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“I bet he is…”
She gave a dangerous smile. The island’s information was mostly safe. My launderer worked with singleminded ferocity. I pitied Zakharov in that moment, just a little at least. A fist to his face and he’d heal. I stepped around her, watching her fingers flying as screen after screen zipped by. But all his damn accounts frozen?Jesus, she was good.She hacked into account after account, including all the offshore ones under aliases, the list of them on a spreadsheet a mile long.
“The Treasury is going to have a field day,” I muttered gleefully.
“Oh, they’re not the only ones. Look what else I found…” she chuckled, pulling up a file. “It was locked down, but nothing I couldn’t break."
I stepped closer. It was a video. The moment she pressed play, I knew that it was…men dressed in expensive tuxedos wearing white masks.
“Turn it off,” I snapped, my gut clenching.
Anna just looked at me. “Why?”
I stepped forward on instinct, stabbed the button, and froze the view. If I looked harder, I’d find it was a bedroom. One of many. “Anna…I said turn it off.”
She just shook her head. Of course she didn’t. She existed in my world, but she wasn’t part of it. She didn’t wade in the filth and the blood. She didn’t know what the White Mask Society was all about. But I did.
“What is it?” she questioned.
“Nothing.” I closed the screen. “Get away from it, corrupt it, delete it, and forget you ever saw it.”
“Fin,” she protested, those beautiful, innocent eyes of hers flashing with anger.
“Do you trust me?” I asked, brushing my fingers along her jaw.
It took her a second longer than what I would've liked to answer. But that answer lingered there…yeah, that answer I was counting on. “Yes.”
“Then delete it and forget it,” I urged. “Please.”
Her forehead creased with annoyance, but she did as I asked, punching in the details and tracing back to the server. I watched her work, knowing what the Zakharovs were involved in. It made me sick. I shoved it to the back of my mind and strode toward the bedroom. They wouldn’t touch Anna, not men who liked to hurt and control.
Not men like Damon…
Not men like my father.
Not again…never again.
41
Anna
“Who are they, Fin?” I pushed the point even as I punched in the command to not only remove the video from the internet, but to unleash a greedy goddamn virus along with it.
He looked at me with that careful, stony stare, and answered. “The kind of men you’ll never have to worry about, Anna…not if I can help it.”
I saw him close down then. His gaze hardened and his jaw clenched. That slow, calculated blink told me that was all I was going to get. But that didn’t mean I was satisfied. I turned my attention back to the screen and finished searching the directories, punching in code after code. Laundering was less about money and more about hiding…and if there was anything I was good at, it was finding those dark, dirty corners of the internet. After all…it was where I unleashed the market for our cryptocurrency.
Those with bloodstained hands ate it up, jumping on board the moment it filtered through the dark web. They saw the advantages all hidden under anonymous trades; Altcoin became the new US Dollar. Whatever you wanted, you could buy, drugs, women, even take out a hit if you knew where to look and how to play. But this was noSilk Road.This was no exchange of physical products like drugs and paraphernalia, this was all numbers.
We provided a way for money to exchange hands for services…without knowing who they were at all. The beauty of it was, we held all the power. Each transaction was held in our escrow service, the one I'd built and designed from scratch. One the US government wouldnever find.Because it didn’t exist, not in the way they expected. It was mirrored and bounced, changing every time I updated the passwords.
Beep.
Fin’s phone dragged his attention elsewhere, long enough for me to punch in a few commands.White mask, expensive suits, dangerous men, who are they?And logged back out as Fin lifted his gaze to the screen.
“Almost done?”
I smiled, punched in the last command, and watched as account after account on the Zakharovs' list of aliases all flashed red with the wordsACCOUNT FROZEN PLEASE CONTACT UNITED STATES TREASURY.
