A knock interrupted my concentration. Akim stepped inside. I had seen him earlier as I was entering the club. He was busy behind the building with a man who probably made a very poor decision tonight. Whatever the man did, Akim corrected it. He was good at that and understood his work well. That was why he remained my right-hand man.
“Boss, we have a problem,” Akim said, stepping near my table.
I didn’t look up from the laptop that needed a password to unlock. Akim was smart enough to handle whatever this was before it reached me.
“Someone stole your money.”
His words made me pause. I leaned back, letting the chair swallow me. So the man Akim was torturing outside was a thief. Either the guards and the employees were incompetent, or in on it.
“Boss?”
“Handle it,” I said. If I stepped in myself, the club would erupt into chaos before I could finish a single sentence.
He stepped closer. “Sir, I wanted to confirm with you first. So she is not your wife, by any chance?”
I raised an eyebrow without looking at him. “What nonsense is that?”
Akim pushed his phone onto the desk. “This is what the Torres guy said.”
He tapped the screen, and a video started. The face of an old bastard from my casino flashed on the screen. An idiot who had run up a debt and promised fifty thousand a month to keep breathing. He was supposed to be paying me. Instead, he was trembling, blood streaking his lips.
“She … she came and said she was the boss’s wife. I didn’t know.” The man coughed. “She threatened to call the boss. Please … I didn’t know the boss didn’t have a wife or a son. Bu—” His voice cracked, betraying the little courage he had left.
“How does she look?” Akim asked, making him describe it.
“I … I don’t remember clearly, but she had short hair—”
Akim’s fist met his stomach, and the man flinched.
I leaned back, already confused. “What am I watching?” I asked.
Akim exhaled. “Mister Torres got tricked by a lady who showed up and claimed she’s your wife. She also said you have a son together. That’s what he’s trying to explain.”
I looked at Akim for a moment, letting the words settle. The idea pressed against my patience hard enough that a laugh almost slipped out.
“Mister Torres was drunk. It looks like it was easy for her to trick him—”
“Are you insane?” A chuckle escaped me, dry enough that Akim stepped back on instinct. “You want me to believe some desperate woman with short hair walked up to a grown-ass man and took my money?”
“Boss.”
“And you believed him.” I pushed the phone back toward him and turned to the laptop. “Do not insult me by bringing thisnonsense back here. He is lying, so handle it how I would.”
Akim hesitated.
“Kill him and his brother,” I snapped. “Shut the restaurant down. We’ll turn the place into a club. I don’t entertain bullshit.”
Akim stepped forward again and slid the phone back onto the desk. “I hacked the CCTV from the meeting point. And it’s true, a woman approached him.”
God help me, my patience was running thin. But Akim didn’t bring half-baked problems to my table. If he said there was something, there was. I looked at the screen again.
The Torres guy leaned against a trash can, a cigarette between his fingers, smoke curling upward. The footage was grainy, but I could see a woman approaching from behind. She paused briefly, then closed the distance. They exchanged a few words, her hands moving as she spoke.
Torres stepped back, pointing a finger at her. She reached for something in her pocket. I thought it was a knife, but it was a phone. Whatever she said next made Torres straighten and bow.
He passed the briefcase to her without protest, and she took it. She tucked it tight under her arm, glanced both ways, and then bolted, disappearing from the frame.
The clip ended, and I stayed where I was, eyes fixed on the frozen footage. “What is this?” I asked.