Page 33 of Queen's Ransom

“Okay, you’ve got my attention.” He placed the glasses on the table and poured them both two fingers’ worth of what her nose told her was high-dollar whiskey. She didn’t begrudge him the drink, or the tie he loosened, or the sleeves he rolled up. He’d been in court all day, only to return and find her waiting in his office. “All right, out with it, then.”

“Preliminaries.” Helena lowered herself in the chair across from him. “How much do you want to know?”

“Privilege.” He took a healthy swallow. Wise man. “I know your family’s skeletons.”

Or maybe she gave him too much credit. “You don’t know the half of them.” She sipped her whiskey. “Last chance to save yourself.”

He drained his glass, refilled it, then tipped it toward her. “Go on.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She gave Oak the thirty-thousand-foot overview of the shooting on Friday, the evidence linking it to Griffin, and how Maricopa County had stonewalled her today on getting the probate information for Herman Mosley.

“I can help with the last bit,” Oak said. “The title to the car came across my associate’s desk after Mosley died. He was Griffin’s last foster father before Griffin aged out of the system. Mosley left every one of his kids something.”

“If Griffin was in jail, where’d the car go?”

“Storage unit in Bayview with the rest of his personal items.”

“Who pays for that?”

“Ex-wife. Condition of the divorce.”

Helena would have spit out her whiskey if she weren’t already familiar with the hypocrisy of the law. There was a reason she did what she did—at both jobs. “He’s the asshole in jail.”

“I didn’t make the community property rules.” He sipped his second glass of whiskey more slowly. “It was either three hundred a month or half the other marital assets.”

She sipped and stewed in silence, rearranging the evidence in her head, sure Oak was doing the same. “So assuming he wasn’t suddenly out of jail—”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Then someone else accessed the unit and the car.”

“I’m guessing you want me to find out who,” Oak said.

“I’ve got a few guesses, and if you give me the details, we can get the surveillance from the facility.”

“Don’t tell me your guesses. Let me see what I can get out of Griffin. As for the other…” He stood, ambled to the desk, and snagged a Post-it and pen from the fancy setup on his immaculately kept desk. He scribbled on the paper, then put his pen back in the holder and brought the neon pink note over to her. “That’s the name and number of the facility.”

“You remembered that?”

“There’s a reason I’m the best criminal defense attorney in the city.” He added a wink as he sank back into his chair.

She muffled her laugh in her glass, finishing her whiskey.

“How do you want to play this?” Oak asked. “I get this info, then I claim conflict and get removed?”

“No. I don’t want us to lose control over this, but it’s just you and me. Don’t involve the associate who handled the case originally. Bratva could be involved.”

“Fuck.” He reached for the decanter again, offered her a refill, which she waved off, then refilled his own glass and took another healthy swallow.

“We all have to tread carefully.” She wasn’t only concerned about Oak and his legal associates. The more they learned about this case, the more Helena wondered if she’d made a mistake by rekindling her friendship with Celia, by letting Hawes’s words provide the justification for falling into the kiss Celia had initiated yesterday, for visiting her when she’d arrived home, for tossing and turning the rest of the night as she considered following that amazing kiss and those softly spoken midnight words into something more than friendship. As much as her body and heart wanted to get tangled up with Celia Perri, her head was telling her that maybe she shouldn’t have taken the bike to the shop. Maybe she should have let Mel continue to train Celia while she maintained her distance. Maybe Celia, Gloria, and the kids were safer without her in their lives. The Perris were already risking enough with Chris tied to the Madigans. Why should she double that risk?

“All right,” Oak said, jarring her from her thoughts. “I’ll find out what I can.”

“We’ll continue to gather evidence and organize on our end as well.” She crossed one leg over the other and rested back in the chair. “And don’t let on to Griffin about the Bratva. He may have no connection whatsoever, and prison walls have ears.”

He nodded. “You think the Bratva are trying to start something?”

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