Dark Obsession (Vampire Royals of New York #3) - Sarah Piper Page 0,19
deftness that made FierceConnect’s Silicon Valley-educated developers look like preschoolers trying to jam square pegs into round holes, Charlotte navigated through the file manager, searching through everything from the demon’s vacation photos to his rather extensive porn collection.
“Busty Bollywood Babes aside,” she said, “looks like Estas is marginally smarter than I’d given him credit for. There’s nothing professional on the laptop.”
“So this was a waste of time?”
“Hardly.” Charlotte dug into her bag again, this time procuring a stethoscope.
Dorian laughed. “I’m all for playing doctor, love. But didn’t we just narrowly avoid another clandestine closet interlude? Perhaps we can revisit this game later.”
She looped the device around her neck, eyeing him flirtatiously. “Behave yourself, and we’ll see what your future holds.”
With that, she turned toward the art on the wall—a knockoff Monet in a plastic frame that had been painted to look like wood. She lifted it and set it on the floor, revealing a wall safe.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dorian said. “Estas is a high-ranking Rogozin demon and a multi-million-dollar black-market art dealer, and he’s got a wall safe?”
Charlotte shrugged, adjusting the stethoscope over her ears. “I said he’s marginally smarter than I’d thought—not a genius by any stretch. Besides, how often does a demon living in the woods get robbed?”
“Fair point.” Dorian watched with twisted fascination as she pressed the stethescope’s chest piece to the safe and listened, spinning the combination dial this way and that.
After no more than a minute, a smile lit up her face. “Bingo.”
The safe door swung open.
Dorian’s jaw damn near hit the floor. “Did you really just do that? In sixty seconds, no less?”
“Can’t say dear old Dad never taught me anything useful.”
“No, I suppose you can’t.” Dorian shook his head, feeling as if he were trapped in a very long, disturbing, and slightly erotic dream.
But it was real. All of it. The scent of Charlotte’s unfulfilled desire lingering on the air. The sound of her heartbeat, calm and steady as she focused on the task at hand. The dim glow of the computer screen. The swish of her ponytail as she efficiently rifled through the safe.
“Hello, beautiful,” she finally said, slowly turning toward him. Her eyes danced, her energy buzzing and alive with some new victory. She held a large, mustard-colored interoffice envelope—the kind used for staff memorandums before email had rendered them obsolete.
In large black letters across the top, someone had scrawled two names:
RAVENSWOOD / D’AMICO
Charlotte opened the envelope and tipped its contents into her gloved hand, catching a flash drive, a passport, and a folio of first-class airline tickets.
Thumbing through the passport and tickets, she said, “Passport’s a forgery. It’s Rudy’s picture, but the name says Joel Irwin. The tickets are in Irwin’s name.”
“Where to?”
“São Paolo. One way, connects in Miami. Heading out in… wow.” Charlotte’s brow creased. “The twenty-seventh? That’s just two days after he plans to hit Ravenswood.”
“Is that odd?”
“Very.” She flipped through the stash again, shaking her head. “First of all, Travis is Rudy’s go-to forger, but this isn’t his work—I don’t recognize it at all. So it looks like Rudy’s doing this behind his back, going through Estas instead. And there’s no return ticket. If Rudy’s not coming back, who’s handling the payout?”
“How do you mean?”
“Normally after a big score, the crew stashes the artwork in a storage unit in Jersey or Pennsylvania, then everyone lies low for a few weeks. After that, the boss does an inventory, figures out the initial payout for the crew, and then contracts a guy like Estas to fence it. He’ll either sell it piecemeal, taking a commission on each sale, or he’ll buy the whole lot for a set price and sell it off on his own time. The whole process can take months—sometimes longer.”
“So maybe the Brazil trip is Rudy’s way of lying low,” Dorian suggested.
“No. Something isn’t adding up here. My gut says Rudy’s not planning to pay out at all. He wouldn’t leave that kind of detail to anyone else.”
“You think he’s double-crossing his crew?”
“Looks that way. The thing is—I don’t know who the crew even is this time. When he first brought me in on Ravenswood, he said it was a side project between him and Travis, and that our usual guys weren’t involved. He was adamant that I not discuss it with anyone else.”
“But others are involved,” Dorian said. “All that surveillance of my property, the spies at FierceConnect…”
“Exactly. But I have no idea who they are. Rudy’s a demon. For all we