Page 40 of Indecent Demands

Ariana went back to the account, and I saw the date that she was looking at—the date that Damien had apparently withdrawn all of the currency from the account as cash. It was the same date that the crypto was listed at fifty thousand dollars a coin.

I paused the video so that I could do the math on the transactions on screen. It amounted to ten million dollars in cash.

Holy fuck.

Damien had ten million dollars in cash hiding somewhere? For what purpose? But it was all highly suspicious considering the company was about to go public, which usually happened to raise additional capital.

Ariana then opened up the internet and went browsing. She was looking up Damien, trying to see what she could find on him. Yeah. I was going to need our tech team to do a much deeper dive on him than I’d had them do originally.

On the screen, Ariana shut everything down, wiping away all traces of her activity on my system. She was good with computers, I had to give her that. As good as I was.

I put away the camera and contemplated what my choices were.

Ariana suspected that Damien was doing something behind the scenes, and now I had to agree with her. My confusion was what, exactly, he would need that money for. His company was operating successfully except for the small amount of withdrawals Ariana had made—nothing compared to the cool ten million sitting in Damien’s pocket. He was about to take the company public. Why would he need money squirreled away and untraceable? Was it something he had done in his past? Or was it something he was about to do?

In my experience, you needed that kind of money if you were about to do something extremely illegal. For example, disappearing off the face of the earth. Or…

Maybe I was wrong. But there was a kind of job that our security company was sometimes asked to do, one that we always declined. We were in security, plain and simple. The ‘security’ wasn’t a front for anything else, as in mercenary work. But lots of former military veterans opted for a deadlier job, one where they were taking lives instead of protecting them.

The going rate for hitmen was pretty damn high. It was why all those ‘hire a hitman’ sites on the dark web were fucking scams. Actual skilled hitmen were either employed by the mob, or insanely expensive to hire. They didn’t exactly advertise their services willy-nilly.

I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but that particular possibility gnawed at my instincts.

I couldn’t do anything at this hour of the night, but I went to bed with troubled thoughts. My bed felt too big and cold, and unusually empty. I wondered if I slipped into bed with Ariana, just to hold her…

No. I couldn’t give into that weakness.

Now that she was on to Harcourt, my concern was that she could potentially cause a whole lot of trouble if I didn’t get ahead of her detective work and figure this outfirst. If Damien was actually doing something dangerous with this money, whether that was fleeing the country and creating a new identity or hiring a hitman, then Ariana would be putting her life in jeopardy if she pursued what she’d discovered. I couldn’t give in and be soft with her and let myself fall further.

Which suggested I was falling at all, in the first place.

Goddammit.

I slept restlessly, and got up early to work out and try to get rid of some of the tension. Ariana was still asleep when I left her, and I headed immediately to our company headquarters at Elite Protection and Consulting to get in touch with some of our contacts in the underworld.

I was on the phone with someone when Vaughn came in. He looked well-rested. Honestly, he looked a lot more relaxed and better-rested since getting together with Claire. I was happy for him, even if I was also a bit envious.

As soon as I disconnected the call he rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. “How’s the case going?”

“This might be a bigger problem than I thought,” I replied. “And we might not be getting paid.”

“We might not be getting paid?” Vaughn glared at me. “What kind of fucking job is this?”

“A job where I was hired to find whoever was stealing from the company and learned that the CEO has been doing something far more suspicious himself. He just made ten million dollars go missing from the company.”

Vaughn whistled. “That’s not chump change.”

“But it’s not the kind of embezzlement we normally see, either,” I said, scrubbing a hand along my jaw. “I don’t think it’s for his wealth. And it’s just the one transaction.”

Vaughn frowned. “So he needs a specific amount of money for somethingoffthe books.”

I nodded. “Exactly. It’s very well hidden.”

“What do you think?” he asked.

I leaned back in my chair. “Well, I need to establish exactly how he’s in trouble, or why he might need that kind of untraceable money. In the meantime, I’ve reached out to some contacts to see if anyone knows about a hitman being hired.”

Vaughn cringed. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.”

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