Page 98 of The Fix
They were allowing her to ruin him.
Slowly. But surely.
Posey continued to find more ways to access electronics and inventive methods of connecting to sites and files previously out of reach. She secretly read news sources and knew what was going on inthe outside world, far beyond the prison where she was kept, locked not only in her room, but in her broken body.
She pretended to be weak and scared. Anton liked it that way.
The more failures the business suffered due to Anton’s incompetency, the more distracted he became. That was good for Posey.
She took great pleasure from hearing him curse and rage when another one of his “fixes” was stopped by the intended target. He didn’t understand how or why. The Kiss family business’s reputation plummeted. Contracts dwindled. No one wanted to use services with such a high likelihood of failure, when failure in these instances meant complete collapse of a client’s life.
Posey heard voices and footsteps from below, echoing in the marble halls. The man who’d entered was speaking to the butler at the door. There would be others around too—Anton had layers of security. Was anyone suspicious? Had they called Anton in another time zone? There was only a small likelihood they would. But still ...hurry, hurry.
The ventilator broadcast the push and pull of her diaphragm. She didn’t have to remind herself to breathe. The machine did it for her.
Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, she simply removed an unseen link so that a fix failed. She’d given others a chance for a do-over, too, over the years in cases where do-overs made sense. Most had failed, but a couple had not. She wasn’t privy to each detail of the job outline. She didn’t always know when or how or where. The do-over targets had to do the legwork, literally. She could only give what she was able to steal and no more. She’d gotten better at it over the years. Posey began to improve in her offers. She left no trail, especially not for Anton to find.
And then eventually, she completed the one final task she’d been attempting for years.
The coup de grâce.
It’d taken her over a decade of failed attempts, but she’d successfully hacked Anton’s passwords for his bank accounts. The sums therein were much lower than they should have been—their father had lefthis children a fortune, and Anton had already squandered much of it. But there was enough. Enough for Posey to live comfortably for the rest of her life.
She closed her eyes as she waited, finding calm in going back over her latest success. Cami Cortlandt had responded beautifully to her offer of a do-over. Cami, who’d once survived such a vicious attack—the reason that Posey felt an affinity for the young woman.
Posey had only had the video of the boy and some basic information to send. She knew neither the time nor the place. Cami figured that all out on her own. Posey had later hacked into the police database in Big Sur, California, and read the police report. She and a man named Alexander Lowe had rescued Cami’s son from the traffickers Anton had sold him to in order to recoup some of their family fortune he’d squandered away. The deal was unnecessarily cruel—no surprise there—but it’d bought them time.
Alexander Lowe.
She’d looked him up, and then she’d begun to wonder if there was more opportunity in this case than she’d first considered.
It was time, after all, for Posey to plan her escape. The police weren’t safe—some of them were clients. Others were pawns. She could transfer evidence to the FBI, but unless Anton was surprised in a six a.m. raid, he’d have time to kill her. And she had no doubt he wouldn’t hesitate to do so. He might be taken, but he’d take her with him if he could.
Or she’d wind up in the state-run pit of despair, no access to the family trust, squandered though it was.
And so, she’d found a way to get Rex the information he’d need to begin to unravel the case she knew he was working on. She’d waited in the one location she’d figured he would eventually show—Hollis Barclay’s campaign website. She’d only had moments to communicate and almost dropped her tool in haste. But he’d obviously worked her message out. He was as impressive as she’d banked on. Literally.
Posey leaned down and used that same tool now, held in her teeth to press the keys on her voice device, transferring the money fromAnton’s personal and business accounts to the accounts she’d opened under a corporate entity in a foreign country. She watched, her eyes held to the screen as two sets of footsteps approached her room. The transfer completed just as the door opened, and Posey dropped the tool to her lap.
The butler walked through first, followed by a tall, broad-shouldered man with jet-black hair, carrying a medical bag and wearing a crisp white coat. He smiled.Rex Lowe.He was even more handsome than the photo she’d seen online.
“Josephine,” the butler said, “Dr. Ellingson here for your appointment.”
“Hello, Josephine,” Rex said as he stepped forward and bowed his head slightly, medical bag gripped in both hands. Her heart soared, but she held back her smile.
Rex glanced over at the butler. “May we have some privacy, sir?”
“Of course. I’ll be right outside the door.”
The butler exited, shutting the door softly behind him. Rex turned back her way and then walked to her wheelchair and squatted down next to her and took her hands in his. “I’m assuming you know another way out of here,” he said.
Posey grinned then, a small victorious laugh bubbling from her mouth. Oh, she hadn’t used her voice in so long, too long, so she did it joyfully now. “Yes, Mr. Lowe, but you’ll be required to carry me.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
It’d been a hell of a week, and Rex’s nervous system might still be in a bit of disarray. When he started to tailspin, emotionally speaking, he first pictured Cami and Cyrus curled up on her dad’s couch, where they’d gone after Cami was discharged from the hospital.Safe.And then he envisioned Posey Kiss’s smile as he’d driven her through the gates of her estate. And both memories caused a breeze of peace to blow through him.
Still, he experienced a sudden heartbeat spike in reaction to the sound of a car drawing closer. He stepped outside the house, the rattle letting him know immediately that it wasn’t Cami as he’d very momentarily thought, but his mother, her ancient Toyota chugging up the hill toward the house.
