Page 66 of Fixate
I wanted to feel him completely in every way.
This relationship we had wasn't based upon much, but I would be damned if I passed up the opportunity to have all of him.
CHAPTER 24
Pharrell
Dario's facecontorted as he gave me the news. "I'm really sorry.”
I shook my head. "What do you mean you're sorry?"
He laid the papers on the desk in front of me. We had come to my office at the casino to go over the finances for this quarter. As my CFO, he handled all the financials across all my businesses. He was one of the few people that I trusted with my money.
My clean money, anyway.
Because no matter how many times I had been told I shouldn't, I kept my mafia life away from my legal businesses.
Lyon Enterprises, the company I built to house everything I had that was legitimate, would not be tainted by the death and destruction of the underground.
Except it was still being harmed.
I just needed to find out how.
Immediately I noticed the differences in the numbers that he presented to me. Our profits were down substantially, yet everything appeared to be going correctly.
"I know you've already dug through this. What did you find?" I asked.
He straightened his suit jacket before dropping into the empty seat across from me.
We were second cousins, our mother's having been cousins first. And it was funny because we looked nothing alike yet managed to have the exact same mannerisms.
Dario was put together in a nice suit, and he was all business. He reminded me a lot of Henri, if Henri didn't know how to kill a man in fifteen ways.
Okay, I'm lying. Fifteen was an underestimate.
It was more like forty-five or fifty. That was just with his bare hands.
I shook my head to focus on what Dario was telling me.
“As I was saying,” he started again, his eyes clearly knowing that I had gotten lost in my thoughts. “As I was saying, the reports all look as if they normally would. The numbers should make sense. But they don't match what was actually deposited and shown as revenue. When I tracked it all down—and believe me it took far longer than it should have—I discovered all the discrepancies were connected to one section of entities.”
He paused as if waiting for me to encourage him to continue. I wouldn't, of course. This wasn't a game to me.
It was my money, my livelihood.
No one stole from me and got away with it.
“The money missing is from the strip clubs,” he finally said once he realized I wasn’t going to take the bait.
I picked the pages back up and read them again. The numbers for the clubs were all separate because with Dario's need for detail, he made sure each business was outlined thoroughly during these meetings.
When I scanned over each club, I could see that their profits were showing higher than what was actually deposited. Theissue with discrepancies such as this was that you had to not only pinpoint where it came from, but who was behind it.
It could be some of the girls merely taking money from the registers and trying to cover it up, or a manager who wanted to make an extra buck and took from the profits by lying when he closes for the night.
Neither of those sounded like what actually happened.
When I placed the papers back down on my desk and leaned forward onto my elbows to look at Dario, he was grinning.
