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She was fine.
Unless the guy she’d overheard had seen her, had guessed that she understood.
Especially after she’d rushed out of here after.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, going into my library to grab a gun, then my keys, and, finally, Val’s leash. “Come on, man. Let’s go find her,” I said, clipping on the leash, then leading him outside.
I’d figured she might have gone home, been looking for a little bit of normalcy, a chance to check to make sure her cousin had left the place in order.
But her car wasn’t there.
It wasn’t at the biker clubhouse, hanging out with her male cousins and uncles.
It wasn’t at her work, either.
That said, the lights were still on, so I went ahead and parked, grabbed Val, and headed inside.
“Mr. Alcazar,” the biggest asshole of the group, Mike, said as I walked in.
There was a coffee cup on Hope’s desk, still some liquid inside.
So she had been there.
I’d just missed her.
It should have been my first stop.
This was Hope, after all. She practically lived at work.
“Are you here for an update?” he asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I’m here for,” I said, even as I tried to figure out where Hope might have gone after this.
Trying to seem casual, not like some fucking creep looking for his fake maid, I lowered myself into Hope’s seat, kicking my legs up on the corner of her desk.
“What you been working on?” I asked as Val sniffed around Hope’s desk, likely picking up on recent traces of her.
If it weren’t for the fact that she was likely in a car, I could probably tell him to follow her scent, and he’d lead me right to her.
“We’ve been working up profiles on your men.”
“Have you?” I asked. “‘Cause I thought Hope had already done that. Days ago,” I said, gaze moving from man to man, happy to watch them squirm a little.
“We wanted more in-depth profiles,” Mike said.
“Yeah? Let me see ‘em,” I demanded as I rummaged through Hope’s desk, finding a notebook I’d seen in her car that night I’d caught her watching me and my guys go to the bar.
Flipping through, I found the pages with information on my men as Mike and his guys scrambled, only producing a combined ten pages.
Hope had almost twice that.
Still, I flipped through it all, wanting to see what they all saw when they looked at my crew. You could learn a lot about your own organization by paying someone else to look at it, to analyze it.
They all came to the same conclusion that I’d been operating on for years.
That it was damn near an airtight ship.
Nothing should have been able to leak.
But, that being said, I knew better than anyone that betrayal could come from the inside.
I always thought I had some immunity from that, being that I was a fair boss, that I didn’t put my men through fucking hell while tossing them pesos. Threatening their families. Forcing their sisters and nieces and even wives to fuck me because I felt entitled to everything.
I’d overthrown my bosses because they were corrupt and vicious to those who’d they’d forced to pledge allegiance to their cartel.
But I knew as well as anyone that it wasn’t always about morals.
Usually, it was about something a fuckuva lot more basic.
Money.
It was fucking always about money.
Greed was a powerful motivator. I knew that personally, coming from nothing. Having to steal and fight for everything. Listening to my mother cry when she thought I was sleeping, but I was awake with a rumbling, empty stomach.
I also understood really well how that once you started getting a little money, you were even hungrier for more.
It wouldn’t matter if my organization had all profits split evenly. Someone would always be greedy for more.
It was naive to think otherwise.
And maybe I’d gotten too comfortable with the family feeling of my organization.
Yeah, kindness was powerful in ensuring loyalty.
But so was some unpredictability and fear.
I used to be more of a hardass.
In those early days, men knew they had to watch their backs, that I was always breathing down ‘em.
I would even pull men in for questioning completely randomly.
It looked like I would need to bring back those crackdowns once I found this one snake and dealt with him.
“Do you have anything to add?” Mike asked when I sat there silently, flipping through their pages and Hope’s ones.
“Yeah, you got this one’s name wrong,” I said, pushing a paper back toward him, then tapped my knuckles on Hope’s notebook. “She got it right,” I added.
“She has access to you for questions,” one of the other ones, the redhead, said.
“She had these notes before she came to work at my place,” I said, getting out of the chair. “Nice try, though,” I said, making my way toward the door. “You all need to step your shit up,” I told them, mostly because I was in a sour mood, and it was fun to watch them share worried looks, wondering if I meant I was going to fire them, or start hacking off limbs.
