13. Rhaim

13

RHAIM

I 'd gone into my office earlier and turned on my surveillance of the newly vacationing Mrs. Armstrong's computer systems immediately, watching Lia change all of Mrs. Armstrong's grandkid's names into her own password, which she then unwisely used for every single program.

RLG123!

Simple and easy, and I'd have to assume that all of the programs she had access to were now compromised. I watched her mouse's scroll across the screen as she happily let herself into all of Mrs. Armstrong's emails—even the woman's personal ones, which admittedly shouldn't have been on her desktop at all, and rocked back in my chair, playing the end of a pen against my teeth.

It'd been a while since I'd felt challenged.

Not that I was happy to have attracted the notice of the FBI yet again, but...there was something in the moment that felt right. A certain electricity to knowing we were playing cat and mouse.

Or cat and cat with one small mouse between us.

Moth, more like.

Because I remembered the tattoo I'd seen on Lia's wrist that night at Vertigo. I doubted her father had seen it yet; Nero was too old school to suffer anything different from what he was used to: bleached blonde women with waxed pubes, who looked like they'd just stepped out of any number of issues from a 1990s Playboy .

And he'd always been keen to differentiate himself from the "trash" we'd both come up with. The second he could afford a fitted suit, he'd gotten one, and he had no truck with piercings or tattoos. He had no need to show off his warning coloration to those of his own kind—he was too busy ingratiating himself with his betters, flashing their particular mating signs of navy, gray, and black . Then he made sure important construction projects ran smoothly as he bought up chains of the mom-and-pop car washes via the shell corporations I created for him, creating chains of financial ownership so intricately complicated—and me making sure each individual stake was so small—as to not be worth the energy in tracking. Drugs came in, when drugs were good—then guns, when small warlords in Africa decided they were going to dump weapons. There was always some idiotic skirmish going on somewhere, and in the good ol' US-of-A there was always someone looking to buy.

Things were sold, and then the cash was filtered through the complex apparatus I had created, until it rose up to him, practically distilled. I was like an alchemist of money, turning people's personal sorrows into gold.

As long as you weren't too greedy—didn't dip into government coffers or contracts, and you understood that an illegal dollar in was not the same as an actual spendable dollar out—it was more like thirty-cents if you wanted to play things safely—you could do it for decades.

Just like we had.

You could even make yourself into a respectable businessperson along the way, whose opinions and advice was welcome amongst his peers.

So I watched her through the secret cameras again, feeling like I had in the panic room at the farm, curious and somewhat horny, trying to figure out which of our movements had attracted the FBI's attention. The Frazetta thing was no big deal; we just wanted in on their casino lease—but so did fucking MGM, and I guaranteed the FBI wasn't crawling up their ass.

So—why?

And—what?

What could one beautiful, terribly sexy little girl with a forbidden moth tattoo do to me?

Other than remind my dick it was alive?

I got a message on my personal phone:

I can meet today. Usual place. Lunch?

I felt a Cheshire-cat like grin spread over my face as I texted back:

Yeah.

I strode out of my offices and Corvo like I had someplace to be—partially because I did, but also because I was interested in seeing what it'd do to Lia.

She'd panicked.

It was lovely.

Her pulse jumping at her throat, her wringing her own wrists like she sometimes did, and the rapid breathing that came with knowing she wasn't going to get her own way.

If Lia was a moth, then surely I was a spider, and I liked to see her squirm.

When I made it outside, I ducked into an alcove along Corvo Enterprise's fa?ade and hopped onto the camera system with my phone. I watched a distressed Lia pull out her phone—I couldn't see the number, the screen was tilted away from the small camera I had installed in one of the framed pieces of art behind her, but her mood was clear—she was animated.

And angry.

At me for abandoning her?

Or for putting her, however briefly, off my trail?

She thought about dialing someone, then realized what I'd been trying to tell her about surveillance, and switched to texting them instead.

Clever girl.

Then she frowned at the phone until she got a response and started running out the door after me.

I hopped through the cameras expertly to keep her on-screen until I saw her trotting through the lobby and exiting the building itself, where she looked from side-to-side, but couldn't see me.

Surely the FBI would have told her to be a little less obvious?

Then again, she was young. Uncertain.

So harmless I might almost feel bad about crushing her when it came time.

She peered down the block, and started to wave someone down.

An Uber? To follow me?

No—just some man in a beat-up red Camry.

He rolled down his window and she leaned in—and for a second I was worried I was going to see her kiss him and then I was going to have to murder him on principle— for Nero's sake, of course —but all she did was shout a little, and then when other people started honking he drove off.

But not before I got a photograph of his license plate.

I watched her stand there, clearly frustrated, her hands curling into and out of fists, before she went back in—and I had to hurry to make my lunch date.

I always met Sable at a small outdoor café, where if you bribed the waiter—I'm sorry, tipped the waiter, I mean, like normal people do—you could sit at a table with your back to the stone wall, and have a good view of the passersby, plus three different exit routes, and they made a perfect cappuccino.

She strode up from wherever it was she'd been loitering after I'd secured the table, with a genuine grin on her face. We'd met when she'd been a punk over a decade ago, dropping USB sticks in the lobby of Corvo trying to get helpful idiots to download her malicious code, and after that, I'd hired her to work for me for years.

"Well, well, well, if it isn't Mister Selvaggio, come looking for help," she said, sitting down.

Throw out whatever misconceptions you had about hackers being hunchbacked nerds—Sable was a lanky, almost-six-foot-tall Black woman, and her hair was always in stylish braids. Today she was wearing jeans, army boots, and a T-shirt that said "You're not fucking her, I am."

"Who are you in trouble with now?" she asked.

"Would you like them in a tiered ranking, or alphabetical order?" I said, pulling out my phone and texting her the picture I'd taken outside of Corvo's building. "First off? Figure out who the fuck owns this car."

She glanced at her phone's screen as the picture flashed over. "You called me out for kindergarten grade shit?"

"No—cover your tracks, because I'm fairly sure I'm dealing with the FBI."

Sable squinted at me. "Fairly?" she said, with the utmost sarcasm.

"I don't take a shit before I know if the toilet will flush, Sable. So I'm not going to tell you I'm certain of things when I'm not—and I'm also not one to leave a mess behind."

"Duly noted," she said, licking an imaginary pencil and ticking off a non-existent box in the air. She flagged down a waiter and placed an order, before flipping her napkin out over her angular legs. "If that's the appetizer, what's the main course?"

I had considered what this would require of me ever since I'd texted her. I found myself not wanting to tell anyone about Lia, like she was a secret I wanted to keep to myself—but I had to share, for Corvo's wellbeing. "You swear not to tell anyone?"

She looked deeply offended. "Do you even have to ask?" Then she leaned forward, with a light in her eyes. Sable was another cat. "Come on. Out with it."

"I need you to research a girl for me." I paused on purpose, so I could see her inhale delightedly, before I deflated her. "It's Nero Ferreo's daughter, Lia."

She clucked her tongue and reared back. "What? No. Why?"

"She's come back into his life out of nowhere, after being gone a good long time." She hadn't even been present at her mother's funeral, thinking back. I'd noticed her absence at the time, but then assumed it was because her dad was already shacking up with another blonde who was heavily on display, crying like she knew Lia's mother personally—which, given Nero's womanizing habits, was possibly true. "I want to know where she was, what she was doing, who she was with—and why the fuck she's back now."

Sable considered this and nodded. "Does it have something to do with the FBI?"

"I'm hiring you to tell me." I didn't want to taint Sable's powerful intuition with my own assumptions.

"Hmmm," Sable said, as the waiter brought her salad. She ignored me for her phone for a moment. "This her?" she said, flashing a picture over, after making it larger with her fingers. It was Lia in a group shot on Facebook in the mountains somewhere. Lia was beautiful, of course, but appeared unhappy under the direct sun—she was a moth, not a butterfly.

"Yeah."

"Pretty," Sable said, before giving me a look.

"She doesn't like women."

"How do you know?" Sable teased, before jabbing, "I'm good at everything I do." Then her jaw fell open a little. "Unless—please tell me you have not slept with her, Rhaim."

"I have not," I said firmly. But I'd possibly like to.

If only doing so wasn't guaranteed to kill me.

Sable gave me a disbelieving look. "Well, she's your typical twenty-something-year-old," she said, then started swiping through screens. "I mean, she has a public Instagram account. Tracing the rest of her life shouldn't be too hard."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" I reached over and grabbed her phone to see for myself. I found myself confronted with photographs taken of cream-colored paper—pages from books—stained by streaks of highlighters over declarations of love, occasionally outlined by tiny red hearts. "This...is hers?"

"Yep," Sable said definitively. "Let me back up a bit—how old is this girl?"

"Twenty-three," I muttered, and added, "Don't look at me like that," without looking up.

Sable took a few bites of her lunch while I scrolled. Lia's feed of quotes and quips from books was like being in a Hallmark store on Valentine's Day. At least she was smart enough to not have her face in any of the photos—but what the fuck was the rest of this shit?

"Not real prime FBI material there—unless it's the world's best cover? Maybe she highlights things in code," Sable said, leaning over to snatch her phone back, after dabbing at her face with a napkin. "I hope you know this means we're married now. I never let anyone else touch Margaret."

"If you get that desperate for health insurance, let me know, I know a guy who knows a guy," I said, in the most mobster accent I could manage, and she laughed.

"Seriously, Rhaim," she said, shaking her phone between us. "You want me to go the full nine yards on this girl? I almost feel bad for her already. And what'll you do if I find something?"

Lia clearly believed in love—and a lot of people had done dumbass shit for love before, me included. "That'll be for me to decide."

Sable pocketed her phone and then looked at me with pursed lips. "I don't know how to say this without making it sound weird—but I like you living. So don't fuck this up, please."

I snorted, and stood, dropping enough cash on the table to cover everything for both of us. "I'll try not to."