off, but it wasn’t something that I could do. It wasn’t in my nature. Even more so now, since Collette would no more drop this than me. I had to protect her as much as I could.
It made my stomach churn at the idea of what they would do to her.
Andrew would have had a well-thought out plan which wouldn’t have made a lick of difference if he’d given himself up in trade for Heather.
That was the other thing that I hadn’t told Collette. Andrew had left an insurance policy. I hadn’t viewed the contents of the thumb drive yet, but I planned to now.
We’d both known that going to Ireland was dangerous and a gamble. Heather’s father wasn’t going to give her up without a fight. Andrew had found something that would help him convince Edmond that he should let them be.
I shook my head at our stupidity. I’d never been naïve, but Andrew had convinced me that he would be okay. The information that he had wasn’t something Edmond wanted coming to light. It had been Heather’s insurance policy, but she’d never had a chance to use it against him.
That was why I planned to watch it now. To see if it was useful. We’d go forward with the plan regardless, but it might mae it easier. Given who it was supposed to be used against, I hadn’t particularly wanted to watch it before. I doubted it was images of questionable accounting practices.
I clenched my fist. Angry at myself, at Edmond Kelly, and at Andrew for getting into this situation and getting himself killed.
I glanced at Collette, dozing on the bed in the back room. A fist clenched around my heart at something happening to her.
I walked over and nudged her. She blinked at me, sated and sleepy.
“I have blackmail that Ian planned to use on Heather’s father. It’s probably horrible stuff. DO you want to watch it with me and Rossi?”
She sat up with a snap and grabbed her clothing, dressing fast. “Of course.”
I called Rossi back and plugged it into the laptop.
The video started in a bedroom. In one corner a girl, barely past puberty, huddled naked in a dog cage. She shivered and cried. The sound was hoarse, as if she’d been doing it for a long time.
My stomach twisted. I glanced at Collette, whose hands were clasped in front of her in a white knuckled fist. I stopped the video.
“Are you sure you want to watch this?” I asked quietly.
“Yes,” she answered, her tone flat.he wore a dark grey tailored suit. When he turned to face the camera, his face was rugged, with a slightly crooked nose, broken in a fight years ago. His piercing green were sharpand calculating as in the moment before he turned away to gaze at the girl in the cage, whose sobs became whimpers.
In the next ten minutes, I saw more of Edmond than I’d ever wanted to.
I liked inflicting pain during sex, but I had my limits and no interest whatsoever in children. Edmond didn’t share my limits, and by the time he was done, she couldn’t scream anymore.
Bile rose up in my throat, I swallowed to make myself not be sick, but this was something I would never be able to get out of my head for the rest of my life. Colette shook next to me, huddled, and I put an arm around her.
Rossi had gone so expressionless that I knew he was almost at his limit too.
Edmond rolled off her, calmly grabbed a gun from the nightstand, and put a bullet in her head. Then he dressed.
“Take out the trash, Sergi Petrov,” he said, the first words he’d spoken. ,walking away. No remorse, just selfish, cold, calculated callousness.
A moment later, Sergi Petrov walked into the frame. A little shorter than Edward, he had a wiry build. He’d cut his hair since I last saw him; the buzz cut was barely a shadow on his scalp. He stuffed the girl's body into a doubled garbage bag. As he did so, the camera got a full view of his face.
Icy blue eyes, fair skin, a faded scar running across one cheek. A man women found attractive until they discovered the monster he actually was.
The video ended as Sergi worked.
“We’re going to have to be really careful, boss.” Rossi breathed.
“Yeah, we will. If Edmond even has a hint that we have this, he’s going to make our lives hell until we give it back to him. On the off chance that Andrew didn’t have time to reveal anything, we might have a chance to work out the deal that he couldn’t.” I rubbed my temples in frustration.
“The older man was Emdmond Kelly. The younger was Sergi Petrov. He also goes by Pyos and uses dogs to hunt and hurt people. I would be more than happy to fly you right back to LA, Colette.”I really wanted her to go now. I could picture what they would do to her.
While her face was pale, her eyes flashed. “No. Sergi is the guy with the dgs, right? Who killed Andy?”