“Apology accepted.” Xander grabbed his brother and hugged him. They gave one another a hearty backslap, as if to make up for the tears flowing freely. He turned and tried to surreptitiously wipe his eyes, but Javier had to have seen. “I knew you used to grit your teeth every time one of the L.A. news outlets picked up on my escapades and splashed them all over the page. I’m sorry for being an out-of-control asshole.”
“Yeah.” His brother swiped his eyes with his sleeve, then tried to grin. “I accept your apology, too, but I’m sure you’ll have to apologize again at some point for being an asshole.”
Xander laughed, their sudden banter lightening the mood and his heart. “Fuck off.”
Javier collapsed into the chair London had graced only a few minutes before and nodded. “Yeah, you fuck off, too.”
The ensuing silence quickly filled with gravity. They’d repaired their rift, but London was still gone, still out there alone thinking that she wasn’t beautiful enough for them, and not trusting their words otherwise. That hurt Xander most of all. She didn’t need to be alone now. She needed to know they loved her. She needed to see that the flawed men they’d been before were better because her sweet spirit and her love had changed them.
“We have a choice,” Javier said. “We either let her go and be the men we once were—”
“Fuck that!” Xander didn’t want to be that douche anymore. He’d been miserable and lonely. Despite the fact that he’d fucked thousands of women, he’d been intimate with no one until London.
“My thoughts exactly. There’s a bottle right there, and I could drink it all and forget for a while . . . but my need for London would be there when the buzz wore off. I can’t drink her away.”
Not like he had Francesca. Xander understood perfectly. Loneliness could be medicated and masked until a man had something so real that nothing would ever make him forget. “I’m sure I could find Whitney again and fuck her in every way known to man in the next few hours. If she wasn’t enough . . . there are others in the club. But I’m not interested and I’m not letting London down. She needs us to be stronger and better so she can heal, finally give herself fully and be free.”
“Exactly.”
“What do we do? If she’s left Dominion, there seems no point in staying,” Xander pointed out.
“Have you tried calling her?”
“Her phone is back at the hotel room. Even if she had it, I doubt she’d answer.”
Javier nodded. “You don’t happen to know where Callie lives?”
“No. That brat was always off limits to me because I knew how Thorpe felt about her, even if the ass is too stubborn to admit it. Besides, Callie wasn’t up my alley. She is a serious handful. I kind of feel sorry for her Master, whoever he is. He was probably taken in by her baby blues and lush curves, and is just now figuring out that she’s going to make him insane.”
“Then . . . I guess we head back to the hotel. Maybe she’ll show up there? We’ve got all her stuff. If not, well . . . she knows how to call us if she’s ready to talk.”
True. And the fact their phones weren’t ringing scraped every bit of his composure raw. His mood bled, and he wasn’t going to feel right again until he had London in his arms, between him and Javier, making her feel both so good and so loved.
As they headed out of Thorpe’s office and grabbed their belongings from the playroom, they headed back into the main part of the dungeon. Xander spied Callie’s Master and Thorpe arguing with gestures as sharp as the crack of a whip. Idly, he wondered if Thorpe realized that his unrequited need and jealousy were making him a real asshole.
With Javier beside him, they headed out into the sweltering night. Ignoring the fact that it was nearly ninety degrees despite being after midnight, he kept his grumbling to a minimum and hopped into the car, speeding through the night back to the Mansion.
The opulence and elegance of the Turtle Creek hotel didn’t register with Xander at all. He prowled through the lobby, fishing out his key, then slamming it into the slot once he reached the door. The moment he pushed it open, he realized the trench London had been wearing when she left the club was strewn across their bed, along with the shoes she’d been wearing. Stomach clenching with anxiety, Xander touched the coat. It was still warm. Her clothing and her purse were nowhere to be found.
“She’s gone,” Javier said into the awful silence, scrubbing a hand across his terrified face. “I pushed her too hard.”
Desolation swamped him. “She has to let go of that hurt and worry. We’ve got to help her.”
“How? We have no idea where she’s gone. I doubt very much that she’s going to take our calls or show up to the office on Monday. She’s not going to pretend that nothing has happened.”
Javier was right. “One thing we do know is that she has no reason to come back here. But I have a trick to track her down . . .”
“Oh?” His brother looked intrigued.
“She had problems with her iCloud account one day, so I helped her. She gave me her e-mail and password. With that, I can track her iPhone. Let’s see where she’s gone.” With a few clicks of his own phone, he tried to locate her device, but the app wasn’t finding her. Cursing, he tried two, three, four times. Nothing. “Damn it! She’s turned off her phone.”
With a heavy sigh, Javier sat in a plush chair. “Could anything say more eloquently that she doesn’t want to hear from us?”
No, but that couldn’t be the end. “Too bad. I’m not letting her fester in self-doubt. I’d bet money that, right now, she wants familiar people and comforts around her.”
“Agreed. Somehow, someway, she’s headed back to Lafayette.”
Xander nodded. “Let’s pack up and follow.”
His brother began gathering his stuff into a pile, shoving it into bags without a scrap of organization or care. “What do we do when we find her?”
“Convince her that we’ll do anything for her and that we’re never letting her go.”
The words had barely cleared his lips when Xander’s phone rang. He yanked it from his pocket, praying London was on the other end, that she missed him, that she wanted to talk—something. When Xander glanced at the screen, he froze.
“Who is it?” Javier demanded.
“Someone I hired to help us with the security issue surrounding the log-ins Maynard was bitching about. He’s more than qualified. Former military special forces. He’s especially good with industrial espionage. If he’s calling in the middle of the night, it’s not good.” Xander hit the button to answer his phone. “What’s up, Decker?”
“Hey. I followed the trail of those IDs down to their last access point near Cancun. I found a guy by the name of Albert Carlton. That name mean anything to you?”
“Not to me,” Xander answered, then looked at his brother. “You know an Albert Carlton?”
“Yeah. He’s an employee. In R & D. He’s Sheppard’s work bitch, follows him around from meeting to meeting like a dog in heat.”
“You hear that?” Xander asked Decker.
“Yep. And Sheppard is . . .?”
“The head of R & D.”
Decker grunted. “That puts a few things into place.”
Maybe for Decker, but Xander was confused as hell. “If he’s an employee, what’s he doing accessing proprietary information in Mexico? Is he working on his vacation?”
“If he was, the vacation is now permanent,” Decker drawled.
“What do you mean?”
“I went out there to spy on the guy. Instead, I found a body. My guess is that someone professional whacked him.”
“Professional? Like an assassin?” Xander tugged his fingers through his hair. “You’re sure?”
“Yep. Carlton wasn’t in a hotel room in the tourist area, but in a house on the seedy side of town, so normally I’d think robbery or drugs. But no one took his wallet, phone, credit cards, passport, or his baggie full of coke. His printer, fax, and mouse were all sitting on his desk. His computer, however, was missing. I suspect the killer waited until evening rolled around and Carlton opened his window to the breeze so there’d be no sign of forced entry or struggle. He finished Carlton off before the poor fuck ever had a clue.”
“Think the neighbors heard the gunshots?”
“In that neighborhood, they’re used to drug dealers taking one another out. If anyone had heard anything, they wouldn’t talk. But Carlton wasn’t shot. He was strangled. The ligature around his neck is brutal and obvious. Rough rope, about two inches thick. This killer is strong. Carlton died quickly and without mercy.”
Those words rattled around in Xander’s had. Strangled. By a pro. Who liked fat ropes. Like Francesca. What were the odds of that?
“The good news is,” Decker went on, “I did some digging on the vic’s phone. I found a list of his passwords. He paid for an online backup service, so I grabbed a fresh computer and put a mirror of Carlton’s computer on that. It should be done now, so let me see what we’ve got, then I might be able to tell you what got him killed.”
“Sounds great,” Xander said, even though it didn’t. It sounded like corporate spying had ratcheted up a notch if dead bodies and professional assassins were involved. And death by strangulation.
But what was the connection to Francesca? She hadn’t known a damn thing about the company, nor had she cared.
Fuck, he and Javier didn’t need this right now. They needed to be focused on London. But they now had a murdered employee. They needed to get back in town ASAP and start getting some answers to their questions. He gestured to Javier, and together, they gathered their luggage and ran out of the hotel, making their way to the valet stand. His brother barked for the valet, handing over the claim ticket, and waiting with an impatient tapping of his foot.
“You’re a lousy liar.” Decker laughed.
“Fine. It sucks hairy, ripe monkey balls. Don’t pros usually shoot their victims?”
“Most often, yeah. Not always. They might use other methods if they’re trying to keep quiet. And some just like a certain MO. Like serial killers, they get off on it.”
But in a neighborhood where gunshots were common and no one would tattle, why not kill Carlton by squeezing a trigger rather than his neck? It was such a specific way to kill, and maybe he’d be less suspicious if Francesca had died any other way, but . . .
“Did the cops take any crime scene photos of Carlton’s body?” Xander asked as the valet brought the car, and his brother threw the luggage in the trunk as he slid behind the wheel.
“The Mexican police hadn’t discovered the crime yet when I was there. And don’t worry, I removed all trace of myself so when they come into the crime scene, it will look pristine. But I snapped a few photos on his phone in case they came in handy. I’ll forward them.”
“Thanks.” Xander couldn’t help but suspect that what Carlton had known because of his job had gotten him killed. But who would want him dead?
Xander’s phone chirped with a message a moment later, but he didn’t put Decker on hold to look at them while speeding away from the hotel. He wanted to study the pictures before he showed Javier. Unless the need arose, Xander could see no sense in sending his brother back to the edge of his sanity with pictures of a strangulation. His resolve to give up booze was too fresh.
In Xander’s ear, Decker was quiet for a long minute, tapping away at the keyboard. “You told me to look for a Chad Brenner in all this?”
Xander gripped the phone tighter. “Yeah. You got something?”
“A whole bunch of somethings.” The other man was quiet for another unbearable stretch of silence. “Ready for this? Carlton worked for you until last Friday. For the past few years, it looks like he’s been secretly stealing information from Sheppard and your internal drives and selling it to the highest bidder. Oh, look. He even sold some secure log-ins so other creeps could crawl through your databases. How handy that he documented where he mined all the data from, who he sold it to, and for how much.” Decker whistled. “Damn, no wonder he left his job. He’d gotten fucking rich.”
“How does Chad Brenner play into this? For a long time, he developed our new technology. He’s brilliant. He could invent anything we did, probably faster or better, so I doubt he’d want our secrets.”
“There’s a long string of e-mails between Carlton and someone calling himself the ‘Face of Revenge.’” Decker scoffed. “That shit sounds like a seventh-grade boy making up his screen name for fucking Call of Duty.”
Pretty much. Brenner had wanted revenge against S.I. Industries for its perceived theft of his intellectual property since walking out in a huff and suing. Was that silly handle his? “What do the e-mails say?”