Embrace the Darkness (The Maura Quinn Series Book 1) - Ashley N. Rostek Page 0,96

I sucked in a breath. His eyes traveled to mine, showing me he meant it.

“Are you mine?” I asked, barely breathing.

His hand moved up to cup my cheek and his thumb brushed over my lips, pulling them apart slightly. “What do you think?”

He kissed the hell out of me by nipping and sucking at my lips. He’d successfully turned me into a wanton mess. Running my fingers through his hair, I gave it a light tug in order to break away from him.

“You’re being mean. Lady Town is out of order for a few more days.”

He chuckled. “Then get your ass in bed. You need sleep and I need sleep. This shit will still be here tomorrow.”

I gave in. “Fine.” I squealed when he got up with me in his arms and carried me to bed.

That became our routine for the next three nights. Vincent and I would research all day and Jamie would come in late at night to make us stop.

It took some time to get Vincent to open up. It was literally like pulling teeth, but by day two things got a little easier. He was incredibly smart, especially for someone at the young age of nineteen. His parents had died in a car crash when he'd been a kid and we kind of bonded over it because my mother had passed the same way. He'd lived with his grandma until cancer took her life when he'd been sixteen. Refusing to go into foster care, he'd run away, making money by hacking for anyone who would hire him. Or if he was in a pinch, he’d illegally wire money into his account. Which was how he'd come to work for Stefan a little over a year ago. Vincent had wired money from one of Stefan’s accounts and it hadn't gone unnoticed. Stefan had found Vincent and instead of killing him, he'd offered him a job.

The poor kid had been through some major losses in his lifetime. No wonder he didn’t like to leave his home, which I most definitely asked about. Turned out, he lived past the border in De Luca territory. There wasn’t anything wrong with his home, just its location.

After three long days, my brain was ready to explode from everything I'd learned. The upside, we got a lead.

We'd begun our research by tearing through the books and electronic records on the flash drive. The books were the financial records of what we put out and brought in from selling cocaine and the ledgers were all dated back during my grandfather’s time as boss. The flash drive was the same thing, but dated from when Stefan had taken over.

We received the cocaine from a supplier in Columbia. We paid fifteen thousand per kilo to the Columbians, then turned around and sold it for forty thousand per kilo here in the States. After paying our courier slash smugglers to get the drugs from Columbia to here, the family profited twenty grand per kilo.

That had been the case until about two years ago.

Over the course of two years, our profits had slowly been decreasing down to a profit of ten grand per kilo. The drop of revenue had happened gradually in the first year, starting with us losing a thousand, then two, three, until we'd reached an even ten thousand lost per kilo. The ten thousand had been a consistent loss for the past eight months.

Stefan was right. And it was slightly insulting that Samuel thought he wouldn’t be caught. When we'd reached this point in our research, I'd had Vincent dig up all he could on Samuel, Dylan, and every man that worked under them. I'd wanted pictures, backgrounds, bank accounts, anything that was tied to their name and fingerprints.

Everything we could find on Samuel and Dylan had come up as Stefan had stated. There had been no extra money in their accounts, which just meant they had it hidden under different aliases. Vincent had worked his ass off to find out what they were. I'd learned a lot that I hadn't wanted to know about my uncle and cousin. Samuel constantly cheated on my aunt with high end prostitutes, which I'd already known, but what I hadn't known was he liked them young—eighteen, to be exact. Dylan watched too much anal porn. I could have gone my whole life without knowing that.

Hours of research and I'd known pretty much everything about Samuel’s men. It had been information overload, but it had been worth it when