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“I don’t have time for sex, Tristan.”
“I didn’t ask for it.” He dropped her hand. “Besides, I think my libido burned out from the smell and the sight of that place, Lila. I just want to make sure you eat dinner and sleep tonight.”
“I might not have time for that, either.”
“You have to live sometime.”
“Those kids need to live too. Besides, I have a High Council meeting tonight.”
“Fine. Give me something useful to do. I’m tired of chasing leads that go nowhere.”
Lila opened her satchel, took out the oracle’s files, and slid them over. “I don’t have time for these right now. Look them over. See what you see.”
She slipped out of the truck before he could say more.
Hopping into her sedan, she sped back to the compound, and parked in front of the security office. On the fifth floor, she filled out a request for lab work, marking the blood samples as a rush order, and handed them personally to Captain Regina Randolph. “Run the tests yourself and send me the results. Destroy all paperwork after.”
Captain Regina raised a brow, but she wasn’t so suspicious that she’d go against Lila’s orders. She wasn’t so suspicious that she’d send the data to the chairwoman, either. Lila had put loyal officers in charge of her departments. If loyalty wasn’t enough, she’d made examples of two spies in her first week as chief, had ruined them so completely that her people were more afraid of turning on Lila than not spying for their matron.
Being thrown out of the militia had just been the beginning for the two women. Everyone had skeletons in their closets, and Lila was very good at finding them.
She was even better at seeing them prosecuted.
No highborn wanted to spend time as a slave.
Lila jogged down the steps and got back into her Adessi, wondering if Bullstow had arrived at Natalie’s hideout. She planned to break into their records and go over their reports later. Shaw and his men sometimes caught things that she missed.
Besides, she had no idea how to trace bullets.
Isabel knocked as soon as Lila stepped from the shower, bearing a silver platter with none of Alex’s grace or sarcasm.
She only bowed and waited for a reply.
Lila didn’t have to peek underneath the platter to know what it hid, and it wasn’t anything like the meal she’d eaten at El Dorado. “A missive from our illustrious matron for a family dinner, I suppose?”
Isabel bowed again. “Chef said you’ll be dining on wild salmon.”
“Well if we’re having wild salmon, then how could I say no?” Lila snatched up the cream-colored envelope. She had absolutely no reason to say no to her mother’s summons.
Why hadn’t she stayed with Tristan at his shop?
“Chef is making petit fours. I saw those little chocolate ones you like so much.”
Lila’s mouth watered. Her appetite seemed to have recovered somewhat after her lunch with Tristan. “Have I mentioned how much I love Chef lately? The woman has a sixth sense for when I’ll need chocolate or pancakes.”
Isabel smiled shyly, took Lila’s grin as an affirmative, then carried the silver platter away.
Still in her robe, Lila sent Max her last communications with Reaper’s partner. She then flipped on her desktop computer and proceeded to hack into Natalie’s data. After sending the decryption codes to Toxic, she poked through Natalie’s star drive and skimmed through several spreadsheets of Sangre sales, black market absinthe, and another product she couldn’t identify for half an hour.
People, she discovered after penetrating the star drive further. Natalie Holguín ran a brothel, perhaps more than one. Since there were no outgoing expenses for labor, it was obvious that her workers had never signed up for it. Natalie had been stealing them from auction houses across the region, slaves arrested for petty theft, shoplifting, vandalism, trespassing, minor in possession—
Minor in possession?
Teens?
Gods, Natalie was selling children.
Lila shook her head and kept digging. The kids were mostly workborn teens who had no one to prod Bullstow after they’d gone missing, no one to keep their cases fresh in the minds of the blackcoats. They existed as nothing more than torn and dirty fliers on a bulletin board, as ones and zeros in a computer file that hadn’t been accessed in years, as nagging paperwork that no one could quite clean off their desks, but wasn’t that bothersome so long as you put other paperwork on top of it.
