AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I nod, my chest clenching painfully for her as I say, “Yes.”
“By a hired gun from my fiancé and his father, my father’s best friend and business partner, who was coercing my mother into an affair with him.”
“Yes.”
She sits up, her forearms dropping to her parted thighs I’m positioned between. “But… why did my father add in the stipulation about me needing to be married?”
I throw my hands up in frustration. “I have no clue. It doesn’t make sense to me, and I feel like that’s a big piece of this pie that we’re missing.”
“I agree with both of those. Why would he be so adamant that I marry Ezra if he was onto Alfie?”
“We also don’t know why he changed his will, other than we can assume it was because he was suspicious of Alfie and no longer wanted your mother to inherit anything.”
She falls back against the couch, only to stand and start pacing again as she works this out. “But it’s not like he knew he was going to die.”
I climb up onto the couch and watch as she paces. “I wish I could tell you more. I have a lot of unanswered questions, and much of what I just told you is from educated guesses based on data.”
“It’s the worst thing in the world to know that I’ve spent all this time with men who murdered my father. Who would have likely murdered me and my mother given the chance and timing. I very nearly married one of them. I don’t even know how to reconcile this in my head. I never suspected them of something like this. Maybe it’s naïve of me, but how can people be so two-faced, and you don’t even know it? I guess it’s true what they say. You never really know someone’s true character until it’s too late.”
“I’m sorry, baby. I truly, truly am.”
She stops pacing and faces me, visibly raging, yet with a calmness to her I didn’t expect. “Do we have any proof?”
“Yes. We have a lot of proof. Enough to take both men down. Your father built up a hell of a case, and I have the paper trail leading from Alfie to Ezra a week before your father’s death.” I swallow and lick my lips, shifting to the edge of the couch as my eyes lock with hers. This is where it gets tricky. “I’d like to send all of this anonymously to the FBI. I sorta have a contact there that I’ve sent other things to before, and she’ll handle it the right way. Alfie never thought anyone would ever be able to hack this. It’s a burner phone he uses with Ezra, only that’s exactly the same phone he used to hack my dummy system.”
“The FBI,” she parrots. “And they don’t know it’s you?”
I shake my head. “No. Nor will they ever. Alfie fucked up. I never do. But honestly, governmental agencies aren’t known for their timely interventions. With that, I’d like to leak some of this to local law enforcement and media who will take it and create a public demand for something to kick it into gear.”
She blusters out a breath. “And my mother’s stuff? The affair?”
“I don’t see any reason why that needs to become public. At least from our side. The financial stuff and the paid assassin are enough to put both Alfie and Ezra away for a very long time and keep your name out of it. Well, as much as possible. But you, as board chairwoman, will have to wade through this storm and all that comes with it. And Georgia, there will be a storm.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I spend another hour creating an encrypted document and then send everything over to Agent Smalls. She’s been the head of cybercrimes for the FBI for the last ten years, but this goes beyond his cybercrimes. This is all kinds of SEC illegalities, so the truth is, I have no idea how long it will take for them or anyone else to act.
Plus, we’re heading into a holiday weekend, and that always messes things up.
So, to that point, I leaked the money trail and text message stream between Alfie and Ezra, and Ezra and the mob boss guy whose name I left out of it—because I’m not fucking stupid—to the police and LA Times.
Now that all the pieces are in play, we wait. But once this goes live, Alfie will know he’s been hacked, and I don’t know what he’ll do or how he’ll react.
The only good news for Georgia is that because she married me, she’s safe. I’ve protected all of her systems, her financials, everything. More to that point, if she had married Ezra, who knows? Between her own money, her father’s inheritance, and the shares, she was a target, and she didn’t even know it. Now there is no benefit to them hurting her because it’d all go to me, and if they hurt me, it’d all go to probate, and their chances of getting anything are minimal at best.
Still, I’m not taking any chances.
I put a tracker on Georgia’s phone and in her purse. She wasn’t happy about it, but she also didn’t argue it too strongly either. After that, I passed out for roughly three hours, and now we’re driving down to Boston, both of us quiet as we listen to music, so very different from our initial ride up here together.
“Does this FBI agent have any way to contact you?” Georgia asks as we approach the outskirts of Boston.
“No. I send my person the stuff, the FBI analyzes it and then does what it wants with the information. I don’t get involved beyond that, and honestly, this is only my third time sending them stuff. The first time I had intercepted a Russian hacking organization that was targeting US federal banks, the second was a bunch of assholes who were going to target multiple hospitals’ EMR with ransomware and were stupid enough to brag all over a dark web forum about how they were going to roll in it because hospitals have to pay so patients don’t die.”
“So you reported it?”
“More or less. I fucked with both organizations a bit first, and then I reported it.”
Georgia gives me a wry look, and I shrug.
