Page 125 of Ballrooms & Blackmail

“But you won’t,” I say.

She lifts a brow. “No?”

“You want me to open it, yeah?”

A terse nod.

“So shut the fuck up and let me do just that.”

The room falls quiet and I draw the case closer. It’s made of heavy steel—heavy enough to be bulletproof.

Or tamper-proof.

I touch the built-in screen on top and it flashes to life, asking for a five-digit code.

Angela huffs impatiently.

“What?” I mutter, tapping the keyboard. No numbers. Only letters. But five of them? Christ, it could be anything.

“Want to get a move on?” she prompts. “Because we only have so much time before this shit goes public.”

“Well, I’m open to any ideas. It’s not like dear old dad and I were close before or after I left.”

“I’ve tried the obvious,” she says, ignoring me. “Yours and your mother’s names. Sergio, for obvious reasons, his rank, his company’s name, all the nicknames for and names of the women he’d been with that I knew of. The projects he was head of. Hell, I even tried everyone on the Board.”

Sighing, I stare at the screen, hoping it’ll come to me.

I turn to Pascal. “Maybe we should just bust it open.”

River reaches past me, types on the screen.

N-R-O-H-T.

My name.

But backward.

“That won’t—” Angela begins, but River just hits enter and my lungs hitch when the case makes a whirring sound and pops open.

Silence surrounds us.

Then Angela slowly opens the lid.

Inside are three hard drives and a folded sheaf of papers.

Pascal sets his laptop down next to them, plugs one in and gets to work.

“Christ,” he whispers. “Are these for real?”

Angela nods as she looks over his shoulder. “Considering what it took for me to get them, I have to believe so.”

Pascal turns the computer my way. “It’s blackmail material,” he says and starts clicking through the files. “A list of judges, shipping contracts for big corporations, political donations made by private security executives, photographs of officials with prostitutes, offshore money trails for pharmaceutical CEOs.” His expression hardens. “Shit that will make people panic if it surfaces.”

She picks up the papers, starts reading through them. “And these drives hold copies of only a few choice files, apparently. His exit strategy.” Angela’s lips twitch. “I couldn’t have planned it better myself.”

I wonder what her exit strategy is…and what lengths she’ll go to keep it safe.

“Where are the full drives?” Pascal asks.