Hating Beauty (The Vegas Titans Series Book 6) (9 page)

“I told you to go suck dick, you
asshole. Maybe mine!”

“You’re really hot when you’re mad,
you know that? I’d let you suck my dick.”

She groans and gently pulls her
wrist out of my grasp.

“Knox. Grow up. Take a cold shower. Get your head out of
your whatever. And I’ll be back in the lobby in twenty minutes.”

As I watch that perfect ass of hers disappear into the
women’s locker room, I have no choice but to hope to god that I’ll see her
again.

In twenty minutes.

Chapter Thirteen

Knox Cole

By the time Tatiana reappears in
the lobby, I’m sweating and I think I may have developed an ulcer. The clock
has ticked away thirty, forty-five minutes, and I’ve paced every inch of the
floor. A security guard has explained to me five times that I can’t go into the
women’s locker room, and I’ve come painfully close to punching him in the jaw. I’ve
run through every possible scenario of what will happen to me without Tatiana
and the laptop. They all end the same way and it’s not pretty.

And then there she is, fresh as a
daisy, standing before me with an innocent smile as if she hasn’t just caused
my cortisol to spike through the roof.

“That was not twenty fucking
minutes,” I bark, hiding my relief in anger. “You almost gave me a heart
attack!”

Tatiana looks remade, fresh and
clean, her skin bright, her hair blown out. She’s wearing makeup, sunglasses,
and a baseball cap, and smells like fucking springtime. It makes me want to
take her straight to bed, where I could smell every inch of her skin and drink
her up until I’m full. It’s also not lost on me that she’s somehow produced a
new outfit—a tight casual black dress that shows off everything I like looking
at, complete with a pair of colorful, practical trainers on her feet. An
army-green duffle bag is slung around one shoulder and brushes tantalizingly against
her left hip with every step. It draws my attention to those hips, the way she
moves, and that makes me even angrier.

“So what,” she grunts. “I’m the
first woman to take a long shower?”

She laughs and loops a slender
finger through the belt-loop of the jeans I’m wearing. Then her hand slides
over the black t-shirt I’ve commandeered. The skin burns under my clothes where
she’s touched me.

“Where did these come from? They
actually fit! You look human again.”

I take a deep breath, willing
myself to calm down and focus.

“Jimmying open lockers is not
exactly a tricky skill to master. I’ve had that down since junior high.”

“I see I have the right partner in
crime.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere. You
have the laptop?”

She frowns. “What is this obsession
with the laptop? I have what we need for the next step. Come, let’s get going.”

I grab her arm as she tries to walk
past me. “Wait. What do you mean, next step? If there’s no laptop, we’ve got no
leverage.”

“We don’t need the laptop.”

“What do you mean, we don’t need
the –”

I stop myself, my jaw locking in
anger. Roughly, I snatch the duffel bag, not caring that Tatiana is still
attached to it, and yank the zipper open. She stumbles after it with a gasp,
closing the distance between our bodies as I rifle through the bag. I feel her
weight against me as I search. Inside the duffle are papers, papers, papers.
Nothing but papers! A folder. A passport. A small ornate box. A teddy bear.

A teddy bear?

“Shit,” I hiss. “Where is it? Where
is Breslin’s laptop?”

“It’s not here,” she says.

“Obviously!”

“I told you Knox, we don’t need it
now. I have everything we need. We are ready for the next step. Trust me.”

To say that I am angry is like
saying The Incredible Hulk is Incredible.

“Don’t try to play me, Katja.
Dammit, I mean Tatiana. Fuck. What the fuck is going on? What next step are you
talking about? Am I going to have to die because you think you have everything
under control? Because I gotta tell you honey, you don’t have anything under
control! You don’t even have me under control, and I’m supposed to be on your
side, right? We need that laptop. It’s the only thing that we can use to
bargain with.”

In spite of my muffled barking,
Tatiana blinks at me completely unruffled.

“Why would we need the laptop, when
I have a copy of everything on it?”

She reaches into her bra, which
causes a momentary reaction in my groin, and pulls out a slender flash drive.
She twirls it in her fingers just long enough for it to glint in the light and
connect in my brain, and then she slips it back into her bra.

“Ok, crazy man? Now can you relax?
You are stressing me out.”

Of course she’d make copies.

But I’m not fully satisfied. “Hold
up. If it’s all about what was in the computer, why was Breslin so worried
about getting his physical laptop back? All the data was as good as stolen as
soon as the laptop left his apartment. Why does he care about the laptop?”

Tatiana shrugs, but not before I
catch the ghost of a twitch in the corner of her mouth.

“Beats me,” she says.

It’s a lie. I file it away as I
watch her zip up the duffle bag and readjust it on her shoulder, realizing that
I need a different strategy if I’m ever going to get a grip on this situation.

“Okay,” I sigh, raking my fingers
through my hair. “You win. We’ll do it your way. What are we doing?”

Now she smiles, a sly, confiding
grin. “Follow me, and I’ll show you.”

Ten minutes later we’re in a
Staples, at one of those pay-and-print computer stations, and Tatiana has
whipped a debit card out of nowhere and powered up a session on a huge clunking
dinosaur of a PC.

“God, I haven’t used one of these
since 1999,” I chuckle. “I didn’t know these still existed.”

Tatiana taps her short fingernails
on the plastic desk impatiently as the computer slowly boots.

“Oh yes,” she murmurs, distracted,
“In Europe, they exist everywhere. Everybody uses the internet cafes, all the
time. Here, it is less. Nobody uses.” She sweeps her hand around to indicate
the empty workstations on either side. “We are the only ones.”

It’s the first time she’s said
anything, however vague, about where she comes from. And I notice that when
she’s not paying attention, her accent grows thicker. I watch with interest as
she pulls up an email account on hotmail.

“Hotmail? Seriously, who still uses
hotmail? What are you, forty?”

Her eyes flash at me. “No. Not
forty: foreign. Hotmail is still hot in Europe.”

“Where in Europe?”

She ignores me, typing furiously.
Soon she digs in her bra, produces the flash drive, and plugs it in. While it
loads, she turns to me.

“Listen, Knox,” she says. “Here is what
I am doing. You talk of leverage with Breslin. It’s no good this leverage idea,
it’s not enough. At this point he knows what I have on him, and he probably knows
what I can do.”

“That makes one of us.”

She smiles. “It’s no good trying to
negotiate with him, your boss. You of all people should know that. Even if we
pleaded and bargained he wouldn’t hesitate to kill us anyway, no matter what we
promised in exchange for our lives. The only thing that makes sense to do, is
exactly the thing he is hoping to prevent.”

Biting back my annoyance at her lack
of specifics, I decide to humor her.

“Which is…?”

“We have to win.”

Now I’m the one rolling my eyes.
“No shit, Sherlock. Do you have a fucking plan, or are you just stating the
obvious for your own amusement?”

She glares. “Yes, I have a plan.
This is the plan. Look. Read it. You’ll see.”

She leans back from the computer,
eyeing me defiantly. It’s an email, with several attachments—must be the
documents from the flash drive. The body reads:

“Rachel, Jeanne, and Melissa;

You have all said you would be
able to run the story we discussed if any of us could unearth any hard cold
evidence. Well, I have. Here it is, straight from Jasper Breslin’s personal
laptop: emails proving insider trading within Breslin’s company, spreadsheets
tracking laundered money in Swiss accounts, names and dates, records of
payments to FBI-identified sex and drug traffickers, addresses and financial
records of brothel buildings that have since been raided and shut down. It
clearly shows that Breslin runs the largest sex-trafficking ring in New York
City, and has a self-documented record of sexual encounters with under-age
girls.

And, most horrible of all, a
list of young women’s names, dates, and a code that I have not yet cracked but
believe to be a clue to their present status and whereabouts. Half of the names
are directly traceable to federal missing person’s files starting in the year
2009. Several have been found over the years, dead. The first name on the list
is Sunny D., my sister’s nickname. She is still missing. I believe she is
alive.

It is for her, that I have
risked my life in getting you this information. Please do what you promised,
call the police chief I told you about in the Bronx—he will confirm everything
and point you to other authorities that will help. I have already sent copies
of these documents to the Manhattan D.A., my private lawyers, and my contact at
Homeland Security. Homeland Security has already responded, to let me know that
they are incorporating this data in their ongoing investigation of Breslin.
Their contact information is enclosed, so that you can confirm.

Time is short, not just for me,
but for the girls on this list. Please publish this quickly, but of course, not
the girls’ names. Who knows—perhaps some are still alive and can be saved. This
is what I will find out now. But publish the rest. Publish it for my Sunny, my
dear Keto. Publish it for me. Publish it for all of the innocents that Jasper
Breslin has destroyed. Once this hits the stands he will be crippled, and at
least one empire of evil will crumble. The world will be a better place. Your
journalism will have made a difference.

Sincerely,

 T.”

When I come to the end of the
email, I let out a deep breath. It explains everything and nothing. Why Tatiana
hates Breslin. Why she’s after him. Why she’s so obsessed, so relentless, so
determined. But still—if I am reading between the lines correctly, this tells
me that she’s working on her own. That she always has been. That this is the
culmination of her efforts, her big reveal. She may be poised to strike a
terrible blow against a bad guy, but what comes after she throws her final
punch? She’s got no support. No backup.

No chance.

“Jesus,” I whisper. “Baby girl, you
are in some deep shit. Is this true? I mean, I don’t doubt what you say about
Breslin, but can you actually prove any of it?”

She nods. “Yes.”

“With the stuff you found on his
laptop?”

“Yes. This is why he cared about
his laptop and wants it back. It’s his prized possession, his sick trophy for
himself. Like all evil men, Breslin laid the path for his own destruction. What
is the word the ancient Greeks had for lethal pride before the gods? Hubris?
This is Breslin. He has hubris. He kept records of everything, for his own
pride, foolishly believing no one would dig deep enough. But I did. And now, I
am finally one step away from finding my sister. An eyewitness. Maybe there
will be a few others, if we are lucky. If we are fast.”

I shake my head. It sounds exactly
like something Breslin would do, keeping explicit, obvious records of illegal
shit, believing that even with a paper or digital trail no one would be able to
touch him. He’s just that wonderful of a guy.

And just that rich.

Hell, he was rich and invulnerable
enough to wipe my slate clean, and offer me a job when no one else would dare
to touch me. He was immune to all my dirty laundry, able to absorb the infamy
and scandal and come out unscathed. He picked me up out of one gutter and then
chained me in an even dirtier hole. He was the only one powerful enough to erase
my mistakes, like a fucking Dark Messiah. And the price was my soul—the thing
that Tatiana is stirring back to life in me—against my better judgment.

And now Tatiana is so hopeful, her
eyes blazing with fervor and youthful zeal. I’m loath to crush her dreams of
justice. I chew on my tongue, thinking.

Tatiana continues, “Even in one
short day after taking his laptop I was able to fact-check a lot. It all stands.
The dates, the raids, the figures—much of it is in public record, but this
links everything straight to Breslin for the first time. My press contacts,
they have been waiting for this. It is a huge story. Once it breaks, his
company will stagger to its feet, lose money. Lose face. It will bring Breslin
to his knees and put him on the run.”

 While my brain strains to absorb
all of this new information and find the best angle, I glance over the email
addresses in her recipient list.

“Rachel Lee at New York Times,” I
read, “Jeanne Kane at Wall Street Journal, Melissa Anderson at USA Today.
Jesus. Tatiana, this is big. You understand? You send this out, they publish it—I
mean, there’s no going back after that. There’s no talking him down.”

“No negotiating you mean.” She
fixes her eyes on me. “What did you think, that I have come all this way and
risked this much just to apologize to Breslin, to ask him to forgive me for
upsetting him? My father used to have a saying. You don’t negotiate with rapid
dogs. You shoot them in the head.”

“Sounds like a warm guy, your father.”

“He wasn’t. But he was right.”

It’s hard to explain why I have
such a weight on my chest right now. It’s not just my survival instincts
objecting to getting myself deeper in the hole with Breslin, it’s something
more. It’s worry.

About her.

“Look Tatiana,” I say, “I’ve got no
love for Breslin, but I sure as hell respect the power and position that he
holds. That is why I know that even if this does come out, he’ll find a way
around it. His business might collapse, but he won’t. Not Breslin. At worst he’ll
escape to some island paradise and leave a few cleaners behind to wipe out the
people that hurt him. He’ll never let it go. That’s just the way this stuff
works.”