Page 148 of All Your Hate

“Check my fucking spam? I’m not waiting for a newsletter.”

“He encrypts his messages with all sorts of shit so sometimes they get sent to spam.”

The guy really needs a better system.

“That sounds dumber than you,” I mumble.

“He’s just a kid. You know he likes to mess around with shit like that.”

“Right. I’ll look now. Thanks for checking in. Does this mean Wynter and Willow will get to meet soon?”

As soon as the words leave my mouth my heart drops. For a moment I’d forgotten what happened between us.

“I’ll think about it,” Dean grumbles before hanging up.

I’ve got nothing better to do so I open my emails on my phone. There might be something we missed about Dmitri that Kai was able to find out. Lo and behold amongst all the porn and dick enhancement spam is an email that is just code in the subject heading.

There’s a load of attachments with it. None of them make any sense to me. Medical records from Switzerland. Nothing about Dmitri.

Something doesn’t sit right. Why would he send me the wrong files?

I decide to call him.

“You finally opened it,” Kai says as he answers.

“I don’t know whatitis. Why are you sending me medical records when I asked you to tell me who put the hit out on Abato?”

“I’m hardly going to spell it out in bold for anyone to see now, am I? The info in those documents is enough for you to go off. Like I said before it’s real soap opera shit.” I'm still not sure what he's talking about.

“Well, it doesn’t matter now anyway. Dmitri Volkov’s dead."

My face is throbbing and I need some pain relief so I put the call on speaker and toss the device onto the passenger seat.

“Who’s Dmitri Volkov?” Kai asks while I’m deep in the glovebox trying to find some medication.

I pause for a second before saying, “He put the hit out on Tommaso Abato.”

“No, he didn’t. His wife did.”

I'm not sure if I've heard him right.Daniella? She’s been putting on one hell of a show if it was her.

“You’ve gotta be wrong,” I say, abandoning my search for painkillers and snatching the phone back up.

Kai makes a noise like I’ve offended him. “I’m never wrong with this. Don’t expect me to do you any more favors if you’re going to disrespect my work like that. I’m looking at it right now. Jax’s files took me a while to find and I had to clean up a load of crap before I could find everything he deleted. Nothing was labeled properly so I had to—”

“Get on with it already,” I snap.

“Alright, alright. Turns out Daniella isn’t as stable as she wants people to think she is. She spent a few years in an institution in Switzerland when she lost her baby forty-odd years ago. She snapped and kidnapped her sister's kid, thinking it was her own baby. They had her locked up and forced a load of pills and therapy on her. It all got filed away by her husband. He paid a lot of money to keep it out of the public eye.”

“But why would she want him dead?”

“That I can’t tell you. It’s not like she left a diary entry when she put the hit out. It was all done online and she used a fake name, but I traced the money back to her account.”

Something still doesn’t feel right about the whole thing. Dmitri never actually confessed to putting the contract out. I just fucking assumed he did. Shit. I remember Daniella at the office. How I rubbed the lie in her face that Wynter was pregnant.

“Fuck.” Instinct tells me to get the tracking app up.

“What’s wrong?” Kai asks.

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