AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Hey,” I said, cupping her cheek to lift her gaze back to mine. “I don’t think there’s anything strange about what you just told me or about being into more than one guy. I actually—some of my best friends are in a very committed joint relationship. One woman and four men, and they make it work. I’ve seen how happy they are. They’ve even done an unofficial marriage ceremony, and now they’ve got a couple of kids.”
Maddie blinked at me. “Wow. I never even thought—to take it that far…”
I shrugged. “Why not, if that’s what your heart wants? My point is, I’m not going to judge you. I’d even support you.” The corner of my mouth quirked upward. “Don’t get me wrong—I’d love to have you all for myself. But if you aren’t willing to let these other guys go, that’s not a dealbreaker. I’d rather share you than lose you, no question about it.”
“Oh,” she said, the breathlessness coming back into her voice. The excitement lighting in her eyes now had nothing to do with intellectual curiosity. I’d just opened up possibilities to her that she’d clearly never imagined before. “I’m not sure whattheywould think about the whole thing.”
I’d certainly like to find that out for myself. I smiled at her, stroking my thumb over her cheek. “Since I’m the one the most familiar with those kinds of relationships, I could always come around and talk with them to clear the air and figure out where we all stand.” And whether they did actually deserve a real place in this woman’s life.
Maddie’s brow knit, but only for a moment. “That might actually be good. I have no idea how they’d react, but I guess I have to find out sometime.”
“Exactly,” I said, anticipation tickling through me. “Better to get it all out in the open and let the chips fall as they may.”
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
Madelyn
The building didn’t look particularly ominous or important from the outside, just a four-story concrete office building, its pale gray walls gone dingy with age. As Logan parked his car down the street from it, I glanced at him from the back seat. “Are you sure it’s worth checking out this place?”
He nodded, his eyes fixed on the building. “It took a lot of digging, but I finally found a connection between the seafood market and that accounting office. There’s a very low-profile corporation that appears to own both of them, with a couple of steps in between to obscure that fact. And the people behind it wouldn’t be going to those kinds of measures to hide the connection if they weren’t up to something nefarious.”
I could see his logic, even if I didn’t totally understand how he’d unearthed that information with his computer skills. My heart thumped a little faster as I readied myself for the task ahead, the now-familiar mix of excitement and apprehension rushing through my chest. “How do we handle it from here?”
“It’s got a lot of offices, some of which take regular clients,” he said. “We should be able to walk in without anyone thinking it’s strange. Once we’re at the office for this corporation on the third floor, Dex will get us in there and we’ll see what we’ve got.”
Dexter swiveled in the front passenger seat to briefly catch my eye. “I brought a few of those small cameras so we can keep an eye on the business going forward too, just like we did with the seafood market.”
“Okay. Sounds like a plan.” I exhaled slowly in an attempt to ease my nerves and couldn’t help wishing that Slade had joined us to lighten the mood with his playful attitude. But he had a major presentation this afternoon that the other guys didn’t want to distract him from, and Logan had said it was better if we didn’t bring too large a group anyway.
We’d arrived just after usual business hours, when some of the offices—including, we hoped, our target—would be closed for the day, but early enough that some of those that kept extended hours were still admitting clients. A woman pushed into the building ahead of us and walked past one of the doors on the first floor. We continued on to a stairwell that appeared to be the only way up in the old building and tramped up the steps to the third floor.
The guys set a swift pace without any sign of discomfort, but I was breathing a bit hard by the time we reached our destination. We peered through the window in the stairwell door and found the hall on the other side empty. Logan waited until Dexter had snapped a few photos with his phone and motioned for us to get moving.
The door of the office in question held no company sign or any other indication of what the business located there did. Logan rapped his knuckles against it, paused with his head cocked toward the door, and then nodded to Dexter when there was no sign of anyone on the other side.
With a nonchalant air that still impressed me, Dexter crouched down with the picks already in his hand and wiggled them into the lock so quickly and efficiently that the bolt clicked over just a few seconds later. He shot us a swift smile that lit up his green eyes and nudged the door open.
I tensed as we eased inside, but nothing horrifying or murderous met us beyond the threshold. If anything, the small room we stepped into was depressingly bare. It held a metal desk and a matching shelving unit, but no papers or books lay on either surface. No electronics either. Not so much as a pen or pencil. The walls were blank. It was hard to believe anyone had ever worked here, let alone recently.
“What the hell?” I murmured as the door tapped shut behind us. I walked to the desk and opened one of the drawers, but it was as empty as the rest of the space.
Dexter had his phone out recording our discovery, his expression unperturbed. “This is typical of large-scale organized crime,” he said. “They create various layers of corporate fronts to disguise who’s really responsible for their business activities. This office probably only exists so they have a real address to associate with a corporation that doesn’t really do anything except shield the true players.”
A shiver ran over my skin. “So we haven’t really found out anything, then.”
Logan scanned the shelves and peeked behind them in case anything had been left behind. “I wouldn’t look at it that way. We have confirmation that something about this corporation is shady. I’ll just have to dig deeper. And someone will come by every now and then to check on things like any mail arriving, since they won’t want evidence that the place is vacant to pile up. If we can catch that person on camera, we’ll have another lead.”
Dexter frowned as he considered the sparseness of the room’s furnishings. “I don’t think there’s anywhere I could hide one of our cameras in here without it getting noticed. There’s just not enough… anything.”
Logan grimaced. “No kidding. Why don’t you check where the mailboxes are and see if there’s any mail for the corporation in there right now? Maybe there’ll be a good spot to place a camera around there or in the hall outside.”
“I’ll try both,” Dexter said, and bobbed his head to us before ducking out of the room again.
Logan moved to the desk, checking each of the drawers and prodding their interiors, I guessed to test for hidden compartments. It hadn’t even occurred to me to do that. But then, I was still very much a newbie to this world of vigilantism that the guys had settled into years ago.
That knowledge still gnawed at me. Tension prickled over my skin standing there next to Logan, alone together like we hadn’t been since he’d brought me to his apartment several days ago. I couldn’t just stand here silently.
“Have you done a lot of this already?” I asked, keeping my voice low so no one from the neighboring offices could hear. “Chasing down leads related to my dad?”
