Page 113 of Only Fools Rush
“Sitting in the dark will make your eyes worse.”
“Excuse you,” he groaned as he rubbed them. “Too bright.”
I laughed. “It’s on the lowest setting of the dimmer. You’re being dramatic.”
He scoffed, but he pushed back his computer chair and turned to face me. “Out of all of us, that’s what I’m known for. Drama.”
“So right.” I smiled and then sat on his lap, my arms going around his neck. My heart leaped as his hands rested on my hips. It wasn’t too long ago that he’d pushed me away. This was much better. “Speaking of drama queens, I want to get a crown made for Ryuji.”
He snorted. “I’ll have one made immediately.”
I took his cheeks in my hands to plant a firm kiss on his lips. Home. I should have said so on the phone—God knows I was thinking it—but he was my home. They all were.
“What are you working on?”
“Well, I was just about to send you and Obi an update about your father’s account numbers.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Yeah?”
He pulled up a few documents. “I’m not through all of them yet, but you’ll be interested to know there are payments to Don Sandrini and Don Lucchese on here, too.”
I scanned through the data. “Seriously? The other Dons were involved, too?”
“All the Dons except Don Rossi. Not sure why. But there are outgoing payments to Sandrini and Lucchese. No incoming payments.”
I blew a breath through my nose. “So the other Dons were involved. Maybe they were all helping him, the same as Don Vincenzo was. Or maybe my father was paying them to look the other way.”
“It’s possible.” He tightened his grip on my hips. “We’ll get to the bottom of it. Whether blackmail or something else, the pieces will come together.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to make it make sense. “You sent this to Obi?”
“Just did. I’m still looking through the rest of them. They’re getting harder to trace.”
“Okay,” I murmured. “Let’s keep looking. There has to be more.”
“I’ll find it.”
Maybe the rest of the accounts would tie everything together. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the other Dons were involved in the same shady shit my father was—and Max knew it, too. Ifwe got more answers, we’d hopefully be able to understand his goals.
“What else are you doing?” Ciel’s desk was a total wreck, with papers, and empty energy drinks crumbled behind his keyboard. He was a master multi-tasker. I’d never known someone who could keep track of different projects like he did.
“Two things at once.” He nodded at the screens on the left. “That’s everything I can find about the board meeting and the restaurant.” Then he nodded to the right. “That’s everything I have on the Alacrán Cartel.”
Something about his voice seemed off. Tense, or maybe frustrated. I studied everything I could see about the Alacrán. “You seem stuck. Disappointed. What am I missing?”
He chuckled, nuzzling his nose into my hair. “As always, you notice everything. It’s not so much whatyou’remissing, but what I’m missing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve always suspected that the Alacrán Cartel killed my parents.”
I sucked in a breath. His earlier reaction to hearing about them finally made sense. “Seriously?”
One of his hands let go of my hip to double-click an image to enlarge it. The grainy image of a man with brown hair shaved on both sides while keeping it long on top filled the screen. His face was so obscured that I couldn’t get a good look at him.
“That’s the leader, Rafael Arboleda. He’s a phantom. I can’t get any other clues where he is currently or whether they have connections to when my parents died.”
“What happened?” I asked. “When they were killed?”
