Chapter 14: Chapter 14

Images and articles flicker across the laptop screen. I bring the glass of vodka to my lips, taking a slow sip, scanning the information in front of me.

Taylor Crown has had an illustrious career. Top of her class, graduating magna cum laude from NYU; early, at that. Then on to Harvard Law, where she was, again, the very top of her class—right above her two co-partners at the firm.

I’ve tried digging deeper into her social media. But she hardly has any social presence on the web. What little there is strictly involves her work, which she seems to have been slavishly married to for the last dozen years.

She was a top junior associate at Kramer, O’Donnel, and List. Then they bumped her onto partner track after a few years of, frankly, killing it with them. She received an even better offer from a rival firm…and then two more even better ones from two other rival firms.

But she stayed at Kramer, O’Donnel, and List. Which is…curious.

It wasn’t due to a lack of intelligence or drive. She was purposeful in turning down every other offer.

Out of loyalty.

That’s something new she’s learned in the last fifteen years…

A few years later, though, after an inhuman number of billable hours at the firm, she handed in her notice. So did Alistair and Gabriel Black, at their own firms. The three of them formed Crown and Black, pooling their resources, talent…and more than a few poached clients.

I smirk grimly. There it is. There’s the traitorous streak I know all too well.

I frown as I dig deeper, looking for anything I can about the formation of their firm. Alistair and Gabriel come from some money…not much. Their grandfather, Charles Black, was once a bit of a kingmaker in the gray underbelly of New York. A wannabe gangster who couldn’t quite stomach getting his hands dirty. Apparently he was an early investor and board member of Crown and Black, but it looks like he’s recently been kicked out and doesn’t have anything to do with the firm anymore.

But even there, Charles is wealthy, but he’s not the sort of wealthy that could fund the startup of a firm like Crown and Black. Nothing I read about him, including the tidbit that his own grandsons and a young daughter he’s had with his much younger trophy second wife seem to loathe him, would suggest he had that much invested.

So where the fuck did they get their startup cash?

I put down my drink, and my fingers fly over the keys as I pull up whatever public-record financials I can find. When that isn’t enough, I text Dimitri, a brute-force hacker I have on retainer. I have no fucking idea what time it is in Tokyo right now, but the kid never sleeps anyway.

Sure enough, he responds instantly and gets to work.

And I sit back and let my eyes drag across image after image of a grown-up Taylor Crown.

Aka Annika Brancovich: the Trojan horse who let the enemy inside my walls to destroy my world.

She was always beautiful, I suppose. I was pissed at the idea of marrying for political reasons when I was just twenty-two, and finally free of war after years of bloodshed in the Balkan conflicts. But I was livid at having to marry the daughter of our enemy.

Even so, I’ll admit she was beautiful in that youthful way: tall, leggy, long chestnut brown hair—dyed, obviously—down to her waist. But the Annika I know now, who I’ve taken, and who will play a role to get me what I want, is something else altogether.

She’s simply gorgeous now.

She’s matured into a woman that any man would trip over himself to have. She’s still got the legs and the height. But her hips have filled out into a toned ass, and her tits…

Jesus Christ, I’m…hard.

Very, very hard.

It’s not just that she’s grown into a stunning woman. The world is full of those.

…But none of them, at least hardly any, have the same black tastes as me.

And one of those is her.

My mind replays the delicious way she whimpered in the dark for me. The way she wanted me to chase her. Begged me to, in fact.

To hunt her. To pin her down. To hurt her.

To be my willing and eager little fuck toy and cum slut.

For a brief second, I allow my hand to drop to the obscene bulge in my pants. I cup myself as my eyes slide back to the screen, to an image of Annika—Taylor—smiling for the camera at some charity ball hosted by Crown and Black. She’s in a stunning shimmering green gown that plunges down her back and shows off a tasteful yet teasing amount of cleavage. The contrast between the glittering emerald and the fiery red of her hair brings out a hunger in me that…

Stop it.

I yank my hand away from my throbbing, thick erection and glare at the picture.

No.

I scroll back to the earliest things I can find on her. There’s a great-aunt—Florence, with whom she lived in New York the summer before she started college. But Florence died essentially the week “Taylor” started school. And before that…

My brow furrows.

There really is nothing.

Not a single thing on social media. No schools attended. No places lived.

Nothing.

“Taylor Crown” even has a social security number—a clean one, at that. She has a fucking US passport. Just—no past.

How the fuck did she go to college, let alone Harvard, with no educational records?

My phone dings with a text from Dimitri, telling me he’s found what I wanted and that it’s sitting in my inbox. I wire him his usual fee and open what he’s sent me: financial records pulled from Crown and Black’s internal server.

He’s good, Dimitri. And fucking fast. This time he was even quicker than when I had him hack into the NYPD servers and delete the videos of her in that car, not to mention the naked parking garage footage after she escaped from me that first time.

As satisfying as it would have been to see her career go up in flames, I couldn’t have Annika disappearing into the judicial system and eluding my wrath.

Yes, I have questions—several, actually—concerning that stolen Lamborghini. But they can wait.

This is far more pressing.

I find the file I’m looking for and open it. My eyes scan the breakdown of the startup costs of Crown and Black, looking for the source of funds. Sure enough, there’s a decent chunk from Charles Black. Gabriel and Alistair both seem to have emptied their modest trust funds, too.

And then I spot Taylor’s contribution, which is noted as “the entirety of her trust fund”.

My blood boils when I see the amount, which is literally sixty-five percent of the money they needed to open the doors.

You little fucking liar.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. One of my little details that I’ve never been able to tie up is that the night I lost everything, I was also robbed. I didn’t realize until later, of course. But after I’d pulled myself out of the wreckage, buried my family and fled into the night, I realized the emergency fund my father had kept secret and separate from everything else was now gone.

Only he and I knew about the suitcase he kept locked in the safe in his office. The safe not even I knew the combination to. A fireproof safe containing twenty-two million US dollars, cash. Yet when I was pawing through the wreckage of my home the day after I lost everything, I found that safe empty.

My eyes drag back to the screen in front of me. I drop my gaze to “Taylor Crown” on the opening funds contribution list for the law firm, and the amount next to her name.

My hands curl to fists.

Her “trust fund” contribution to open the firm was twenty-two-million dollars.

My mind spins as my rage throbs under the surface.

I saw her body. I spit on her corpse.

…Which, I now see clearly, wasn’t Annika. Somehow, she got away that night. She knew about the money and somehow opened a goddamn number-pad safe before disappearing to the US, to this mysterious great-aunt Florence.

She changed her name to Taylor Crown and settled into a normal, quiet life. She was smart. She didn’t buy a splashy mansion or a fleet of sports cars. She sat on that stolen money, way off my radar. And then when opportunity came knocking, she finally used it to build her own empire.

A growl rumbles through my chest, but I restrain myself from marching through the house until I find her and throw her to the rocks beneath the cliffs.

Punish the hand that wielded the tool, not the tool.

The goal here isn’t Annika. It’s Vadik. Well, first it’s Vadik. But after I get him, using her?

Then I’ll exact my revenge on her as well.

I drum my fingers on the edge of my desk as I click away from the financial statements and to the cameras that cover every angle of my home and my island.

She’s not in her room.

My mouth curves darkly at the corners as I shrug off my jacket and slowly roll up my sleeves to the elbow.

I keep clicking on different cameras. None of them show her in the house.

My smile turns…hungry.

I would appear she took the bait.

Slowly, I open my desk drawer and pull out the matte black devil mask.

Time to run, my little slut.