Page 19 of Corrupted Deception

With a sigh, I opened my laptop, connected to a secure line, and made the same video call I’d made each night for the past eight days.

“Charlotte! ¿Cómo estás?” a throaty, feminine voice answered.

Val’s face filled the screen. Her dark eyes, normally filled with warmth, were clouded with concern.

Val, a smoking hot Colombian woman in her late thirties, was one of the few people my dad trusted. I think he really believed he’d done a good job keeping it hidden that the two of them fucked like rabbits every opportunity they got.

“Buenas noches, amiga,” I replied.“I’d be better if tonight hadn’t been a total bust.”Understatement of the century.“I don’t suppose you’ve had any better luck?”

She was well-connected in several South American countries and had been doing what she could to find out where Silva might have been keeping my dad.

She shook her head as a furrow formed between her winged brows. “No, I’m afraid not,amiga.” Her expression mirrored my sadness, her voice filled with empathy.

Tears welled up in my eyes despite my efforts to hold them back. There’d been no chatter, no rumors. It was almost as if—

I clamped down on the thought.

Because I wasnotgoing there.

I shifted the video call to one half of the screen and loaded up my email, silently sending up prayers to any deity who felt like tuning in at the moment.

There were a total of five people my father trusted out there—Val included—and I’d reached out to every one of them.

“Your father was right, though,” Val said. “Silva announced his intention to run for the Venezuelan presidency this evening.”

“Frakkinghell,” I cursed as frustration writhed beneath my skin. That corrupted, sadistic prick had no business running anything but his own little corner of hell.

My email had loaded up, but there were no messages from the men I’d reached out to. Just one new message from an account I didn’t recognize, a jumble of letters and numbers that meant nothing to me. My heart quickened as I opened the message, a feeling of dread settling in the pit of my stomach.

“Hello, Miss Finley. Or should I say, Miss Santoro?” the email read. That was it.

“Shit,” I cursed aloud.

“Charlotte?” Val said, her voice thick with concern.

I tried to swallow, but all the moisture was gone.

“I have to go,” I forced out past dry lips.

“¿Qué pasa?”

“My cover’s blown.”

And because imaginations had a tendency to be most active at the worst possible moment, I swear I could feel a dozen eyes on me all of a sudden.Awesome.

“How do you know that?”

“I just received this,” I said as I screenshotted the email and forwarded it to her.

Val’s eyes widened as her gaze shifted, looking at the other side of her screen. “¡Hijueputa!”

My father and I changed names as often as most people changed their socks. All right, maybe not quite that often. But with every new job came a new identity. And Madison Finley—my current identity—hadn’t existed until a year months ago, the same time Madison’s uncle, Cade Finley, miraculously came into existence.

“Charlotte,” Val began, her voice hesitant, her teeth digging into her bottom lip. “You don’t think your father—”

“No,” I cut her off. “He didn’t crack, Val. I know he didn’t.” It wasn’t misplaced faith; it was fact.

“All right. You know what to do,chica. Do it,” she said, her no-nonsense, pragmatic side shining through.

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