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“We thought they were safe houses.” I blow out a breath as Leo scoffs, looking my way as if waiting for the penny to drop. “They’re stop-off points?”
“Bingo!” He drums his fingers in the air in front of him. “It makes the whole small-companies farce completely brilliant because they all offer trivial services. Florists, cleaners…all small domestic businesses that can move around from place to place without raising suspicion.”
“While it looks like another company fucking around with their tax, it’s actually just a front for moving other things around.”
Leo nods at my conclusion. When he said he had something this morning, I didn’t expect it to be something this big. It gives us something valuable that we didn’t quite have—insight.
“They have so many subsidiaries that the money going into the companies doesn’t seem significant. Then you have the companies that they invest in, and that’s an entire network on its own.”
“If they can move money, they can move anything else.”
Christopher and Casper look between the both of us as though we’ve grown extra heads or something. At this point, it’s obvious we purposely weren’t telling them about this because there’s no way Leo could come up with all this in the last twenty-four hours.
“How long have you been looking into this?” Casper stands to grab the bottle of vodka from the bar. After topping up his glass, he stretches across the table and puts it down in front of me.
It’s not a peace offering—he just knows we’re going to be here a long time going through this shit. Drinking down the frustration is a better option than wasting time throwing punches at each other right now.
“A few weeks, but it wasn’t until last night that I reached out to my guy.”
“So what you’re saying is that they’re using these locations to move people around until they get them out of the country?” Christopher looks between us, that same look in his eye that he gets when his interest has been piqued. He’s hooked just like one of his high-profile cases. “It doesn’t make sense for Charles or Kingsley to turncoat on them. Charles opened the ports for them. Kingsley helped them move money. There was no break in that chain that would explain why they would back out.”
“It also doesn’t explain how Lucy turned up out of thin air or why they took her in the first place,” Casper adds.
There’s a look of pity in his eyes as he stares down at his drink. I know what he’s thinking because I’ve thought it a million times over the years. That day when we walked into the club to find Arabella and Vanya, it was all I could think about, and all the times that I begrudged him for leaving suddenly feel like wasted anger. If I thought that Georgina would be taken from me the way Lucy was or the way Charles wanted to take Fleur from him…I would’ve done it too.
“It doesn’t make sense that Harry didn’t turn the fucking world upside down to find her.”
“Freddie…” Leo grits out, knowing where I’m headed with this.
“No, it doesn’t because if anyone ever even thought about going near Grace, I’d break every fucking law and rule to see them burn.” Casper knocks backs the rest of his drink before levelling me with a searching stare. “What are you thinking?”
“Last night when I was going over Grace’s journals, something popped up. When Lucy realised that I was sending her to the psych clinic, she started talking to me about roles. We all have our roles, that’s what she said, and then she rambled on about puppets and dolls…”
Trying to tame the shiver that runs through me as the memory of her words brings my nightmare to the forefront of my mind, I take a gulp of my drink.
“And I know that maybe she’s not all there right now, but she mentioned the same code that Grace had in her ledger. Petrushka.”
“I might be wrong, but I’m pretty certain that it’s a Russian puppet.” Casper picks up his phone and obviously goes about googling it.
It was the first thing I did.
“When she said it, I thought she was being crazy, but then I saw it last night, and it got me thinking.”
“So you think she knows something about Grace?” Christopher sits back in his chair, checking his phone as it starts going off.
“No, I think that Grace was looking for her, or maybe she knew what happened. Would explain why she was so obsessed over Fleur’s safety if she knew that Charles had something to do with Lucy disappearing.”
“That theory is plausible, knowing he wanted to hand her over to the Russians. So what? We operate on the basis that he handed them Lucy too?”
“I don’t know. She told me that he never let her go.”
“Who’s he?” Leo asks as Christopher continues tapping away on his phone.
Something is clearly bugging him because he looks set to fuck something up.
“I don’t know. When I tried to get that from her, she lost it and started spouting all the shit about roles and puppets…”
“You hit a nerve,” Casper chuckles. “Surprise, surprise.”
