“What the fuck?” Rafe said.
“You’re not going to be mad when I show you what we found,” Storm said.
“We hiredyou,” Nolan said.
“I know, but trust me on this,” she said.
“Who’s the girl?” the man next to Storm asked. Now that we were closer, I saw that he had the same gray eyes as Storm, the same mouth. I wondered if they were siblings.
“None of your fucking business,” Rafe said.
I was torn between being annoyed that Rafe was speaking for me and being weirdly flattered that he sounded almost protective.
I stuck out my hand just to annoy him. “Lilah.”
The guy looked me up and down but there was nothing sexual about it. His gray eyes catalogued my features like a chatbot scanning a passage of highlighted text. He nodded but didn’t offer his name.
Whatever, asshole.
Jude pulled out one of the chairs, gesturing for me to sit, while Nolan pulled over two more.
“This better be good,” Rafe said.
Storm started tapping at her laptop. “I had this feeling I was missing something, about the shell company. It sounded…I don’t know, weird. Most of the time these companies are so generic.”
“Generic how?” I asked, because the only thing I knew about shell companies were the things I’d learned in our last conversation with Storm.
“Like… ‘Consolidated Industries’ or ‘Smithfield LLC.' The ‘John Smith’ of corporations.”
I nodded. None of those sounded like “Imperium Fratrum.”
“So shell companies are named to be forgotten,” I said. “To be invisible.”
“Exactly,” Storm said. “Does Imperium Fratrum sound invisible?”
I shook my head, because no, it didn’t.
“Storm asked me about it,” the man sitting next to her said.
“Gage suggested the dark web,” Storm said, clearly referring to the guy sitting next to her.
“The dark web?” Anything I knew about the dark web I’d learned from bad thrillers watched on the one and only streaming service I paid for.
“It’s an online marketplace,” Storm said.
“And an online meeting place,” Gage added.
Nolan looked at Gage. “Did you find anything?”
“It’ll be easier to show you.” Storm moved her chair and turned her laptop around so we could see what she was doing.
She pulled up a black screen with a series of bold green titles: 5K VALID CREDIT CARD NUMBERS, PURE FENTANYL + TRANSPORT, RESISTANCE OF THE RED GUARD.
I didn’t understand the last one, but I definitely understood the first two.
And there were other things on offer too, things I wished I hadn’t seen, things I knew would haunt me when I tried to sleep that night. I felt gross, like I needed a shower, like I’d seen something perverse, which tracked I guess.
Storm scrolled down, talking as she worked. “Hang on, it’s farther down. At first I wasn’t sure it had anything to do with the job you gave me, but now… I don’t know. Let me just show you.”