Total pages in book: 152
Estimated words: 139934 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 700(@200wpm)___ 560(@250wpm)___ 466(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139934 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 700(@200wpm)___ 560(@250wpm)___ 466(@300wpm)
More and more, it looked as if Ashe was their enemy. He was responsible for the lives of his brother and Evangeline. He loved them both. He owed Fyodor. He wasn’t throwing that all away for a woman he’d only just laid eyes on. Still, if she was going to die, she wasn’t going to be tortured first for information.
“I want eyes on the messenger. Stay well back. No one take any chances. Jeremiah, you earned yourself a spot on the team. Kyanite and Rodion, I want you on the bakery. I don’t care what Evangeline says or how she bribes you. I don’t care if Fyodor gives you a direct order, you aren’t going to fuck up and leave them even for a few minutes. If anything happens to either one of them, I will hold you personally responsible. I’m giving the job to the two of you because I trust you.”
“Consider it done,” Kyanite said.
Jeremiah frowned. “Wait a minute. The bakery was my old job. I know everything about it. I know the rooftops and alleyways. I know customers. I’m the best man for that job.”
“You wanted out of it,” Timur reminded him. He detested being questioned, and no other man under his command would be stupid enough to do so. “You wanted off Evangeline and the bakery because it wasn’t exciting enough for you. You don’t get to jump back and forth as it suits you. You don’t keep your mouth closed, you’ll be pulling kitchen duty instead of being part of the team watching the messenger.”
Jeremiah’s mouth closed. He even pressed his lips tightly together, which told Timur the kid knew he’d had his share of passes.
“Tell us what else, if anything, you found.”
Jeremiah nodded. “When his leopard went for a run, I went through the garbage. There was pretty much nothing, but I did find partially burned papers. There wasn’t a message I could read, but the fact that he’d taken the time to burn them in the first place bothered me. There were several pieces of paper that looked like correspondence.”
Timur’s heart began to pound. At last. Real evidence. “Did you think to bring those papers, burned or not?”
Jeremiah nodded. “Yeah, I thought you might like to see them.”
Timur had always been curious. He liked to study and he liked chemicals. He also liked experimenting. He knew most people wrote on paper with fountain pens or ballpoint pens, sometimes gel pens. The charring of the paper hid the message from a white light illumination, but the original content was still there.
“I brought it with me,” Jeremiah reiterated.
Timur let him see that he was pleased. “Nice, Jeremiah. Burned paper crumbles easily. Put it carefully on my desk in the other room.”
Jeremiah nodded. “I tried reading it, but he made certain to burn the contents.”
“We may still be able to recover something if the part with the message is still intact.” He couldn’t imagine being so lucky. Having the correspondence was a stroke of luck that couldn’t be foreseen by either party. The messenger had no way of knowing Timur had spotted him. It had been instinct alone. Nothing had given the big man away.
“When are you going to talk to this woman?” Kyanite asked. “Do you at least want company so that if the messenger comes snooping around, we can warn you?”
Timur thought that over. He wanted to be alone with Ashe to give her a chance to come clean with him. It was possible Lazar was holding her family hostage unless she did as he said. Lazar would kill them anyway, but she wouldn’t know that. He almost hoped it was something like that. If she came clean, he would spare her. He’d try to turn her to their side and offer her every opportunity to make amends for attempting to spy on them or even possibly trying to assassinate Fyodor or Evangeline.
He had made certain Fyodor knew to question Evangeline about her relationship, if any, with the woman. They looked as if they had worked together at some point, but if so, it was long before Evangeline had become Fyodor’s wife. That made no sense. It would be too big of a leap to think Lazar knew Evangeline and Fyodor would meet and fall for each other.
He wanted to know everything there was to know about Evangeline’s relationship with Ashe before he questioned the woman. Her life hung in the balance and he wanted to give her every opportunity he could to tell him why she was there.
He glanced at his watch for the millionth time that evening. It was late. Very late. The hours had slipped away while he plotted to send his men on a raid of a territory that belonged to a crime boss, Ulisse Mancini. He’d been running his counterfeit money with Emilio Bassini’s weapons. They wanted to keep Emilio’s business just steady, not thriving, and Ulisse was becoming such a problem; bosses in other states were beginning to worry about his greed.