Page 91 of Oath
We didn’t say anything, but I felt Bones’ tension ease by degrees.
“Let me know if she comes down,” I said. “I want her to see this. Not all of it, but enough to know we’re not shooting blind anymore.”
“I’ll bring her a cup of tea,” Bones said, standing and cracking his neck. “She likes the honey vanilla one.”
I nodded, not remotely tackling the comment of Bones making her tea. It was absolutely cute, but right now, she needed anddeservedthe care. “I’ll make the maps. You run through the intel on his schedule and once we brief her, we’ll let Gracie decide how she wants to do her approach.”
Bones looked at me for a beat. “You sure?”
“No.” I tapped the keyboard again and brought up Sinclair’s personal calendar—the one he hadn’t shared with the firm, but which was syncing in the background through his assistant’s device. “But she needs to be part of it.” She needed to be the one to break him even if it broke her.
She’d already broken once today.
And still? She got up.
Which meant when it was time—when we had this bastard in our sights—Grace would be the one to confront him. The shock of the meeting might do exactly what we wanted it to do and jar a confession out of him.
Liars often needed time to perfect the lie, rock them enough and the truth could be shaken free.
If he was involved…
Then we’d bury him.
By the time Lunchbox and Voodoo made it to the house with supplies—food, clothing, and electronics along with weapons—Gracie had come back down, showered and in better spirits. She was still paler than I’d like. The surprise on her face when Bones brought her the cup of tea almost made me laugh.
Her soft thank you, though, that was the kind of thing that wrapped a noose around me and yanked tight. The three of us worked, Gracie reading the reports we’d put together, Bones pulling more on Sinclair and his partners, as well as his senior associates.
It wasn’tquitea boutique firm, but it was definitely one where the partners made the decisions and the people at the bottom were the ones left doing all the heavy lifting. I was right about his corporate leanings. He handled a lot of foreign trade negotiations, acquisitions, and mergers.
In no way was he afamilyattorney, that made me dig into the person he was representing in the Alexandria Family Court. His client was a man named Emanuel Mendoza—no photos were handy, no social media footprint, and no associated corporation.
Who the fuck was Emanuel Mendoza? The more I dug, the less I found and that just about set off every alarm I had. I was still chewing over that when we took a break from the computers to eat the pizza and get the debrief from Lunchbox and Voodoo.
They were pretty succinct in their summation of the firm, its security, and access. “It’s not the easiest place to penetrate,”Lunchbox said as he added another slice of pizza to Gracie’s plate before he took a bite of his own.
She’d gone for the straight pineapple pizza, no meat, no veggies. Just cheese and fruit.
I kind of liked it.
They brought two large versions of it—one with a hand-tossed crust and the other thin. She preferred the thin, I took the hand-tossed.
“So,” Lunchbox said when they finished going over everything they’d picked up. “What is the plan?”
As a group, we all looked at Bones. He grunted then downed an entire bottle of water before he rose to get a beer. He brought back five bottles and opened one after the other for us. When he handed one to Grace, she gave it the most inelegant little sniff before knocking back a long drink.
Amusement curled through me. She loved to yank his chain and she was so damn good at it. Good for him. Good for all of us really. Bones actually slept more these days. Lunchbox had gotten more creative in not only his cooking but his explosives. Voodoo had relaxed for the first time in—forever really.
As for me?
Gracie made me smile. She also made me want to put down a lot of assholes so she never had to deal with them again. Unfortunately, the world tended to frown on the eliminate the problem at the root theory. Still…
We had been cleaning up a lot over the past several months. That we let O’Rourke go… Well, I was still mulling on that one too. “Before I forget, I got an update on O’Rourke.” It had come in thirty minutes earlier, but I was a little too focused on Mendoza to worry about that asshole.
“If he’s not wearing a toe tag somewhere,” Voodoo said. “We can skip that briefing.”
A flicker of a smile over Lunchbox’s face, but there was no mistaking the tension that tightened his eyes. Bones merely glanced at me. “Do we care?”
“Probably not, but in the interests of keeping us all aware, he’s surfaced at a golf resort outside of San Diego. The broken leg is definitely slowing him down.” The walk out of the desert on that broken leg probably hadn’t been fun either.
