Wicked Lovers 07 Ours to Love (37 page)

“Sounds great,” Xander said, even though it didn’t. It sounded like corporate spying
had ratcheted up a notch if dead bodies and professional assassins were involved.
And death by strangulation.

But what was the connection to Francesca? She hadn’t known a damn thing about the
company, nor had she cared.

Fuck, he and Javier didn’t need this right now. They needed to be focused on London.
But they now had a murdered employee. They needed to get back in town ASAP and start
getting some answers to their questions. He gestured to Javier, and together, they
gathered their luggage and ran out of the hotel, making their way to the valet stand.
His brother barked for the valet, handing over the claim ticket, and waiting with
an impatient tapping of his foot.

“You’re a lousy liar.” Decker laughed.

“Fine. It sucks hairy, ripe monkey balls. Don’t pros usually shoot their victims?”

“Most often, yeah. Not always. They might use other methods if they’re trying to keep
quiet. And some just like a certain MO. Like serial killers, they get off on it.”

But in a neighborhood where gunshots were common and no one would tattle, why not
kill Carlton by squeezing a trigger rather than his neck? It was such a specific way
to kill, and maybe he’d be less suspicious if Francesca had died any other way, but . . .

“Did the cops take any crime scene photos of Carlton’s body?” Xander asked as the
valet brought the car, and his brother threw the luggage in the trunk as he slid behind
the wheel.

“The Mexican police hadn’t discovered the crime yet when I was there. And don’t worry,
I removed all trace of myself so when they come into the crime scene, it will look
pristine. But I snapped a few photos on his phone in case they came in handy. I’ll
forward them.”

“Thanks.” Xander couldn’t help but suspect that what Carlton had known because of
his job had gotten him killed. But who would want him dead?

Xander’s phone chirped with a message a moment later, but he didn’t put Decker on
hold to look at them while speeding away from the hotel. He wanted to study the pictures
before he showed Javier. Unless the need arose, Xander could see no sense in sending
his brother back to the edge of his sanity with pictures of a strangulation. His resolve
to give up booze was too fresh.

In Xander’s ear, Decker was quiet for a long minute, tapping away at the keyboard.
“You told me to look for a Chad Brenner in all this?”

Xander gripped the phone tighter. “Yeah. You got something?”

“A whole bunch of somethings.” The other man was quiet for another unbearable stretch
of silence. “Ready for this? Carlton worked for you until last Friday. For the past
few years, it looks like he’s been secretly stealing information from Sheppard and
your internal drives and selling it to the highest bidder. Oh, look. He even sold
some secure log-ins so other creeps could crawl through your databases. How handy
that he documented where he mined all the data from, who he sold it to, and for how
much.” Decker whistled. “Damn, no wonder he left his job. He’d gotten fucking rich.”

“How does Chad Brenner play into this? For a long time, he developed our new technology.
He’s brilliant. He could invent anything we did, probably faster or better, so I doubt
he’d want our secrets.”

“There’s a long string of e-mails between Carlton and someone calling himself the
‘Face of Revenge.’” Decker scoffed. “That shit sounds like a seventh-grade boy making
up his screen name for fucking Call of Duty.”

Pretty much
. Brenner had wanted revenge against S.I. Industries for its perceived theft of his
intellectual property since walking out in a huff and suing. Was that silly handle
his? “What do the e-mails say?”

“Carlton sold the information to this Face of Revenge character.” Decker flipped through
the laptop. “All kinds of information, dating back a little over eighteen months.
Your information. The most recent sale involved something called Project Recovery.”

Which explained exactly how the competition had been beating them for months—by buying
stolen advancements in technology and passing them off as their own.

“Fuck me. Any idea who this Face of Revenge is or what he’s been doing with the information
he bought? One of our competitors had come forward with a product that’s suspiciously
like ours recently—and that’s not the first time.”

“Well, it looks like Carlton was having second thoughts about blindly doing business
with the Face of Revenge and started digging. He’s been compiling information about
the identity of his contact. After working his angles for a bit, he surmised it was
Chad Brenner. Is the competitor you’re talking about United Velocity?”

Decker was good. Xander was always impressed. “The very one.”

“Well, whaddya know? Brenner owns a shitload of United Velocity stock, according to
Carlton’s research.”

Yeah?
That might be the Holy Grail of information they needed to finally prove that Brenner
hadn’t given up seeking his pound of flesh after the courts had sided with S.I Industries
and affirmed that the release-of-intellectual-property waiver he’d signed meant that
everything he’d developed while employed with them belonged to the corporation. Because
he’d been unable to take it with him, he’d been stealing everything the company had
developed since and funneling it to the competitor—then bought stock to earn an extra
buck.

“Amazing.” Xander’s voice dripped sarcasm. “So why kill Carlton? I mean, your guess.
Think Brenner had something to do with it? Maybe he was getting suspicious that the
guy was onto him.”

“Maybe. More likely Carlton quitting S.I. Industries meant he was both useless in
the future and a loose end Brenner wanted to tie up.”

Made perfect sense. “Anything else?”

Decker clicked around a bit more, then some truly terrible music blasted through the
phone.

“What the hell? That sounds like karaoke at its worst.” Xander held the phone away,
but the music played on, violating his ears and making him grimace.

“This fucker was weird. He’s got a bottle of rum in one hand and seems to be making
his own homemade music video. Wow, he looks wasted.” Decker laughed, then turned dead
sober. “Oh, shit!”

“What?” Xander went on alert.

“Stupid bastard was filming himself singing when his killer sneaked into the room,
holding a rope. Carlton saw him in the camera, but didn’t turn around in time to fight.
As soon as the killer gets the rope around Carlton’s neck, he flips the lid of the
computer shut.”

“And the online backup saved that?”

“Yep.” Decker affirmed.

“Did the camera catch the killer’s face?”

“In shadows, but you can see some of his features.”

That was hard evidence that could be used to solve the murder . . . and maybe make
a few other breakthroughs. Was this the same professional strangler who’d murdered
Fran? If so, he wondered again what the connection between corporate espionage and
a bored housewife was. If Brenner was behind all this, what had he hoped to accomplish?

Revenge.

Xander’s heart chugged in his chest. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but his
thoughts—and his hope—raced. Maybe this would give Javier the closure he needed.

“Send me what you’ve got. I’ll look at it as soon as I get it.”

“Will do. I’ll shout if I find anything else, but I think we’re onto something.” Before
Xander could say a word, Decker hung up.

He sighed, gripping the wheel. The hair on the back of his neck stood up in warning.
The day had started badly. London gone. His heart in shambles . . . Carlton strangled.
Now this? He didn’t like it one fucking bit. Then he glanced at the still pictures
Decker had sent of Carlton’s neck. He liked everything even less.

The ligature marks on Carlton’s neck looked precisely like those around Francesca’s
corpse. Carlton’s home movie hit his inbox next, and watching the final frames of
it raked an icy shudder down his spine.

With his heart stuttering, he turned to his brother.

Javier frowned. “You look like you’ve seen a goddamn ghost. What’s wrong?”

Not a ghost exactly, but something far worse.

“Recognize the face creeping up on Carlton?” Xander held up the phone, displaying
the frame where the victim realized that he had an intruder in his house and a rope
around his neck. It was the best picture of the killer in the video. In Xander’s head,
it matched the security footage of Fran’s lover from the hotel in Aruba where she
was last seen alive.

“Valjean the assassin,” Javier breathed, then frowned.

Bingo
. Xander pressed his lips together grimly and pushed on the gas pedal. Every minute
they were in the car was another minute wasted.

Javier looked decimated. “Oh my God. And he killed Carlton?”

“Looks like.” Xander dropped the phone on his lap. “We should be asking ourselves
why.” The more he thought about it, the more Brenner having contact with Carlton and
being offed by the same assassin who’d killed Francesca seemed too coincidental. Brenner
had to be the connection. “Did you say you’d hired someone to look into Fran’s death?”

Looking shell-shocked, Javier nodded. “Private investigator. His name is Nick Navarro.”

“Get him on the phone. Brenner had a vendetta against us. He used Carlton to get to
us until his usefulness was at an end. Good chance he paid to have Carlton killed.
Doesn’t it make you wonder if this is the first time Brenner hired this hit man?”

***

CALLIE
was kind enough to drive her as far as Shreveport, despite the fact that it was the
middle of the night. She checked in frequently with her Dom, a Scotsman with a deep,
sexy brogue. Thorpe, her boss, called too. Both seemed more than a tad territorial.
London stared at her own phone, which she’d powered down as soon as she’d taken it
from the hotel room. She wasn’t ready to talk to Xander or Javier. They’d tell her
that her failure was nothing, that she was overreacting, that she’d merely panicked
during the scene. Maybe she had. Missing all the milestones of maturity between fifteen
and twenty-five had, at times, left her both confused and scared. Bottom line, she’d
allowed herself to sink into the fantasy that they could accept her, scars and all,
just as they’d claimed. That they could love her. But when push came to shove, she
hadn’t been able to risk seeing the revulsion on their faces that she’d seen on Brian’s.
And they’d never said anything about love. She’d believed it because she’d wanted
to, because she’d been surrendering her own heart to them . . . but that didn’t make
it so.

Now she had to face the fact that Javier was too tormented by his past and Xander
simply too wild to be hers forever. Time to get out now before it hurt too much to
do the right thing. Alyssa had tried to warn her, but no . . . She’d had to feel this
terrible, wretched fear and pain herself before she’d understood that she couldn’t
possibly help to either heal or hold them. Pressing sadness suffocated her, and the
years of being alone stretched out. The accident had made her a freak in so many ways—a
scared girl in a woman’s body—but for this one week, she’d felt normal. And loved.
She’d always treasure that.

Refusing to impose on Callie, despite the woman’s repeated assurances, London had
swallowed her pride and called her cousin. Alyssa’s husband had groggily answered
the phone, listened between her tears, and agreed to meet her and Callie halfway between
Dallas and Lafayette. Every mile she’d put between herself and the Santiago brothers
was a fiery stab burning down her heart. Only ashes remained now. They’d move on.
But London knew she’d never be the same again.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Luc said beside her.

“Thank you for coming to get me. I’m sorry. I know it’s incredibly bad timing.”

“You’ve already apologized twice.” He sent a dark glance her way as the morning sun
poured in through the windshield as they headed southeast. “Tell me what happened.”

“Nothing.”

“That’s crap,” Luc said. “Tell me what Xander and Javier did to you. I need to know
how painfully they should die.”

“Don’t even joke about that!”

Luc raised a brow. “Who said I was kidding?”

She glared at him, then rolled her eyes, feeling a bit like a teenager talking to
her dad. “It’s not their fault.”

“Really?” Skeptical would be a kind description of his scoffing tone. “So they were
the innocent ones at the beginning of the relationship? They completely gave their
hearts to you? But you pushed them too hard, too fast?”

London gaped at him. “How did you . . .”

“Oh, come on. I could have written this script without any imagination at all. You
had absolutely no experience with men, did you?” When she shook her head, he went
on. “So you fall for a bad boy and a tortured drunk.”

“Don’t call them that! They’re way more. They can be so tender and—”

“To get what they want, of course. They’re your first loves. I get it. You fell hard,
but they’re still playing whatever games they always play. It could only end one way.”

“You have it all wrong. I’m the one who walked out. They’ve been demanding, yes.”
She blushed and squirmed in her seat, knowing that Luc could read between the lines,
but she pressed on. “They’ve also done their best to take care of me and make me feel
good about myself. I’m just not ready to open up in every way they want. I can’t show
them my scars. They weren’t going to accept that.”

“Because they’re perfect?” He rolled his eyes.

“Of course not. They wanted trust I couldn’t give them. That I can’t give anyone.
They deserve happiness, and I love them enough to let them find it without me.”

“At the expense of your own? Don’t you think you’re being a little rash? You had to
have been more than a tad overwhelmed by the speed of this relationship. Trust doesn’t
develop overnight.”

“It doesn’t change the facts.”