Torch (Great Wolves MC) - Jayne Blue Page 0,57

face bloodied, her arm broken.

I felt hot ash in my mouth as I continued to turn the pages. The crime scene photographs of the fire were hard to process. At first, the bodies didn’t even look human. There was nothing left of them. Skin burned away, leaving something mottled and black behind.

But those weren’t the worst of what I saw in that file. I met Thomas Anthony. A young boy. Just barely fifteen years old. It was Torch, but not. All his features were there in his mugshot. His sandy-blond hair was worn just a bit too long. His hair had grown darker as he aged. Everything about him had. But in this photo, he was skinny. His face lacked the same hardened character as it had now. A thought occurred to me. This boy looked like he could be Torch’s son.

His son. Maybe my son. If …

I turned the page and let out a sob.

Thomas had been beaten. He was photographed in profile. His eye blackened. There was a shot of his torso with deep blue-and-purple welts. A belt did that. Carl had whipped him with the buckle end.

Torch thought he was a monster. These pictures told the truth. Thomas Anthony died that day in the flames. Torch rose from them like a phoenix. Tougher. Stronger. Scarred. He was a protector and a survivor. Even in the end, Irene had been so broken herself as to have chosen the man who brutalized her.

I wanted to hold that boy I saw in the photographs. Tears streamed down my face and hit the pages. There had been no one to comfort him. They had taken that beautiful strong boy and thrown him in a cage.

“I love you,” I whispered as I smoothed my fingers over his face in the photograph.

But it was more than love, I felt. Not pity. Not horror. Not regret. Torch thought his truth would poison me against him. Instead, it made me love him even more.

I closed the file and slid it under the bed. “Sydney?” Shannon knocked softly at the door. “Is everything okay? I heard you crying.”

“I’m fine,” I said, wiping my tears. I pulled out my laptop and attached a USB cord from my phone to the port. I pulled up the pictures I took of George’s ledger books. There was another truth in here. I knew it in my bones.

After a while, Shannon stopped knocking on the door. It grew dark outside my window as I worked through lunch, then dinner.

Most of George’s ledger entries were routine. The club had him on a monthly retainer. Ten thousand a month went into his trust account. At the end of each month, he’d transfer it into his business account and make payroll, the rent, utilities. Nothing seemed unusual until about a year ago.

There, buried in other client payments, I started seeing deposits coming in from a new account. They went out almost as fast as they came in. But they didn’t go into the business account. George was taking out cash.

I wrote down the incoming account numbers. I hovered my cursor over the firm billing software. George had me load it onto my laptop when I started working for him. I said a silent prayer as I hit my login.

The screen hung up for a second, but I was in. Just like the key to the office, George hadn’t yet removed my access.

I pulled up his calendar. Generally, his secretary Mona was the one responsible for entering his appointments as my Uncle George stayed firmly in the twentieth century. He liked to write down his appointments in a paper book that he kept in the top drawer of his desk. Usually, Mona would grab the book and transfer his entries into the software. A few times, George had me do it for him.

At first, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Then, about the time he started getting the mystery deposits, Mona started carving out a block of time on the first Tuesday of every month. There was no client name. No location.

It hit me like a lightning bolt. I’ll see you next Tuesday. I’d overheard my Uncle George yelling that to his mystery man in the office the other day. Juice. He’d called him Juice. I thought he’d just said it as an insult. Code for a different C-word that I’d never utter myself.

But what if …

Shannon pounded on the door. “Sydney, you have to come out. Glover is here. He wants to