Page 31 of Sinful Desires

12

MILES

“The face is looking good.” The last of Josh’s bruises had faded by the time we met on Wednesday afternoon, weeks after the staged fight at the bar. Staged from my standpoint, at least. I doubted it felt that way to him.

“Uh… thanks.” He was still salty, but there were more important things to discuss than his personal feelings. We sat facing each other in a cramped booth situated at the rear corner of a true greasy-spoon diner in the middle of Brooklyn. The idea was to keep our activities between us, at least when it came to this particular facet of my work here in New York.

Stirring cream into a cup of bitter coffee, I asked, “Do you have it? The clock is ticking. The event is next weekend.”

“I’ve been through everything with a fine tooth comb, and it looks legit to me.” Withdrawing a manila folder from his laptop bag, he slid it across the table before picking up a greasy burger and taking a massive bite. I was glad for the excuse to avert my gaze from his sloppy feast, choosing instead to open the folder and review what was inside.

To the untrained eye, it was nothing more than a series of printouts from social media chats. Most of it centered around Facebook, though there were a few snippets of conversation taken from text messages as well, all of them going back years.

“Look good?” He wiped his fingers on a napkin, not that it did much good.

“What about the recordings?” I asked, prompting him to withdraw an older model phone from his bag. Mom hadn’t upgraded it in years, though I’d offered countless times to buy her something new once I could easily afford it.

“Listen for yourself.” Pulling up one of the files, he handed me the device. “Just hit play.”

I did as he instructed, holding the phone to my ear in time to hear Magnus’s voice. “Fuck, I miss you, Leila,” he growled out. “I swear, I’m flying out there as soon as I can get away for a few days. Evelyn doesn’t have a clue. You know how it is. She’ll believe anything I tell her. Just know every time I jerk off, I’m thinking of you. Imagining that mouth around my dick. I can’t wait until I don’t have to imagine anymore, baby.”

I was barely able to hold back my laughter until the recording finished. “It’s perfect.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve spent weeks living in the man’s penthouse, sharing meals, chatting about his interest in AI.” Another laugh burst out of me at the irony. “Here he is, captured for posterity in all these messages.”

Only he had never spoken those words, or at least not to my mother. Not within the last three decades, as far as I knew. Yet the files created using AI to mimic his voice were dated as recently as the past year, thanks to a little technical know-how when it came to doctoring data. How convenient was it that I happened to know people with such skills?

Staying at the penthouse served more than the purpose of getting close to Aria. It left me able to record conversations into which I had drawn Magnus. Most of the time, we discussed nothing in particular. That wasn’t the point. Capturing his voice on my phone was all that mattered. I had, and we’d trained our new AI program using that data.

The result? Extremely incriminating recordings detailing an affair between Magnus and my mother. Along with that were the manufactured screenshots—sexting, for the most part, to confirm what the fake messages already alleged.

Evelyn would never forget the night of her nonprofit’s thirtieth-anniversary gala. What a shame it wouldn’t be for the reason she expected.

“You know, if he ever figures this out…” Josh winced, polishing off what was left of his burger.

“How could he? His head is so far up his ass he believes the entire world smells like his colon. Besides…” I added. “He can’t prove a thing. I didn’t spend so much time putting this together to leave anything to chance. As far as Magnus Miller is concerned, I’m part of his happy family. Yes, I’m about to drop a bomb on them, but there’s nothing in any of this to point toward it being doctored. I am merely a concerned son wanting to clear the air.” As I spoke, I scanned the printouts, carefully checking the date stamps to ensure there was nothing obvious that might give us away.

It wasn’t enough to break the heart of Magnus’s precious daughter. Magnus was going to regret the mistake he’d made in abandoning us and pretending we had never existed, forcing Mom to flee the country in shame—no friends or family out there, starting from scratch with her son, a paltry excuse for a divorce settlement, and no support system.

My chest tightened when memories from earlier in the afternoon slammed into me. That boy, his mother. She couldhave been Mom. How many times had she berated me mercilessly for a stupid accident? How many times had she made it sound like she blamed me more for my very existence than for a glass of spilled milk or a grass-stained sweater?

It wasn’t her fault. She had done the best with what life had given her. The drugs and the drinking had already begun to change her by the time I was roughly that boy’s age, perhaps a year or two older. Until then, she had only been short-tempered and unpredictable, but there had been some good times. Fun times.

“You okay?” Josh asked nervously, eyeing me warily from across the table. “Something wrong?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.” I snatched the folder and the phone, then dropped bills on the table to cover his meal and my coffee. “My thanks to your people for this.”

“My people? I only found them because you told me to,” he reminded me. The man was uncomfortable, to say the least, nervous at the idea of facing Magnus’s wrath.

“I have no idea who they are or where they do their work, which means they’re more your people than mine.” By design, naturally. The less I could be associated with this, the better. “We’ll touch base tomorrow on progress with the office renovations.”

“We could do that now,” he pointed out, speaking to the back of my head. I was already on my way to the door. There was no need to blur the line between work and vengeance.

When all was said and done, I would look like nothing more than an innocent bystander who wanted to set the record straight for Evelyn’s sake. By then, Aria would at least be half in love with me. She was already in my clutches, something I couldn’t pretend I didn’t enjoy. They were fringe benefits. I might miss her when it was over and had no choice but to move on, leaving the ruins of a happy family behind me. Itdidn’t matter that there was a media empire within the extended family. Connor Diamond would not be able to suppress the news once it spread. It would, too, thanks to my revealing Magnus’s supposed betrayal during a gala packed with friends, family, and society figures.

I was so close. I almost tasted victory as I left the diner and took a cab into Manhattan. I didn’t want any proof of this meeting, not Uber records or a ticket from a parking garage. I went out of my way to cover my tracks the way I had all along.

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