Page 3 of Fearless Sinner

My heart is so heavy it feels like boulders are lodged together in my chest, pulling me under.

It wouldn’t matter if I had the entire world inside me dragging me to hell. I must keep going.

Failure is not an option.

The next morning I sit in my office at O’Ridians PLC, the bank I inherited from my father.

I’m so furious I want to tear off my skin and rip the earth apart.

After hours of searching through the surveillance, we found the leak.

It’s a guy called Harlan Jacobs, who works for my shipping company on the other side of the docks.

We picked him up walking through the building two hours before we arrived.

Since the prick has no connection to the warehouse whatsoever, and it’s situated several miles away from my shipping company, there was no reason for him to be there. Other than to report to Lance.

I figured out that Lance must have hired Harlan to spy on me. The fact that Harlan isn’t answering his phone, didn’t show for work this morning, and is nowhere to be found confirms my suspicions.

The surveillance footage showed Harlan speaking to a few people at the warehouse, any of whom could have been Lance. But, surprise, surprise, there was no surveillance for the office Lance was supposed to be in. The cameras that covered that area were turned off.

Everything is screwing with me and I feel like I’m back at fucking square one. Again.

I throw my fist down on the desk, making the stack of paperwork jump. What pisses me off more than anything is that a runt like Harlan was used against me.

Harlan is a motherfucker who joined the company while I was living in Ireland. He’d worked for me for three years. When I decided to return to the States after finding out about Lance, Harlan got close to me.

Or rather, I leaned more on him to take charge because of his experience, so I could focus on finding Lance. That was my first mistake. It’s people like him that your enemies use to fuck with you. I should know that better than most.

On top of that shit, Harlan owes me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Because he’d proven to be so trustworthy and a good worker I loaned him and his wife the money to renovate a building to expand his family’s restaurant chain.

He’s obviously fucked me over with that, too. I never trust anyone, ever. But the fucked-up situation I’m stuck in blindsided me, turning me into a bitch.

A knock sounds on my already open door.

I lift my head and find Jaxon Bortsov standing at the threshold. We call him The Beast because of his long, unruly hair and Hulk-ish, barbarian appearance.

He’s the underboss of the Vysotsky Bratva, who are members of the Creed Council.

We’ve been working together for over a year. His family owns Bortsov Tech, one of the world’s largest heavy-duty arms companies. Due to the nature of our underground contacts, Jaxon was one of my first clients when I started up the shipping company. I wasn’t expecting to see him today.

“Hey.” He walks in. In his hand is an envelope. “Heard what happened last night.”

“It was a fucking shitshow.”

“Yeah. And it’s not over yet.” He holds up the envelope.

“What’s going on?”

“Harlan Jacobs. He’s a fucking conman. He stole my shipment last night.”

My back snaps straighter, as if someone shoved a steel rod up my spine. “What the hell are you saying to me?”

“My team just discovered that the weapons shipment that was picked up from headquarters never reached the docks. Harlan picked it up himself, like he always does.”

This isn’t happening. This isn’t fucking happening. “He seriously took the shipment?”

Jaxon nods and clenches his jaw. “Yes. He took fifty million dollars’ worth of weapons with new-age NASA technology that shouldn’t be in the hands of any old person. We also found this in my internal mail.” He opens the envelope and pulls out a piece of notepaper.

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