Maria

 

“Are you on your way to work?” Brawn croaked into the phone when I called him the next morning. He half-mumbled his words. I imagined he was sitting in bed with his face still buried in his soft pillow and eyes still closed. He’d probably only barely managed to grab the phone and hold it up to his ear.

 

“Yes, I am. I need you and your boys to be ready to go,” I said, sounding a little bossier than I intended, but it wasn’t going to work if we weren’t all on the same page.

 

“We’re ready. I just need some coffee and we’re good to go.” His voice was starting to clear up.

 

I knew he was standing up. I imagined his body as he stretched. I could see the muscles in his chest and arms. I could see his tattoos, the way his boxers caught on his hips. “Okay. Make sure you’re there, because when this is over, I’m going to need to spend some time alone with you,” I said, shaking off the images in my head.

 

“Oh really,” he said with a slight chuckle in his voice. He knew what I was getting at.

 

“Yeah, so make sure we get out of this the way we planned, okay? We both need to be intact.” I realized it was the most direct thing I’d said to him about our physical relationship, but I didn’t care. We’d earned the chance to talk openly about it. I knew I had. I was putting everything on the line to get my dad out of the picture— our picture.

 

“I’m on it. I’ll get the guys and we’ll start heading over there to meet you,” he said, his voice completely cleared up.

 

“I’m about five minutes out,” I told him.

 

“We’ll wait about ten minutes, then. If anything changes, let me know. I won’t be on the bike, so I’ll be able to get to my phone,” he said.

 

“Got it. Talk to you soon, babe.” I hung up before he could say anything else. I groaned as I pulled in and my father wasn’t there. It wasn’t uncommon for him to show up late, now that he had been depending on me to run the office. It also wasn’t unlike him to have other “business” to tend to.

 

I got out of the car and went into the office. I started a couple of pots of coffee on the coffee makers. I logged in to the work computer and checked my email to see if there was any news to explain why he hadn’t shown up yet. I got out my phone and texted both Brawn and Detective Lance, the man Amanda had put me in contact with.

 

Hold on. He’s not here yet. Will let you know ETA when I have it.

 

Neither one said anything back. I didn’t expect them to, either. They were both busy preparing to storm my father’s jobsite. I put the phone on the desk and exhaled, drumming on my knees with my palms.

 

I looked around at the mess of paperwork I’d left after digging through everything looking for information connecting my father to the mob. To me, every stray piece of paper looked like evidence that someone had been snooping, and it was pretty obvious, I thought, who that person had been.

 

I had sorted some of the paperwork into a few stacks on one of the desks, so I figured I could continue doing that while I waited to hear something from my father about his whereabouts.

 

“I guess if you want a plan to work, everyone has to be in on it,” I joked to myself, as if I could have told my father he needed to show up on time.

 

Workers started showing up. A couple of them came in and filled up their thermoses with coffee from the office, prompting me to start making more. Making sure my father’s employees didn’t start a riot in the morning was probably the hardest part of my job. Once they were working, they were fine. It was getting them out there and in good humor that was rough.

 

Still, I waited to hear from him. Finally, once everyone was on the jobsite, I grabbed my phone and texted.

 

Call me if you’re not coming in or if you’re going to be much later. I need to talk to you.

 

“Because that doesn’t sound suspicious,” I said to myself as I put the phone back down.

 

Any word?

 

I grabbed the phone again and replied to the detective.

 

Nothing yet. Waiting on him to call me.

 

Keep me posted.

 

Detective Collins had called me late the night before, after Amanda had emailed me his information so it wouldn’t be a surprise when he reached out to me. His demeanor had been a mixture of eager excitement and cautious suspicion. He sounded like he was ready to take my father down, but he also questioned me from the start.

 

“Maria?” he had asked when I answered the phone.

 

“Detective Collins?” I’d replied, confirming my identity by asking for his.

 

“Great. I hear you’re ready to talk about your father,” he’d said.

 

“I am.”

 

“Okay, before we start with the questions, do you mind if I ask why?”

 

I had wondered immediately if my father hadn’t already reached this man before Amanda did, but Amanda had already assured me she worked with people who couldn’t be bought. She had told me she’d made sure of it. Her job depended on working with legit cops and legal teams. It had seemed like such an odd thing to say when she regularly represented people like Brawn and Shift, bikers who belonged to organizations like The Twisted Ghosts and often found themselves on the wrong side of the law.

 

But it made sense when I thought about it, because when they were actually not in the wrong, they needed someone unbiased enough to help out. And a bias in favor of someone like Amanda Langford certainly didn’t hurt.

 

“He’s trying to blackmail me into taking over his business, and I don’t want anything to do with it because of his connections,” I had told the detective.

 

Collins had agreed to do things the way Brawn had suggested. He knew about Brawn’s case, so he knew we were connected. He’d asked me questions about my connection to the MC, and about my father’s connections to several others. I’d been as honest with him as I could have been. I played down the kidnapping bit, which was funnier every time it came up. It had really become a joke, especially since everyone else had begun taking his little stunt more seriously than we did.

 

I just hoped that by telling him to hold on, I wasn’t losing his trust.

 

My phone buzzed. It was my father calling me back.

 

“Good morning,” I said, sounding as chipper as I could manage.

 

“Morning. What do you need to talk to me about?” he asked. My stomach knotted up. I knew I’d been found out.

 

“Well, I’ve been thinking about your offer to train me to take over the company. Since you’ve been out of the office and off the jobsite more, I was thinking maybe it was time to start moving forward with all of that. I feel like we need to sit down in person to work out all of the details,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as nervous as I felt. I busied my free hand by lightly drumming my fingers on the desk.

 

“We can discuss everything when I get home this evening,” he said.

 

“When you get home?” I asked. My plan was falling apart right in front of me. The one piece we all needed was backing out, and it wasn’t like I could tell him he needed to show up so we could nail his ass to the wall.

 

“Yes, when I get home tonight. Is that going to be okay? Is everything all right at work?”

 

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” I told him. “I was just sort of hoping we could go ahead and address it. I didn’t realize you were going to be out of the office again today.”

 

“Yeah, I’ve got to get you authorized to sign off on certain accounts, I guess, so you can make sure everything is running smoothly,” he added. “Unfortunately, I’ll be away from the office today just like I was yesterday. I’ll be home later this evening, and we can talk over dinner. Sound good?” The last question was spoken in a way that told me I didn’t need to ask any more questions. I just needed to accept was he was telling me and move on.

 

“Yes, sir. Sounds good.” I could hear the disappointment in my own voice, but I didn’t care if he heard it.

 

“Hey, I’m glad you’re ready to talk about taking your next steps. After tonight, I will make sure you have more control over the company. That’s what you needed, right?” he asked. I knew he knew I wasn’t really talking to him about taking over. He had to know.

 

“Yeah. I’ve got some invoices and payroll checks here you need to sign before they go out,” I told him in a last-ditch effort to get him to come in.

 

“I’ll stop by on my way home tonight and sign off on everything. Like I said, I’ll have it set up so you can sign off on everything starting tomorrow. I’ve got to go now, dear. Have a good day. Don’t let it worry you too much.” I could almost hear him winking at me through the phone.

 

After we hung up I squeezed the phone in my hand.

 

“He knows,” I said out loud. “He knows I’m trying to set him up.”

 

I texted Collins.

 

He’s not coming in today.

 

That’s fine. We’ll talk later.

 

My heart sank to the floor. I’d just screwed up, big time. I had my father and a detective suspicious of my behavior, and the whole time Brawn was waiting to hear from me. I didn’t know how to tell him I’d botched our plan. Part of the reason I had agreed to work with him was so I could impress him with my ability to handle the kind of shit he got into with his brothers in the MC.

 

I flipped my phone over in my hand. If I didn’t call him, there was a good chance they were going to show up anyway and really mess things up. For all I knew, my father suspected he was being set up and was waiting somewhere to watch the jobsite for members of The Twisted Ghosts and the law.

 

Can’t talk now. There’s a snag. Will call after work.

 

I sent the text and hoped that he wouldn’t call me or come by anyway, thinking I was in trouble.

 

Everything okay?

 

Everything okay. Will talk after work.

 

With that, I went back to sorting through my father’s paperwork. The least I could do was to continue digging for more information regarding my father’s connection to the mob. There was nothing incriminating in the paperwork on the desks in the office, but at least I knew that for sure.

 

It was nearing the end of the day, and the only thing left to do before calling it a day was to go through my father’s desk. It sat in the back of the office like a beacon. It stood silently, holding his secrets.

 

“Oh, you and I are going to have a talk,” I told the desk as I approached it. I pulled on the drawers, and they were all locked. Even the middle drawer was locked.

 

“That’s another thing I need to get from him,” I reminded myself. “How can I take over if I can’t get into this desk?” I wondered what secrets were hiding in those locked drawers. I already knew everything else that was in the office. I had scoured nearly every file and every stray piece of paper.

 

Who was I kidding? My father was smart enough to keep his other books and his other files out of my reach. After I’d accused him of having mob connections during our last little fight, there was no way in hell I was going to find anything truly incriminating in his office.

 

I sat in his chair and laughed at myself. There had to be another way, I decided. I had to find another way to get him to confess what he’d done.

 

There had to be a way to bring him down.