Page 67 of Priest

“You won’t find anything.” Daniel groaned from his position on the floor.

“Get him out of here,” I ordered Ox.

Ox instantly snatched Daniel up by the broken arm, and the older man screamed in pain.

“You’ve got the code to get into his computer, right, Ember?”

“Yeah. I managed his books. I only recently discovered what he’d been up to the day that you came here. Wait. Do you think that Daniel was involved in that?”

“I know that he was. Your father’s a wealthy man, but to pull off shit like that, he would have had to have someone more powerful and wealthier backing him. That’s where Daniel came in. They’ve been friends for how long?”

“Years. At least ten.”

“I’m sure that your father and Daniel have been involved in this business all along. Short of killing Daniel, we need to find something to take his ass down.”

I watched as she ran to the desk and sat down. Her fingers flew over the keys as she opened the laptop and searched through the files.

It took over an hour,but I finally found what I searched for.

“Bingo!” I replied after I removed the AirPods from my ears.

“What?” Priest asked.

He sat on the couch across from my father’s desk, where he and Sunny spoke in low tones. Every now and then, he would look up and ask if I had found anything useful. When Sunny noticed my stress level rise, he told Priest to chill because these things took time. That was when I finally plugged in the AirPods.

“My father is a brilliantly stupid man,” I answered. I paused and then corrected, “Was.”

It was unsettling in some ways to know that neither of my parents was still alive. It scared and confused me because although it was still hard some days, I accepted the fact that my mother was dead. My father had always been here to love, protect, and nurture me.

Over the last four weeks that Priest kept me at his cabin, I had time to come to terms with the fact that my father wasn’t who he pretended to be, and he protected me as long as I did what he required. The minute that went out the door and I questioned his integrity, all bets were off.

I had four weeks to become acclimated to the fact that he didn’t give a shit about me and that I was alone in the world. Iknew that I would be on my own and would have to make my life work the best way I could. Yet, there was a secret part of me that hoped there was some explanation and that maybe I’d been mistaken about things.

That possibility was no longer on the table for two reasons. One, my father was dead, and he wasn’t coming back. Two, the evidence of who my father was and what he’d done in conjunction with my “fiancé” was in front of my face.

“Did you find evidence?”

“A shitload of evidence.”

“This had better be some good shit,” Sunny declared from his spot on the couch.

“There are hours of recordings of phone conversations between Daddy and Daniel. I’ve viewed videos of them at the warehouses where the kids and women were taken to. Several of them include my father and Daniel, watching as the victims are loaded on and off the trucks. The conversations include discussions about how many ‘sales’ they had on each shipment and how much they would get for them. They even have a list of buyers on here,” I explained.

“How fast can you get that shit transferred out of here and to somewhere safe where we can look over it? I don’t want to stay here any longer than we have to,” Priest remarked beside me, where he looked over my shoulder.

“Another two minutes.”

“Here, send them to this location,” he remarked before he slid a slip of paper my way.

Priest moved away from my side and pulled out his phone. While I transferred certain files, he spoke with Ox.

“At the Crypt? Nah… tell Keeper to hold off. We leaving these bodies. I’ma let the folks handle ’em.”

Priest continued his conversation with Ox as Sunny glanced warily at me from time to time. When Priest ended the call, Sunny glanced at me and nodded.

Priest looked over his shoulder and shook his head.

“Hey, guys. I’m right here. If you need to talk in private, just step out of the room, but don’t play me dumb like I don’t see y’all talking about me in my face.”

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