She pulled her hand away and walked on wobbly legs over to the dinette table. Sitting down, she resettled her wig on her head with shaking fingers. Adrenaline was a bitch sometimes.
Virus plopped down in the chair next to her with a loud grunt. He laid one large, tan-skinned, big-knuckled hand over hers. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget that some scars are easier to hide than others.”
Rosemary relaxed into the warmth of their connection. Sometimes, she did too.
Chapter Twenty
Virus was being charming. Fucking charming. Aleksei wouldn’t have believed it if he wasn’t seeing it. Virus was joking with Rose as his fingers disassembled and reassembled the laptop with a dexterity that shouldn’t seem possible from such bulky hands.
“No tracker,” Virus said, beaming as he pushed the computer toward Rosemary. “Nothing to worry about.”
The statement lifted the jungle of anxiety that had rooted in Aleksei’s neck and shoulders the second Rose had mentioned the computer. At least now he knew they hadn’t been advertising their location the entire time they were traveling. If they got online, that would be a different story, but Virus had enough equipment and skills to block their location for at least a short while if need be. They'd cross that bridge when they came to it.
“I’d never forgive myself if something happened to either of you because I didn’t mention this computer,” Rose said, looking down at the closed laptop in front of her.
She looked so unhappy. He’d trade ten years of his life for a do-over of the last half hour.
“It's not your fault. This shithead,” Virus said, pointing his thumb toward him, “should have asked you whether you had any other electronics with you. There's no way you could have known. If it's anybody's fault, it's his.”
Yep. Rose had made a friend for life, and now he was the one in the doghouse.
“Well, this shithead thinks that we should fire this thing up and see what's in here,” he said.
Rose’s head snapped up, her blue eyes flashing. “You want to start the computer? After you yelled at me for bringing it with me? I thought you said they could find our location if I logged in.”
“They can only track the IP address if we get online. Pannetone’s office was targeted, and you said that you’d found something concerning in one of the client files before you left. Was it about Moresco?”
Rose bit her lip and pressed her hands into her temples.
Virus shifted in his seat, a glare on his face, but he didn't speak. Aleksei knew he wouldn’t. Virus might not like seeing Rose upset, but he understood the need for answers. Aleksei had brought Virus up to speed during their morning walk. Virus knew how dangerous Salvatore Moresco was. Knew the choices Aleksei had made and why. He disapproved, but he understood.
The timing of Rose’s discovery and the explosion were too close to be coincidental. Moresco wanted Pannetone, his people, and his entire business gone, so the first step in figuring out what was going on was getting the details around whatever Rose had discovered.
“I feel like I’m breaching Armando’s trust,” she said.
“Think about it as trying to pin down Armando’s killer,” he offered.
He didn’t add that they couldn’t even be sure Armando was dead. One man had survived the explosion.
Virus grasped Rose’s right forearm, gently pulling it away from her head and toward the table. “Aleksei’s correct. Right now, your computer is the only potential lead we have. I know you’re angry with Aleksei, and you have every right to be, but it doesn't make him wrong about this. We need to get to the bottom of this shitshow before someone else gets hurt. You need to tell him what was going on at work.”
She opened her eyes and smiled at Virus, a sweet, grateful smile. “Thank you. This entire experience has been very unsettling. I appreciate how kind you’re being to me.”
He wished Virus hadn’t reminded Rose that she had good reason to be pissed at him. He wished that warm smile was for him.
She might never smile like that at me again.
The thought was like stitches without anesthesia, but there was no time for self-pity or regrets. They had work to do.
“What did you find?” he prompted.
“I found a couple of invoices on Moresco projects for work that was never done,” she said. “They were for elevators in single-story warehouses. I told Armando about them right before I left for vacation. We started reviewing files on other Moresco projects to see if we could find more suspicious invoices, but there are hundreds of files, so we didn’t make a lot of progress. Armando wanted to get his arms around the issue before discussing it with Sal.”
Of course he did. Stealing from the mob was a life-ending choice. If Armando was the one generating the fake invoices, he would have wanted to divert suspicion away from himself. On the other hand, if Armando was cooking the books for Moresco and missed someone else stealing, he'd be shitting bricks as well.
“Log on,” he encouraged, waving his hand toward the computer.
Rose’s fingers trembled slightly as she opened the laptop and entered her login and password. “I don’t think this will be of any use without connecting to the server. All the Moresco files were on a local server in the basement. I assume it was destroyed in the explosion.”