Lumbering over to the phone on his desk, he hit the intercom button. “I need an espresso in here, Darlene.”
“Just one, sir?”
He looked up at me but I shook my head.
“That’ll be it, sweetheart,” he said. “And shake a tail feather, I’ve got a conference call with OmniVia in five.”
Some days I wondered how Darlene kept herself from waltzing into my father’s office and dumping the entire pot of coffee into his lap.
“Listen,” he said to me, picking up where he had left off. “We’re in a tight spot now, and with Lindsey gone, we’re going to have to figure out another way to legitimize the business.”
I nodded, trying to seem like I was still on his team. “Sure. That makes sense.”
“I’m serious, kid.” He was pacing in front of the window now. “You like your condo, your car, your cushy job? You’d lose it all in a heartbeat if KZM goes down. You want to keep working for the company, you need to get your ass to a lawyer, file for divorce, and start working on securing some new political allies. Especially considering my plans for the future.”
And on he went. I clenched my jaw, watching my father pace and bluster. I’d had it with him and his demands.
I was so close to walking out and never looking back. Fuck the money, fuck the job, fuck the lifestyle. None of it was worth being complicit in my father’s vile empire, swallowing his disrespect day by day, being treated as nothing more than a pawn in his game. But I also knew that the feds were finally closing in, and that my role as the man on the inside was crucial.
“What next stage?” I asked, my ears perking up at the last thing he’d said.
He waved his hand dismissively as Darlene entered with his espresso. “You’ll know when I need you to know. But trust me, it’s gonna be big.”
It was impossible not to sweat what he’d just said—or not said. Hearing that he had some big plan on the horizon made me worry that the DOD needed to quit dragging their feet and get in sooner rather than later. Before my father could make his next move.
“If I’m supposed to be inheriting KZM’s operations, I need to be kept in the loop,” I pushed as soon as Darlene had left us alone again. “What exactly are you planning?”
But my father was not about to be baited.
“You haven’t proven yourself worthy yet,” he told me, settling back down behind his desk with his coffee in hand. “Let’s see a real show of loyalty. Maybe then we can talk about your role in this new development.”
With that, he picked up his phone, told Darlene to patch him through to the OmniVia call, and spun his chair away from me, already yucking it up with the executives on the line. It was as if I wasn’t even there. As if, despite everything I’d participated in, and regardless of all the years I’d put my ass on the line for KZM, I was still small potatoes as far as he was concerned.
I let myself out of his office, nodding curtly at Darlene’s sympathetic half-smile, seething and scheming the whole way back to my own desk.
There was no way in hell I was going to let my father get away with whatever he was planning. I’d figure out a way to get all the details and then I’d pass that new information along to Gavin Chase’s brother and the feds. My father was going down. He’d never see it coming.
I buried myself in work all day, waiting for my father to go home. He was conniving, manipulative, and incredibly clever, but he was also arrogant—so arrogant, in fact, that he’d never expect anyone at the company to be smart enough to hack into his computer files. But I knew that if there really was anything to find, I could do it. I just needed access.
He left just after six. I called Bruce.
“I’m on it, boss,” he said by way of greeting. “Red Bentley, heading west toward I-90.”
“That’s him,” I said. “Call me if he goes anywhere besides home. If he leaves the condo at any point tonight, I want to know right away.”
“Copy that,” Bruce said.
The office was deserted, everyone else long gone as I snuck into my father’s office.
It didn’t take much to get into his computer—he had left it on, and his password was easy enough to crack, being a version of Danica, my mother’s name, with a few of the letters swapped out for the @ symbol. I navigated over to his emails and began reading the messages in his Outbox, scanning for any keywords or coded phrases that might jump out at me.
Within minutes, my guts were churning.
Sitting in the dark, with the glow of the computer screen my only light, I read about my father’s plan to shift his operations from sex trafficking to full blown slavery. He was ready to move beyond the prostitution ring, and I found evidence that he was already in the process of arranging to buy and sell people on the international human market. As ‘property,’ I knew they could be forced into labor, domestic service, criminal acts, marriage, and of course sex work.
I sat back, my heart pounding in my ears.
The shock took my breath away. I couldn’t imagine that the late Senator Lindsey, for all his flaws, would have ever been on board with this. My father’s Anja plan was diabolically brilliant in that regard—if Tori had left our marriage over the existence of Max (and before she could find out about the slavery), our divorce would have looked like an embarrassing but clear-cut issue of irreconcilable personal matters. The senator couldn’t have accused my father or me of backing out of our agreement on purpose. A few large donations to the Lindsey campaign later, and the wrecked marriage would have been mere water under the bridge between the two patriarchs.
