Page 112 of Velvet Vaughn

The park itself had been transformed by early afternoon into a full-scale COBRA Securities cookout. The speaker system was playing something upbeat and entirely too loud. Layla and Jade Bradley were deep in conversation near the drinks table, while Remi, still favoring his damaged side, had somehow gotten into an argument with Dorian Demarchis over the proper technique for flipping burgers.

“Stop touching them,” Remi ordered.

“I’m cooking them.”

“You’re harassing them.”

Dorian slowly turned his head. “Did you just accuse me of harassing a hamburger?”

“I’m advocating for the meat.”

Dorian pointed the spatula. “Go advocate from over there.”

Remi took one step back. “The burgers know I’m here for them.”

Chloe steered Anja toward a space near the edge of the pavilion. It was the same spot, Anja realized with a jolt, where she’d stood five months ago watching Leo walk toward her at his sister’s wedding, nervous in a way she hadn’t been prepared for even then.

“There.” Chloe stood beside her, practically buzzing with anticipation. She checked her phone for the fourth time in as many minutes. “Kayne says the car’s twenty minutes out. Are you ready?”

Anja looked out toward the empty drive, her stomach twisting with nerves she’d never expected to welcome.

“I’ve been ready for a while,” she admitted.

She’d once been fairly proud of that drawer, the one she’d built to keep Leo De Luca filed under closed case. Turned out she’d made a terrible carpenter. The thing had rattled, then cracked, then come off its hinges completely, and she’d spent months pretending she hadn’t noticed the wreckage. Some security specialist she was. She couldn’t run a decent surveillance op on her own heart.

#

A layer of anxiety stripped away around the Illinois border. Physically, Leo was healing slower than he wanted, but he was making progress. The ache in his ribs had faded enough that he noticed it only when he laughed too hard or twisted the wrong way reaching for a seatbelt. The arm that had taken a bullet remained a work in progress. His mind had been slower to catch up.

The last week had unfolded in a slow-motion demolition, one piece of his old life crumbling after another until there wasn’t much left standing. Pinnacle was finished. Not officially dissolved yet, the lawyers were arguing over that technicality, but functionally dead the instant federal agents had carried out the last box of files. The clients had scattered to other agencies within days. The reputation Curtis had spent twenty years building was reduced to a cautionary headline in every sports section in the country.

Some of the staff had been complicit. Not many, but enough that Leo had spent long, sick hours running through every conversation he’d ever had in that office, wondering which smiling colleague had known and said nothing. Most, though, had been as blindsided as he was. They were good agents and assistants and paralegals who’d built careers on what they’d genuinely believed was a legitimate firm. Watching their faces crumble one by one as the story came out had been almost as hard as learning it himself.

He’d lost track of how many federal agents he’d spoken to that week. FBI and an alphabet soup of others he could barely keep straight anymore had kept circling back with the same questions dressed up in slightly different language. All had been equally unable to tell him with any certainty how the thrown-game investigations would eventually shake out. It would take months, maybe years, to untangle what Curtis had manipulated versus ordinary rotten luck and bad calls. Leo found some grim comfort that Vic Shaw, at least, had gotten the justice he’d died trying to secure, even if the two of them had never been particularly close.

He’d had a long conversation with Marcy before he left, sitting across the same desk where she’d built his career alongside him, and informed her he was starting over and he wanted her with him.

“I’m going to open my own firm. You’d basically be running it within a month. You always were.”

Marcy had laughed and shaken her head. “I appreciate that more than you know, Leo. But I think I’m done. This whole thing has wrecked me. I’m going to join my sister in the Caribbean, or wherever she decides to go.”

“Marcy.”

“Don’t you dare look at me like that.” She’d swatted his hand away from where it had reached for hers. “You’re not getting rid of me. We’ll always stay in touch.” She’d smiled at him then, with genuine warmth. “Go build something amazing, Leo. You don’t need me to do it. You never did.”

Devonte had flown in two days later, unannounced, showing up at Leo’s condo with a duffel bag and an expression that made it clear he wasn’t leaving until he’d seen Leo standing on his own two feet.

“You could’ve called,” Leo had told him, though he hadn’t been able to keep the grin off his face.

“Calling doesn’t tell me anything.” Devonte had looked him over head to toe, noting every bruise fading along his jaw. “I needed to see it myself.” He’d hesitated then, seriousness replacing his usual easy confidence. “I don’t care where you end up, man. Bloomington, Timbuktu, wherever. I want you repping me forever. You kept my family safe through all of this, and that means more to me than I can ever repay. It’s not something I’ll forget.”

“I’m not sure what I’m building yet.”

“Doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, I’m in.” Devonte had pulled him into a fierce hug, hard, grateful, and entirely too enthusiastic given the state of Leo’s ribs. Leo had grunted through a fresh spike of pain and hugged him back just as hard anyway, because some things were worth a little suffering.

Now he was driving east on I-70 with the compound’s coordinates loaded into his GPS and his phone buzzing itself into a frenzy on the passenger seat. Chloe’s name lit up the screen for what had to be the ninth time in twenty minutes. He’d finally silenced it around Terre Haute, unable to focus on the road with his sister sending what appeared to be a live countdown of his estimated arrival time, punctuated by increasingly unhinged exclamation points. Not that he wasn’t excited to see her. He was. He just needed to make it there in one piece first.

The gate at the compound’s entrance rolled open as soon as he arrived. He drove down the tree-lined road and stopped at the security booth. Tucker Nash poked his head out, his weathered face breaking into a broad smile.