Page 42 of Christmas in Vines

It didn’t make me feel that much better, but it did ease some tension in my chest. “Thank you.”

She smiled and sat back, taking her coffee with her and a contemplative look slipped over her face. Her expression was totally incongruous with the happiness and as the silence stretched, I got concerned.

Shifting my empty plate away, I placed my forearms on the table and leaned in. “What’s troubling you?”

“I—” she shook her head, “I may be off here but this deal my dad is cutting with Maxwell’s dad feels off to me. And on top of that, I just caught my uncle Herman being really shady.”

I frowned. “How shady?”

“Like photocopying the profiles of the shareholders who have voting rights in the company,” Willow replied, setting her cup down. “I don’t know, he says they are for his private records but I… a part of me calls bullshit on that one.”

“Why?”

“Every April when Dad redoes the shareholder records, they are sent to each shareholder for transparency reasons,” Willow said. “Of course, he could have lost his hard copy…but I don’t want to buy whatever he’s selling me. And paired with Maxwell’s dad suddenly getting involved with the company… I’ve just got this itch under my skin.”

“Do you really think it is shady or are you upset about seeing the father of the man who betrayed you so badly?” I asked.

Her eyes narrowed but then she let out a long breath and slumped into herself. “Can it be both? I never expected to see either Winslow again. I mean, that man is known for being…difficult. I know for a fact that he’s been called a bastard, an arrogant son of a bitch, a dictator and that was from the people who like him. I’m worried his cutthroat tactics will wheedle themselves into my dad’s business and make us as soulless as the corporations Winslow runs.”

Wait... is she hinting at something more? Does this man have a history of taking over companies that are not his? Does he do Hostile Takeovers?

“Oh,” I uttered only—because, what could anyone say to that? “Do you trust your gut?”

“Always,” she replied, then grimaced. “Even when I should have listened to it.”

If she felt something was wrong—maybe something was wrong. I had many ways of finding things out and if I could fetter out whatever was going on here, innocent or not, it could help ease her worry.

But I couldn’t do it here with my crappy tablet and phone; I needed the setup I had back home, tripe monitors and a fast Ryzen 7 processor.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I ducked my head. “I need to run out of town tomorrow, but I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

Her brows furrowed. “Is something wrong?”

“Not exactly,” I said, fishing for a believable lie, “I just need to sort out a few things with a storage container I have some stuff in. I need to move the stuff to another unit.”

“Oh,” she shrugged her shoulder. “I don’t envy you. Just make sure you get back in time. It’s Christmas Eve after all.”

Reaching over to grasp her hand, I smiled, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

* * *

The beep from my monitors pinged in the air just before they all came alive. I cracked my knuckles and pulled up a program I’d written to do a deep dive in the dark web where secrets lingered in lines of zeros and ones.

What came up didn’t surprise me as much as it should have. The more I read, the more a hollow feeling carved itself into my stomach. Maximillian Winslow was not only a man who came from old money—the sort that had his own private island in the Bahamas by sixteen—or a man who spearheaded billion-dollar companies across the world from his 45thpenthouse office in Manhattan, the man was a secret venture capitalist.

Fifteen years ago, he’d secretly provided seed money for a small start-up company called Vexxron Corp, a prosthetics company that had turned into one of the most lucrative venture capital investments of the past decade.

From there, he moved on to another medical company that paid him back a thousandfold and the list went on. Winslow raked in capital across the world that he could sell and buy the city he worked in three times over.

The man was a secret titan in the venture capitalist world.

Did Willow know this about her ex-boyfriend’s Dad? Maybe she did have a reason to be concerned. I dug deeper and deeper, following breadcrumbs like they’d been dropped in a godforsaken forest.

At one point, I began to get disgusted by his actions—how much money did someone reasonably need? When I read how he’d “charitably” donated fertilizer to an Indonesian farm of palm oil—a farm owned by his competitors, mind you—that so happened to kill every plant, I added bio terrorist to the list.

The printer churned with another page I’d printed because there was no way I couldn’t give Willow the ammunition she would damn well need to refuse this bastard’s buy into the company.

If it hasn’t already happened, that is.

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