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When she was comfortable, she jiggled her mouse, waking up her screens, and pointed at the spreadsheets there. “Whoever is using these accounts is smart. See these withdrawals?” Zee highlighted the lines I’d ordered by amount. “They’re cash withdrawals. But they’re not being made from ATMs or anything like that. They’re withdrawing cash from the same location—Monaco—and given how regular the withdrawals are, my guess is that they’re living off it.”
“So they’re in Monaco?” I asked, confused. I thought that all the evidence was pointing us to Mauritius.
“I don’t think they are. Look at this transaction. It’s one of the first ones from the accounts, but it wasn’t a withdrawal like the others. It was a transfer. The card expired years ago. It was issued, it received one transfer, one withdrawal for the full amount, then the account was closed down shortly after. From Mauritius.”
“How did you find that out?”
“It was an Australian card. The bank kept note of the ISP that processed the request for verification purposes.” She didn’t add anything further. Unless she’d managed to hack into the issuing bank, the only way she could have gotten that information was out of the historical records from Reserve Bank. She’d never admitted downloading anything—she’d denied it outright, in fact—but we all knew she had the records.
My chest warmed and my belly flip-flopped. I loved this woman. She was incredible. No matter how cold-hearted she portrayed herself as, she had the biggest heart of anyone I knew. She was still protecting us, determined to make sure we had plausible deniability.
Leaning in, I kissed Zee, tightening my arms around her waist. She sighed happily and snuggled into me, playing with the top button of my shirt. “You’ve been working a lot,” I murmured.
“What do you have in mind?” she asked, her voice turning seductive.
“A naked swim. You and the guys. You need to destress.”
She hummed, her voice wistful. “I love that idea. But not yet. I think I may have cracked who it was.”
“What?” I exclaimed, incredulity and shock lifting my voice to a squeak. “What more do you have?”
“This first transaction. It’s the beginning of a pattern.”
Scanning my eyes down the spreadsheet, it was impossible not to notice that every transaction was for the same amount, bar the first one. That was a whole lot more than the others. “It doesn’t match though, and it was a transfer to a card, not a withdrawal. Why do you think they’re related?”
“Look at the timing. Once a month, every month on the same day. There are a few random interim transactions, but this one is the first of the regular amounts.”
Holy hot dog, she was right. She continued, “When you think about it, if you’re moving to a new country with just luggage you can carry, even if you are going home, you’re going to need a lot of stuff. Our guy could have spent most of that on groceries getting their pantry and cold foods stocked up. Then there’s linen, extra clothes….”
“Who do you think it was? Why do you think they were going home?”
She sighed, leaning back against me and snuggling into my embrace. I ran my hand up her back, her bare skin soft under my hand. The only thing she had on was a loose camisole and a pair of ruffled panties that showed enough skin to make me salivate. But that wasn’t what I was focussing on. It was her warmth and her vibrancy that had been dulled by the weight she was carrying. Maybe she needed strength, and if that was the case, I was privileged to be the one she called on.
“Remember when Tristan said that he’d been trying to find the staff members who were at ReimagINC when it went under and how there were a lot who’d dropped off the radar?”
“Yeah. Did you find a connection to one of them?”
She opened a staff profile that included a photograph of a man who was probably in his mid-forties if the greying in his closely cropped beard was anything to go by. He was handsome, with dark skin and eyes. He filled out the light blue shirt he wore nicely, and he had a killer smile.
“This guy was the assistant to the CFO. The credit card that received the transfer was in his name. He was born in Mauritius but immigrated here a year before he got the job with Mum. Before that, he worked for the same liquidators that handled ReimagINC’s winding up.”
“That’s a lot of coincidences.”
“Yeah.” She groaned and scrubbed her hands over her face. She was mentally and physically exhausted, but Zee wouldn’t let up on this until she’d solved it. “There are too many.”
She gritted her teeth, her eyes turning cold and hard. “He’s also one of the people who went completely radio silent when the company went under. I think it’s him, Flynn. I think he did it.”
“Far out.” I exhaled on a shudder and squeezed her tight again. “What can I do, Zee? What do you need?”
“I need to nail this bastard to the wall and make him beg for death.”
My gut twisted painfully. I’d told Tristan and Ezra that they needed to be okay with Zee or Ry ending this… person. But I also needed to be okay with it. Knowing that it might actually happen, that they could be about to take a life, shook me to my core. Fear coursed through me.
What if they got caught? What if they ended up in some scummy overseas jail that destroyed them? I’d seen pictures of Kerobokan Prison in Bali. I couldn’t imagine that Mauritius jails were any better. Did the death penalty exist in Mauritius? Holy hell, if they were caught, they could be sentenced to death. Killed themselves.
My breathing quickened and my pulse skyrocketed. No, I was doomsaying. There were protections we could take, preparations we could make to ensure that this didn’t go wrong.
And we would. I’d wrap it up until it was airtight. There was no way I would let anything happen to them. Just like Zee would do anything to protect us, I would do anything to protect her. Ry too.
