Page 162 of Lethal Obsession

Her pale, determined face as she took the brown paper pharmacy bag from my hands.

Her silent tears of pain and humiliation as she conducted her own rape kit.

We’d both known that a hospital emergency room meant questions. And questions would only complicate matters when I put the bastard who did this to her into the swamp.

You have to promise me nobody will find out, she whispered as she handed me the DNA sample. Not my family, not anyone.

They won’t, I reassured her. We’ll make it look like you were in a hit-and-run. There’s a guy in a lab who owes me a favor. He’ll get me an ID, then erase any trace of the test. You have my word.

What will you do after you find him? Her eyes searched mine, flaring when she saw the answer I knew better than to verbalize. Just him, Lex, she whispered. Just the one who . . . did it. I don’t want you to get in trouble for this.

After hours of scrolling through faces that mean little or nothing to me, it’s oddly therapeutic to remember the cold fury I felt that night, to stare into the eyes of a man who actually deserved my wrath.

Carter Thorne.

I remember the name from the DNA printout. Normally I wouldn’t have needed anything so clinical as a test to find him, but as the Orlovs’ prisoner, I was supposed to be confined to the compound, so showing my face anywhere in Miami to ask questions wasn’t an option.

Dima covered for me for a night, and I used the secret tunnels known only to my family to slip out of the compound. The lab tech was a guy I’d caught several months ago, manufacturing pills that had been dealt in the Orlov clubs. The pills were incredibly high-quality, far better than the shit the Orlovs were buying, so instead of turning him in, I brokered a deal for him with the Lucchese family. Once he was under their protection, not even the Orlovs could touch him, which meant I not only saved him from certain death—probably at my own hands—but also gave him a very lucrative income stream. He was more than happy to help.

Armed with the name he gave me, it took little more than my hacking skills and ten minutes on the lab computer to find Carter and his boys. I waited in the hotel room closet until Carter finally stumbled in, then took him.

I drove away in a car stolen from the hotel parking lot and went deep into the Everglades, where nobody could hear him scream. I used my knife to inflict enough pain to make him feel at least a fraction of the agony Renata would have to live with for the rest of her life.

Then I fed him, still screaming, to the gators and watched until their frenzy tore him limb from limb.

I torched the car on the outskirts of the city.

By dawn I was back in my room at the compound like nothing had happened.

Carter’s disappearance was big news for several days—right up until the media began to report leaked details of drug-fueled rampages that painted Carter and his friends in a less than flattering light, at which point their parents intervened, throwing around enough money to ensure the entire incident disappeared as completely as Carter had. In a city with one of the highest missing person counts in the entire US, the case was forgotten soon enough, as I’d known it would be.

Until now.

I look at the donation amount to Hunter’s campaign associated with Carter Thorne.

What kind of college kid makes million-dollar donations to political campaigns?

It takes a little more digging, and then, just like that, the tangled money trail opens like swamp saw grass when an airboat cuts through it.

The donation wasn’t made by Carter Thorne. It was made in his memory—by a company called Meridian Network.

I stare at the Meridian Network logo on the screen, my pulse racing.

I go into the cabin and open the drawer by Ofelia’s sleeping head, fishing around in it for the business card I put there weeks ago. She stirs in her sleep. I drop a kiss on her naked shoulder, and she settles again, her mouth curving in the sleeping smile that always makes my heart twist. I stare down at her for a moment, at the face that has haunted my dreams for so long, at the body that still feels like it was made for my own, then close the glass door behind me.

I want Ofelia nowhere near any of this.

Back at my laptop, I rapidly click through a series of websites, glancing from the logo on the business card to the screen, my mind working in a thousand directions at once as the pieces begin to settle into place.

No wonder Mak wanted to deal with Owens himself.

As the first pale hint of dawn threads over the distant horizon, I go into the cyber room and punch out Mak’s number.

“Good morning, Mr Petrovsky.” To my surprise, an assistant answers, sounding remarkably composed given the fact that it’s currently three thirty a.m. in London.

“I was expecting Mak.”

“And I know he’d take your call immediately, but something sensitive has come up that requires his attention. He checks in once a day, so if you leave a message, he will have it by the end of the day.”