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For three days, he didn’t speak to me. Three days of silent torture, until one night at dinner, he stabbed a forkful of potatoes and sighed. “Okay, what do you want to know?”
The only problem wasI wanted to know everything.
For the next hour, I grilled him.
What was he laundering and for who.
The what was shocking enough. But the who,that froze every thought I'd had up until that point. The Mafia weren’t the kind of people we knew, or the kind of people we wanted to know. But the money…the money was incredible.The accounts I’d been tracing were all theirs. Ones that held millions of dollars in illegal money. Drugs, gambling, prostitution. It was all there, every filthy dollar they earned.
Dad was wearing himself out trying to keep up, working all night and most of the day, until the inevitable happened…he became ill.Sick enough to land him flat on his back, but the accounts still needed to be shuffled, layering and hiding their transactions. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open, I shuffled them for him.
I was a fast learner. By the end of one week, I’d memorized their US accounts, by the end of the second, all their offshore ones, too. By the third week, I was picking up on details even dad had missed, and by the fourth week, I was coming to him with an idea. A crazy, out there idea…cryptocurrency.
We could anonymize funds to hide their source and break the paper trail. It was half-baked, and brilliant, and worked like nothing we’d ever seen before. So well, in fact, that my father’s employer wanted a detailed explanation of what we were doing, and that’s when my father’s nervous word vomit came into play.
He used my name as the brains of the operation.
Mr. Salvatore was shrewd, but untrusting. He wanted to meet this‘brain’and right then she was walking through their front door.
“This way,” Max, the bodyguard, called.
Dad followed, and I stared. Sleek black furnishings and expensive looking paintings that were strangely all of a woman with flaming red hair adorned dark sage walls. For a second, I forgot about my bladder as we strode along the hallway and stepped onto the biggest and most lavish study I’d ever seen.
“Holy shit,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Dillon,” the large man murmured, watching me with a piercing stare.
“Mr. Salvatore,” dad nearly whispered as he stumbled forward and jerked a panicked gaze to me. “This is—“
“Anna,”The Godfather of all Godfathers'low, rumbling tone tore through me. He rose from behind the gleaming red cedar desk and held out a massive hand. “It’s nice to meet you. Your father’s told me many things about you.”
“You, too,” I answered, grasping his hand with my own feeble grip.
He dwarfed me, but then again, Mr. Bloodmoney Salvatore would dwarf Santa Claus himself. “So,” the giant almost hummed, looking me up and down. “This is the…womanwho’ll one day be the brains of your operation?”
One day?
How about now. Was now good for him? ‘Cause I was pretty sure I could show him a thing or two about regulatory requirements. Only, dad didn’t answer. He just stared, and Mr. Salvatore stared, while my bladder started to pang.
“One day…yes,” Dad nodded, although he looked anything but happy.
“Sounds like she’s running things just fine now. What say you, kitten?” The goliath rumbled and pinned me to the floor with his stare. “You going to come and work for me?”
Work for him?The way he said it made it sound like it wasn’t an invitation…but a command.
“Dad.” I winced and shifted my weight from one foot to the other.
“Oh yes…” dad stuttered, turning to the man who’d invested millions of dollars illegally, and started talking.
Until the door suddenly opened behind us and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen swept through like a summer breeze.Her.The sight hit me.The woman from the paintings.
“Dominic,” she chuckled in the thickest Irish accent I’d ever heard.
All I saw was green eyes and thick, braided red hair. She radiated beauty, prestige, and somehow humility, all at the same time.
“Cian.” The terrifying hulk of a man behind the desk beamed as he shifted his entire attention toward her.
She smiled at dad before turning that ray of happiness on me, stopped in the middle of the room, and plonked her hands on her hips. “Now, who do we have here?”
