Bryna shook her head.
"I don't know. I just thought I was so smart." Emma mumbled.
I squeezed her nape. "Don't worry about it. Alex hasn't been able to come up with anything either. Middleton's smart. Smarter than we gave him credit for."
Emma ran her hands through her hair. "I just feel like I failed at all of this and I put everyone in so much danger. It was really unnecessary."
"Aw, stop that." Bryna shook her head. “Didn’t I already try flogging myself?”
Nyla stood and grabbed herself a cream puff. "Do you understand how much danger I've put this team in before? We've all been there. We are a family. We have each other's backs." She spoke around the puff in her mouth.
East, of course, watched his fiancée's arse as she bent over the coffee table and grabbed another pastry.
Amelia had her laptop too. "I'm doing a deep dive on the security team he used. I'll ask my contacts from work and find out exactly who he used. See if anyone is willing to talk off the record. Someone had to have seen something. Someone has to know about him or what he's been doing. We'll figure it out."
We had the whole team on this. But I could still see defeat in Emma's eyes.
"I'm so dumb." She glanced up at me. "You all tried to tell me. You all tried to warn me that I was in way over my head. You tried to get me to stop, to listen. You tried to get me to let you handle this. And instead of listening, instead of working together, I just made this worse."
I smoothed a hand over her hair, the silken tresses slipping through my fingers. "Look, nothing I say is going to make you feel better right now. You're determined to blame yourself, but we are the London Lords. We look after one another. And Toby was one of ours. We were always going after Middleton. And chances are something like this was going to happen anyway. The only complication is that he's too fixated on you. He's already tried to hurt you once. We have to protect you while taking him down."
She licked her lips nervously. "Maybe I had that wrong. Maybe—"
I squeezed her hand. "Stop it. Stop it now. You didn't have that wrong. I saw him at the party. He’s unhinged. I'm not putting you in that line of potential danger again. Under no circumstances."
She nodded. "I know. I know. It’s just… The whole time we had a plan, and I just kept thinking about things I could have done in a million different ways."
Telly sat up straight. "Holy shit. I think I have something."
East growled from his corner. "The fuck you do. I'm still trying to crack psychiatry reports from Eggston Psychiatric where he spent some time."
"You should have picked a different flash drive," she said and stuck her tongue out at him. "Okay, on this flash drive, we have a list of missing girls. Dozens of them. Organized somehow in three groups. I can’t figure out the rhyme or reason. There is a sub-folder with bank details. We already know Middleton senior was paying into some accounts in Barcelona. But what we didn't know is that those accounts and payments always seem to coincide with Middleton having been to Barcelona. Junior, not Senior. The amounts vary from five to fifty thousand euros, except for one large payment of two hundred thousand pounds. For the most part, they go to shell corporations which are endless threads to follow. But I was actually able to track the largest one of them. Not necessarily because the person got sloppy, but because the amount was different and larger. I found this."
She brought the laptop over, and we all crowded around. I dragged Emma into my lap so she could see better. We eventually had to pass the damn thing around. When it got to me, I frowned. "Okay, so who is Collette Windham?"
"Collette Windham is a close family friend of the Middletons. She grew up with our friendly neighborhood psychopath. The two of them had been holidaying in Barcelona. After that holiday, through a series of shell corporations, Collette was paid two hundred thousand pounds."
I frowned. "Jesus Christ. Why would Middleton senior have paid her that kind of money?"
Telly shrugged. "That's the question. We will need to talk to her. And here's the kicker. That was not the only payment made to Collette. Every month since the initial payment six months ago, they've made another deposit of fifty thousand pounds."
"You think he hurt her?"
Telly shrugged. "I don't know. I've been looking for hospital records on her. I haven't found anything though. That'll be harder to crack."
"All right. If we can get her to talk, we have leverage."
I glanced around at my mates, East, Ben, and Drew, and they all nodded. We were so close. We knew that he had a tendency to hurt women, and there had to be more than Collette. And if there were others, we might have a legal avenue, or a not so legal avenue. Either way, we had him in the crosshairs now.
Forty-Two
Emma
The following day, I left the mansion with security in tow to go meet Nyla and Amelia for lunch. They had a community outreach partner they wanted me to work with to build up their profile. It was a small job for a friend of Amelia's, but it was something. I’d take it, as I couldn’t go back to Middleton’s, and I still didn't feel comfortable working for Bridge. Even though he told me point blank that I wouldn't be working for him directly, it was still his company. And I needed a little bit of separation.
I stepped out of the car into the rare English sunshine. Sunlight glinted off the glass and chrome of the Interpol building when someone called my name. Security flanked me immediately, and I turned slowly, recognizing exactly who was calling to me.
How did he know where I’d be? They'd scrubbed me for bugs head to toe. Unless I'd fucking ingested something. But I was careful never to drink around him. How was this happening?
"Francis, what a surprise to find you here."
"I had a client meeting, and lo and behold, I saw you getting out of the car. I was very confused when you didn't come into work this morning."
"Well, as you know, upon further reflection, I am no longer fit for Middleton Communications. And given my immediate, pressing need to take care of my health, I am unable to continue working at Middleton. And since I wasn't there very long, like many of your female employees, a severance wasn’t necessary. I do feel I left you in a hurry, but obviously, you have the clients handled, right?" I forced a tight smile on my face, and he frowned at me.
"Your husband nearly broke my finger in Barcelona."
"Did he? Are you sure? It was just so chaotic." I made sure to add an attempt at innocence into my voice. There was something very specific about my voice that always made me seem like I was causing trouble, or at least up to something.
He stepped closer, but my security pulled him farther from me. "You can tell your husband I know what he's up to. And I want to know what he was doing on my property."
I lifted my brows. "You're awfully sure of yourself. We were at the reception with you when the lights went out. I am prone to panic attacks though, and I just had to leave. I so hope it didn't cause any inconvenience."
His gaze narrowed. “Everybody else stayed. Why did you have to go?"