Page 68 of Monstrous Urges

My brow furrows.

There really is nothing.

Not a single thing on social media. No schools attended. No places lived.

Nothing.

“Taylor Crown” even has a social security number—a clean one, at that. She has a fucking US passport. Just—no past.

How the fuck did she go to college, let alone Harvard, with no educational records?

My phone dings with a text from Dimitri, telling me he’s found what I wanted and that it’s sitting in my inbox. I wire him his usual fee and open what he’s sent me: financial records pulled from Crown and Black’s internal server.

He’s good, Dimitri. And fucking fast. This time he was even quicker than when I had him hack into the NYPD servers and delete the videos of her in that car, not to mention the naked parking garage footage after she escaped from me that first time.

As satisfying as it would have been to see her career go up in flames, I couldn’t have Annika disappearing into the judicial system and eluding my wrath.

Yes, I have questions—several, actually—concerning that stolen Lamborghini. But they can wait.

This is far more pressing.

I find the file I’m looking for and open it. My eyes scan the breakdown of the startup costs of Crown and Black, looking for the source of funds. Sure enough, there’s a decent chunk from Charles Black. Gabriel and Alistair both seem to have emptied their modest trust funds, too.

And then I spot Taylor’s contribution, which is noted as “the entirety of her trust fund”.

My blood boils when I see the amount, which is literally sixty-five percent of the money they needed to open the doors.

You little fucking liar.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. One of my little details that I’ve never been able to tie up is that the night I lost everything, I was also robbed. I didn’t realize until later, of course. But after I’d pulled myself out of the wreckage, buried my family and fled into the night, I realized the emergency fund my father had kept secret and separate from everything else was now gone.

Only he and I knew about the suitcase he kept locked in the safe in his office. The safe not even I knew the combination to. A fireproof safe containing twenty-two million US dollars, cash. Yet when I was pawing through the wreckage of my home the day after I lost everything, I found that safe empty.

My eyes drag back to the screen in front of me. I drop my gaze to “Taylor Crown” on the opening funds contribution list for the law firm, and the amount next to her name.

My hands curl to fists.

Her “trust fund” contribution to open the firm was twenty-two-million dollars.

My mind spins as my rage throbs under the surface.

I saw her body. I spit on her corpse.

…Which, I now see clearly, wasn’t Annika. Somehow, she got away that night. She knew about the money and somehow opened a goddamn number-pad safe before disappearing to the US, to this mysterious great-aunt Florence.

She changed her name to Taylor Crown and settled into a normal, quiet life. She was smart. She didn’t buy a splashy mansion or a fleet of sports cars. She sat on that stolen money, way off my radar. And then when opportunity came knocking, she finally used it to build her own empire.

A growl rumbles through my chest, but I restrain myself from marching through the house until I find her and throw her to the rocks beneath the cliffs.

Punish the hand that wielded the tool, not the tool.

The goal here isn’t Annika. It’s Vadik. Well, first it’s Vadik. But after I get him, using her?

Then I’ll exact my revenge on her as well.

I drum my fingers on the edge of my desk as I click away from the financial statements and to the cameras that cover every angle of my home and my island.

She’s not in her room.

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