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I sat back in my seat, rubbing my temples and waiting for Ronnie to explain. The meeting had barely started and I was already getting a headache, but I knew her. If she said there was a fire, it was a fucking inferno.
With a few clicks of a button, the conference room windows darkened to black, highlighting the image Ronnie projected onto the wall. I could appreciate the privacy, especially considering the sensitive data she was sharing, but it made me nervous that she was going to that much effort to keep things hush-hush. Everyone in her office knew the truth about my businesses, so the secrecy meant some real potential for instability lurked in those slides. A peek at Greyson and Dominic told me they felt the same.
“Obviously, there were inconsistencies with the accounting.” Ronnie clicked through slides until she found the ones that she wanted. “We expected that, based on what you found at the docks. The problem is that same inconsistency happened throughout all of the businesses.”
Fuck me.
“So there’s a rat everywhere,” Dominic said, sitting back and crossing his arms. “Are we talking about a single rat doing all of this at once, or multiples in key places in the organization?”
“I don’t know.”
“Give us your best guess.”
Ronnie frowned and placed her hands in front of her on the table. “That’s just it. I can’t. We couldn’t tell.”
“How can you not tell?” I asked.
“All of the deposits were made from or into different accounts at different times. That’s not a big deal—your staff list has overlap, but not that much overlap. There’s nobody who has access to every single place and can be accounted for at the same time. The schedules never match up. So, at the very least, you have one person who is playing rat. But we can’t positively identify anyone or promise there’s not more than that. Not without solid proof, which we don’t have.”
“What about the cameras?”
“She asked and we checked, but there’s nothing on the recordings,” Tennessee said. “She even gave us time stamps for each location, and everything was exactly as expected. No breaches, no tampering, no loops. Just nothing.”
“Maybe they did it remotely,” Grey said.
“It’s possible, but improbable, that they managed it without alerting anyone.”
Meaning it was likely that we had more than one traitor, she just didn’t want to guarantee it. Smart of her.
Veronica fidgeted in her seat, fixing her skirt over and over, and I just knew I was not going to like what she said. “We originally asked you for six months of data, and you provided it. The overages were present in each weekly deposit for those six months. I decided to do a little bit of extra digging and go back as far as I could in the data that we had over the last few years to see if I could pinpoint when the overages started.”
“And did you?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. I didn’t like that she was being coy any more than I liked that she’d dug into our finances without telling me. I trusted Veronica, but blind trust was a fool’s game that I didn’t play.
“I did.”
“And?” Dominic snapped. I realized that his playboy persona had fallen by the wayside since I’d gotten home from the hospital, and I wondered why. Had he been that scared for me after Cash took me? Had our breakup broken him in return? I wasn’t sure if I wanted the answers to be yes or no.
“The overages have been happening for at least the last four years.”
Four years. The words echoed in my ears, and I felt like I had tunnel vision.
“You’re telling me this motherfucker has been in my organization for years unnoticed? How is that possible?” I couldn’t even fathom the amount of damage he could have done under our noses. It was astronomical. He could have pulled the strings of my family until it fell apart without my ever understanding why.
No wonder he was so smug. If this was true, he had every right to be, and I had every reason to be very, very worried.
“That’s just it. It’s not just organization money that he has a hand in. I believe he’s had access to the nonprofit.”
No.
I was going to throw up. My ears were ringing. Were anyone else’s ears ringing?
Toni’s Table was a nonprofit that I’d started in honor of Antoni. It provided meals to the unhoused population. It gave scholarships to kids for schooling, including clothes, backpacks, and college tuition. It offered rent and housing assistance to people in need. Toni’s Table existed to help, and Cash had been messing with it.
“In the case of the nonprofit, there were shortages.” I’d heard the term seeing red, but this was more than that. It was a rage blackout being held back by a paper clip and a prayer. He’d stolen money from a nonprofit. I knew we were criminals, but Christ. We had to have some fucking boundaries. That was mine.
Under the table, Greyson grabbed my thigh on one side and Dominic grabbed from the other, the two men pining me down when I hadn’t even realized I’d gotten out of my seat. Ronnie looked terrified, and that cleared the fog a little.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I told her. She relaxed a little, but neither of the guys did. I thought about brushing Dominic off, but I needed the anchor or I was going to blow.
