Page 56 of Trick's Trap

If only he and Liam would stop snipping for more than an hour at a time.They were so similar and would undoubtedly be great friends… if they didn’t hate each other so much.

“Not according to Gina.” He sighed heavily. Tahlia’s ballsy friend had been more subdued the last time he talked to her. “She told Tahlia to run and regroup.”

He’d been sick to his stomach when he’d heard about the threat to the woman’s daughter, enough he hadn’t railed at her for what she’d done.

If only she’d come to him before seeing Tahlia. He could have convinced her they could protect Jenny.

At least she told Tahlia to run and not give herself to those bastards. He could only pray Tahlia heeded her advice.

She’d been gone for over a week. As Liam had discovered, she’d taken most of her new clothes, her fake ID, and all the Visa gift cards he’d given her to buy whatever she wanted from the shops downstairs.

She’d refused to use the cards when he first gave them to her, but he’d insisted they sit in her drawer unused in the hopes she’d change her mind. The grand total for all the cards combined was in the ballpark of a few grand.

At least she has some cash.The question was where would she take it?

“I still don’t get how she got past your security unless she had help,” Ethan grumbled, giving him the side-eye.

“Peyton didn’t help her. She knew how much was at stake.”

“And just where is Peyton?” Ethan glanced around as if looking for her, then glowered when she didn’t magically appear.

He did that quite a bit when he was visiting the hotel.

If only Peyton could see something in Ethan and not my idiot brother.Her life would be so much easier.

“Sleeping. She’s been scouring the poker boards for me. She’s was up all night setting up some tracing programs. She’s trying to track Tahlia’s alias.”

Peyton was also monitoring the dark web at his behest, but he knew better than to mention that aloud to the FBI agent. She was trying to dig up anything she could find on Tahlia’s family and their dirty deeds.

A flash of guilt passed over him as he saw Ethan pick up another file. His friend had devoted a lot of hours to this, and he deserved to know everything they were up to. But sometimes the lines they had to cross for the sake of expediency didn’t mesh with Ethan’s narrow point of view. Black or white. That was how the agent’s mind worked.

If Peyton turns up anything, I’ll tell him, of course.But until then, what Ethan didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

“If she’s smart—and despite going for you, I think she is—Tahlia dumped that ID and got a new one.” He picked up another paper, the entry logs for the passcode-protected doors.

“Well, there’s an unauthorized exit from the laundry around an hour after Gina visited. It might be nothing. There’s a lot of those.”

Trick leaned back in his office chair. “It’s where the hotel’s smokers go to get their fix. We are more concerned with unauthorized entrances back there.”

Employees needed to scan their keycards to get back in.

Ethan picked up the beer and took a sip. His eyes were narrowed on the security guard logs. “If this was her, then Tahlia picked the only time when the hallway to that entrance was not monitored. Just our luck.”

Trick’s cheek twitched. There was that damn word again. He’d lost count of the number of times someone had brought up luck or described Tahlia as lucky in the past few months. Given the circumstances, it irked him to no end.

“If she’s not hiding here in Boston, and she’s not in Florida, then where would she have gone? Back to New York?”

Mulling, he picked up the letter opener—the one Tahlia had fiddled with on his desk. “It’s possible. She’s not well-traveled and doesn’t know any other cities well.”

“What about Atlantic City or Las Vegas? She’d want to earn some money, right?”

“I thought of that. I have men checking the casinos out, but if we assume her family is aware of her gambling, then that doesn’t feel right.” It was still a possibility, of course, which was why he was circulating Tahlia’s description to all his contacts there and in Reno again. But it was also too obvious.

“Can you gamble at any of those places?”

Trick gave himself a little shake. Ethan was watching him expectantly. “What places?”

Ethan rolled his eyes and pointed over Trick’s head. He spun the chair to face the line of photos, all the hotels in the Caislean chain.

---