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“Really?” Her eyes darkened as her expression went tight. “And you’re in here because Malcolm has something to do with them?”
Vlado nodded. “I had a hunch the call was coming from inside the house, so to speak, and I had all the printers at your dad’s offices checked again. My team just confirmed that one of them is a match for the letters Evan’s been getting. That printer is in an isolated part of the building and behind multiple locked doors. Only a few people have access to the area. It wasn’t Evan, and I’m confident that it’s not Grant…”
“Malcolm’sbeen sending them?” Her eyes were saucers. “Are you fucking serious?”
“As a heart attack,” Vlado said grimly. “Luckily for us, he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. We checked that area a few weeks ago and the printer wasn’t there. He tried to cover his tracks, but my guys were able to not only trace the printer history to his office computer, but they also recovered the original files.” He glanced at me. “We weren’t sure how to proceed since we didn’t have solid proof it’s him and not someone trying to frame him, but there’s no doubt in my mind he’s behind everything.”
Her eyes blazed with fury. “That pencil-dicked, two-facedbastard. Iknewsomething was going on.”
“You did?” I asked incredulously. “And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“Why would I tell you my suspicions when you didn’t bother telling me yours?”
“Children,” Vlado inserted firmly, “can we focus on what’s important here? As much as I want to go find lemon face and beat his ass into next week, we need tangible proof he’s behind everything.”
“You’re not going to find shit in his files— Wait, lemon face?”
“That’s what Nick calls him,” I said.
“Better than what I’m going to call him.” She stalked over to the desk. “You need to look in the safe. That’s where he hides the important stuff.”
“There’s a safe in here?” Vlado asked.
She tugged on the painting mounted behind the desk. It swung away from the wall like a door, exposing the front of a large metal safe. “He had it installed when he moved in.”
“Did he download The Movie Villian’s Guide to Being Sus as Fuck?” Vlado asked. “A wall safe behind a painting? It’s like fucking Clue around here. Malcolm in the study with the wall safe.”
“You’re starting to sound like Nick.” Emily spun the dial on the safe.
My brow knitted. “You know the combo?”
“One thing about Malcolm is that he thinks he’s smarter than everyone.” She tugged on the handle, popped it up, pushed it down, then twisted it in three cranks. “And because he’s so arrogant, he underestimates people, especially those he thinks are nothing more than a pretty face.” She opened the safe. “The combo is his birthday backwards.”
“You’re taking this way better than I thought you would,” I said, suspicion creeping into my voice. “He’s your fiancé, yet you didn’t even blink when you heard about the printer.”
Emily pulled a leatherbound journal out of the safe and glared at me. “What are you implying?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Okay, kids.” Vlado peeked around Emily and into the safe. “Can we focus on finding evidence so I can kick lemon face’s ass?”
“I’m just saying, it’s a little suspicious that you’re not even a teensy bit shocked.”
She rolled her eyes and stepped aside so Vlado could rifle through the safe. “Because I’ve had my own suspicions.”
“About the threats?” Vlado slid her a look.
“Not necessarily.” She flipped open the journal and thumbed through the pages. “I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I had a feeling he was hiding something. He’s been different the past few months. I thought it was wedding stress, or him having a temper tantrum about Dad’s retirement plans. But he’s just been…off.”
“Holy shit.” Vlado spun to face us, a folder clutched in his hand.
“What?” I asked, resisting the urge to grab the folder.
“This is bad, Ev. Really bad.” Vlado stood behind Emily. “Do you remember that offshoot company you discovered, the one operating out of Romania?”
“Yes.” I’d found the records of the company while doing an audit of my father’s files. The thing that had tripped my suspicions was that the records were not only incomplete, but close to eighty percent of the file had either been redacted or was outright missing.
