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“Ah, so here we go,” she muttered, smiling at her laptop screen. “So the chopper was a Bell 525 Relentless. You’d need to drop close to twenty mil to buy one, so they’re not overly common. I didn’t get much of a glance at its registration number, but enough to narrow it down, I think, given what we know.”
Lifting her gaze back to me, she turned her laptop around to face me. “Is this the man who crashed your wedding?”
Throat so tight I could barely breathe, I lowered my stare to the screen.
A man smiled up at me from what looked like the deck of a superyacht, straight teeth the gleaming white only hours in a dentist’s chair could achieve, silver-gray hair slicked back from a tanned face. His blue eyes were direct and sharp, the crow’s feet at their edges declaring he was at least in his fifties even as they seemed to mock the concept of not being young. An immaculate charcoal suit covered what was no doubt a fit frame rarely belonging to a man of his age, its cut highlighting broad shoulders, tapered torso, and long legs.
“That’s him.” The confirmation left me on a growl as I stared at the bastard who’d taken Ronnie. Hate and icy rage seeped through me. “Who is he?”
“Aloysius White.”
“And that should mean something?” I asked. The way Lila said his name, like it was rotting meat on her tongue, I suspected it should.
She grunted, swiveling the laptop back to her and tapping on the keys again. “He’s old-school money, starting with oil and property. Has his finger in everything, and I mean everything. Oil, coal, technology, renewables, the media, you name it. If you can think of it and it makes money in some way, he’s got an investment or stake in it, or control of it. And his ego is almost as big as his portfolio. Makes Elon Musk look like a calm, penniless introvert. He’s been investigated more than once for various corporate… Let’s call them indiscretions, and he walks away untouched every time. He’s slicker than Teflon and has more money than the Vatican. And more power and influence, as well.”
Gut knotting, I stared at her profile. “How the fuck did I cross paths with him then? Why would someone like him have any connection to Trinity.”
She flicked me a glance, her eyes hard. Flinty. “Listen to what I just said, Lucas. If you can think of itand it makes money in some way, he’s got an investment or stake in it, or control of it. I’m not kidding. Trinity was a nation-wide criminal organization that turned over a lot of cash. I suspect if we look deep enough—and I mean, deep enough—we’d discover the last stop of Trinity’s ever-rolling money train ends in an account connected to Aloysius White.”
I swallowed.
She arched an eyebrow. “Remember, Trinity’s accountant was a Supreme Court justice with her eye on the presidency. White is exactly the kind of person she would interact with.”
The knot in my gut twisted. I swallowed again, a sick sensation coating the back of my throat. How the fuck did I get Ronnie back from someone like Aloysius White?
“He said you’d made him a grieving father?” Lila returned her attention to her laptop.
“Yeah. But I don’t have a fucking clue…”
A clammy, prickling chill crawled over me as a ghost from my Trinity days snickered in my ear. A bragging ghost who wanted me dead long before I left the gang. A deranged sadist who’d done his best only seven weeks ago to end my life…
Bile filled my mouth.
“Rufie,” I muttered, clawing at the back of my head.
Lila lifted her head and frowned at me. “The mouth breather we dealt with in the warehouse?” Her eyes turned cold. “The one who put Jess into a coma?”
The soft words cut the air. Lila had come out for Jess. Lila loved Jess.
Rufie had become a walking corpse from the second he even looked at Jess.
The last time I’d seen Rufie alive, Lila had been standing over him. I’d never asked her what she’d done to him, because I didn’t care. He’d been a constant pain in my ass while I’d been in Trinity, and then—after discovering I was still alive and not dead like he thought—he’d threatened Ronnie’s life, among other things, in a misguided attempt to defeat me.
That meant fuck-all to me now. Rufie had gotten everything he’d had coming to him, and I had no guilt or remorse about it. Nor was I angry with Lila that whatever she’d done to him had come back to me.
If I had a regret, it was that Lila had ended the depraved son of bitch’s life, not me. Although it seemed he wasn’t so much son of a bitch, but son of a bastard.
“Rufie,” I said again, meeting Lila’s flat stare, “always bragged about being untouchable. About having ‘connections’. I thought he meant just in Trinity, but now it all makes sense.”
I clawed at the back of my neck again, picturing the smug, psychotic fucker. “He’d randomly drop off the face of the planet for a few days,” I said, gut clenching, “and then reappear just as abruptly, nails clean and manicured, strutting about in new clothes, flashing the latest tech. I didn’t care enough about his existence to wonder where he went or what he did when he was gone. The fact he wasn’t under my fucking nose, being a pain in my ass was the only thing that mattered.”
Lila frowned.
Letting out a ragged breath, I shook my head. “I might be wrong. If Aloysius White was Rufie’s father, surely the world would know about it, given how high-profile the bastard clearly is?”
“Give me a sec…” She put aside the laptop, straightened to her feet, and strode from my suite.
I heard the soft hum of her voice outside. She’d called someone. No doubt a contact from her past. I knew not to ask or interrupt, even though every molecule in my body screamed at me to hurry the fuck up and find White and smash his brains in and bring Ronnie home. Lila trusted me, shared a lot with me, but she still kept her secrets. To impinge on those secrets was a surefire way to shorten one’s life. I had no illusion I was immune to that fact.
