Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 67553 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67553 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 338(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Past this day, she wouldn’t be helping anymore.
I didn’t trust my sisters’ safety to anyone—not after Maven was taken from us—and I wouldn’t put them in danger of any kind.
The first sign of this going south and I would definitely be pulling out of the tournament and finding out how to talk to Falliday about his warehouse rentals a different way. This way might not raise as many suspicions, but I didn’t care if I had to fucking kill him as long as I got my answers. Easy or hard. It didn’t matter as long as the end results were the same.
“I think hers is bigger than yours.”
I looked at my sister to see that she was staring at the boat next to us.
I glanced over myself and found Brecken posing with her fish. One of her brothers was taking a photo of her practically kissing it.
“We’ll see,” Artur said. “Catch another one and we’ll take these in since we didn’t get a second boat to do that.”
I shrugged and kept fishing and fuck if my gaze didn’t keep straying to the woman beside me.
Hours later, I’d shed my jacket, and we were all standing next to the platform waiting for our fish to be weighed in.
My gaze was on the coffee truck where I’d spotted Falliday.
I moved toward it, my gaze downcast.
When I arrived it was to hear Falliday and another man talking business.
“…kind of rentals do you do?”
“Cars. Boats. Motorhomes.” He shrugged. “I just started renting out my first warehouse, too.”
“How do you get into the business of renting out a warehouse?” another man asked just before taking a sip of coffee.
“It was something that sort of fell into my lap,” he answered, his eyes gleaming. “I started with just renting out my cars to traveling people. Some big wig that comes to Houston isn’t gonna want to get a shit car from a car rental agency. They want something exclusive.” He rambled on and on, talking about how he’d gone from one car to ten cars. From ten cars to seventeen boats and cars.
“Did you buy the warehouse with the profits off of the other rentals?” the coffee drinker asked.
I raised my hand up at the lady behind the truck’s window and said, “One hot chocolate, please.”
I would’ve done a coffee, but I was all coffee’d out. I wanted a steak with some tea.
But I knew that Nastya would love the hot chocolate, and I’d do anything to see my sister’s smile.
“Well, that literally just fell into my lap. Someone tipped me off that the taxes weren’t being paid on it, and I swooped in and paid them off. Worked with the bank, and by the end of that year, I was able to evict them from their place. From there, I rented out to the guy that tipped me off about the back taxes, of all people.”
I rolled my eyes at the man’s obliviousness.
Surely he wasn’t that naïve.
But as I listened to more and more of his conversation with the two men, I realized that he was.
He was just that stupid that he had no clue how he’d been played. He also had no clue that his warehouse wasn’t being used for the ‘seed production for nursery plants.’
From what Alexi told me, the only thing that’d been found in that building was a block of cells, bread, water and a bathroom in the fuckin’ corner for the guards.
Hearing everything I needed to hear, I placed the phone to my ear and called Lev.
“You get anything on this guy’s phone records?” I asked.
He knew who I was talking about because he’d been listening to everything that was said via a small wire that I was wearing.
I made it to Nastya, who grinned excitedly when I handed her the hot chocolate.
“No,” Lev grumbled. “This guy is meticulous about his phone. He’s using a burner, and it’s not even a smartphone, because he doesn’t trust the government. The man doesn’t even have a bank account. According to what I’ve been able to dig up, the dude mistrusts the government so much that any money he makes he asks for in cash. He has a vault in his living room that houses all his cash.”
“Keep looking. Maybe he’ll slip up,” I instructed.
“Will do,” Lev said distractedly.
Hanging up the phone, I slipped it into my pocket, then said, “We can go now.”
A cheer rent the air behind us and there were a group of people who were crowded around the judge’s stand—Brecken included.
She had a huge smile on her face, and she was holding up a plastic bag with her fish in it.
After a few moments of excitement, she walked to the water with the fish and released it.
I watched her go, wishing I could see more of her body, but the camo coveralls covered every inch of her.