Page 6 of To Catch A Rook

If I were to grant this request, I could have my own man follow him and report his whereabouts. I might get far more interesting information out of the deal—incriminating information. It paid to be a few moves ahead of my father. He was getting far too comfortable as my parasitic house guest.

I unfolded my arms and leaned against the mahogany desk to my right, maintaining my neutral mask.

“No promises. If your information is as good as you say, I’ll speak to Kellan on your behalf this week. Whatever his stipulations are, you’re going to follow them to the letter of the law, or no deal.”

He met my gaze, holding me in an unyielding stare-off for a lengthy minute, then his tired face broke out into a wide smile.

“Excellent!” He beamed, taking a seat on the austere velvet chemise couch in front of me, patting the seat beside him.

I perched on the end as he reached over and grabbed a thick manila envelope of documents. He took out a single sheet and handed it to me.

“It’s to do with the Rodriguez merger. If you look in the rest of the file, you’ll find some very damning information.”

His triumphant grin turned malicious, unveiling the true man lurking beneath the skin. A man who yearned to plunder and pillage for ultimate power, destroying all good things in his wake.

I tore my gaze away from his sickening smile and skimmed the dossier with growing interest. Veronica and Vicente had dirty hearts and even dirtier hands.

Which would only be a good thing for me.

“Teams are in place, Ms. Lane.”

The tinny voice crackled through my earphones as I monitored the security screens in front of me.

“Thank you, Joey.”

Josephine, my most trusted vehicle driver, was also a key driver of my operation—the closed-door underground operation that kept many of the key players in this town in check.

I wasn’t a single vigilante like Bruce Wayne in Batman. Only a man would be foolish enough to risk his entire empire in a plastic suit.

I had teams. Men and women, elite soldiers, who pledged allegiance to me for a fat paycheck and an entitled sense of justice in a city where there was none.

Tonight, we were going to deliver a powerful message to the very justice system that had a penchant for evil.

“Proceed.”

My clipped command echoed over the speakers as my strongest Alpha team—two ex-Marines and an ex-CIA operative—barged into the mansion of the Honorable Henry Cowan, Carlisle’s most dishonorable judge.

Black blurred figures swept across my screens, and their body cameras captured the quiet home as they moved into the judge’s home office—the office where he was currently entertaining two underage girls.

I hated the time between the moment I had the right information until the moment we could actually go in for the kill. There had been times where we weren’t fast enough to catch these sick fuckers in the act, and those failures weighed heavily on my heart in their aftermath.

But my information for tonight had been accurate; my hacker had tapped into Cowan’s security feeds, so I knew with certainty the sixteen-year-old twins, still mostly dressed, hadn’t yet been assaulted.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to stop them from snorting the coke put out for them, so my window of opportunity was now.

A shriek filled the speaker, followed by an indignant “what the fuck!” as Anita, Blake, and Sammy moved into the luxurious den of iniquity. Sounds of muffled grunts and scratchy scuffles resounded around my dark room, followed by more shrieks and then, a howl of pain.

I switched back to the hacked security feeds, since the body cameras weren’t grabbing the angle I wanted, and watched Judge Cowan become fully incapacitated in Sammy’s hold, his tiny hard dick dangling in front of his pants-less body.

The twin brunettes whimpered, shivering from the coke and adrenaline behind Anita and Blake’s bulky forms. My soldiers gently ushered the girls out of the room and into the quiet hallway, leading them back to the nondescript vehicle parked discreetly off the property.

It was a primary rule of the missions: Remove the victims from the premises immediately.

Sometimes, they were brought back to their families—to parents desperate for their return and grateful for our interference.

In other cases, the children were hidden from their families—families who bartered their bloodlines for quick cash or hefty favors. My teams took those to a private facility to heal from their trauma and build skills to start a new life away from the people who’d sold their own souls.

And those families … well, we dealt with them very differently.

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