“Call forwarding and a little misdirection.” He tapped the burner lightly. “It won’t hold forever.”
That didn’t calm me.
“You could have told me.”
“I just did.”
I stared at the table, the whorled pattern in the faux wood grain swimming at the edges of my vision. “So…what’s he saying?”
He slid the phone across the table, screen angled toward me. I hesitated, then picked it up, sinking my teeth into my bottom lip.
We need to speak, Alex. This has gotten out of hand.
I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, but you’ve made a massive mistake. You’ve put yourself in a precarious position. This isn’t how these things are handled.
Come now, be reasonable. We’ve dealt with situations like this internally before. Escalating it only hurts everyone involved.
My stomach tightened. The word “internally” echoed longer than it should have.
Little fox, do you really think you’re the first girl to try this? You’ll get tired before I do. I always come out on top.
I set the phone down—slowly, deliberately—in front of Luka.
“Take this,” I said, punctuating my thought with a shaky breath, “before I do something stupid.”
“Respond, you mean?”
“Yes.”
He nodded.
I stood and paced between the table and the kitchen barstools. “Could we send that to the police?”
Luka narrowed his eyes. “He can’t reach you,mila.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s not that. I mean, can we send those texts to the police to help build the case? Bring him down.”
His face eased, and he leaned back in the chair and studied me for a long moment. “We can…”
“But?”
“The police are one lever. Not the only lever.” He tapped his index finger on the burner phone. “And, in this case, not the most effective. Especially if you’d prefer to stay out of the fire.”
“Okay.” I folded my arms tight across my middle. “What’s the other lever? What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking this information won’t do much sitting in a police file.” He glanced at one monitor, where Richard’s face was already multiplying across headlines. “But the press?” He shrugged, light and easy. “They pounce. It spreads through every channel he depends on. Maximum character damage for him, and you don’t become the story.”
My breath turned shallow. My heart jackhammered at the base of my throat. My mind split in two—one half urging caution, the other chantingdo it,do it,do it, until the words didn’t even sound like words.
Another text message hit the burner, so hard and sudden it vibrated across the tabletop.
Answer me, you stupid cunt.
I let out a slow hiss, not sure if I was going to cry, laugh, or vomit. There was something almost beautiful in how Richard had stripped away the pretense, all the silk-and-steel vocabulary of the conference room. This was the creature at the core: blunt, ugly, and terrified.
Luka didn’t flinch. “He knows he’s cornered,” he said, voice so calm it was almost comforting. “Now he has to keep digging.”
I stared at the screen, the words spreading through my veins like venom. The kitchen lights flickered, or maybe it was just my vision tunneling.