I almost wanted to laugh, but she was dead serious.
"So he could have been our leak?" Archer asked, tapping at his chin thoughtfully.
"It seems that way," Leon agreed. "There were several items at his crash pad that suggested it, like a collection of women's underwear and some image stills taken from the security feeds around the property."
"Wait, are we saying that Trevor was the stalker himself?" I blurted out, frowning in confusion.
Leon gave me a curious look. "You don't think he was?"
I shook my head. "It's too easy. My stalker is way too smart to be caught with evidence like that."
Danny nodded. "That was our thought too. We suspect Trevor was just his inside man and the evidence was either planted or given as a payment of sorts. In our digging, we found Trevor has a history of swiping ladies’ underwear from laundromats."
"Gross," I whispered, horrified.
"Right?" Danny wrinkled her cute nose in disgust. "Anyway, if Trevor was the inside guy, then at the very least your stalker will have a hard time getting access to the property. He definitely won't be able to override the camera feeds to hide his package deliveries either; Leon's taken care of that."
Leon jerked a nod. "Your digital print is now tighter than a nun's nasty. Only people with access are you four and Sampson."
Kody snickered a laugh at that metaphor, and Danny rolled her eyes.
"Another thing," she said, "we paid a little visit to your obsessive blogger girl a couple of days ago. She's harmless and damn near peed her pants over the whole thing. However, she didn't take her blog site down as requested, so we're going to pop over there now before we leave for Serbia and have another chat with her."
"Also, we dug up who put the hit out on you," Leon announced like a fucking afterthought. My jaw fell open when he didn’t immediately continue. He shot me a grin like he knew he was dragging out the suspense.
Danny clearly wasn't in the mood for games, though. She sighed and shook her head at him. "After Archer gave us the information he and Demi Timber had gathered, it wasn't too hard to chase the right threads," she told me directly. "Archer said he thought you had an uncle or cousin who stood to gain in the event of your death, and he was on the right track there. You already knew that Katerina and Abel had twins, Deb and Declan. What was very well concealed was that Abel's considerably younger sister, Josephine, had a daughter, Serena."
"She's the one trying to kill me?" I asked, dumbfounded.
"Unlikely," Leon grunted. "Josephine and her husband, Gunther Zukman, died when Serena was three. She was raised by her paternal grandparents in a strict, Catholic household with no contact with the Wittenberg family whatsoever."
Archer scrubbed his hand over his stubbled cheek. "So, Serena was the one who would have inherited prior to Kate's marriage to me?"
Leon nodded. "Yep, technically."
"Technically?" I repeated, sensing more to the story.
Danny nodded to the folder of papers. "Page forty-seven of the report. Serena Zukman took a nasty fall down a flight of stairs around ten years ago. Left her paralyzed and brain damaged. She was declared mentally unfit, and power of attorney passed to her husband."
My brows shot up. "Ten years ago? So... just before Katerina and my mother were both killed? As well as the trusted CEO Katerina assigned to run Wittenberg? That's not a coincidence."
Leon yawned, then nodded. "Our thoughts exactly. Serena's husband is on page fifty-three."
Archer flipped the report open to that page, which showed a photo of a totally ordinary looking man somewhere in his forties with a receding hairline and glasses.
"Karl Beymen. Married Serena Zukman three years before her so-called accident. Also goes under the fabricated name Karl Kruger." Leon paused then, his sharp gaze on me.
I frowned. "Should that name mean something to me?"
"It should," he replied. "He's the current CEO of Wittenberg."
"It doesn't add up," I muttered after Danny and Leon had left. They were paying another quick visit to MrsJones4eva before catching their flight.
"I agree," Steele said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "Based on the assumption that estates pass to the next living blood relative in the event of a death without a will, then Samuel would be next in line to inherit. He’d be MK’s closest blood relative."
"Unless he’s not," Kody offered.
The silence that fell after that suggestion was thick enough to suffocate, and I shifted nervously in my seat. Was my dad not biologically my dad? That might explain his total lack of human emotion toward me and his willingness to sell me off.
"Bear with me," Kody continued, "we know that Deb did a lot of cover-up to hide MK from her family, right? What if Kruger never knew Deb had a daughter, then came here and killed her—or hired someone to do it—when he found out she was pregnant—"
"With Zane's baby," Archer murmured, his expression thoughtful.
Kody nodded. "Then his wife inherits the company because there are supposedly no other heirs. Deb had specifically edited her will to cut Samuel out in the event of her death, but instead of naming MK, she had put blood relative."
"So what changed?" I pressed. "What caused him to find me six years later and put a price on my head?"
"Your father," Steele offered. "Your father was up to his neck in debts and might have been looking into how to access your trust fund. It was set up by Deb and Katerina, though, and he had no clue what he was poking around at. Maybe somehow he found out that he wasn't your biological father, and that's why he sold you off."
"Cutting his losses," I muttered, bitterness coating my words.
"And alerting Kruger to your existence at the same time," Archer added with a sigh.
"It's just a theory," Kody added, "and not likely to be something we can ever work out for sure, but..." He trailed off with a shrug.
I nodded. "You're right. It's a theory, but it's a pretty good one. It makes sense. Except, if Samuel isn't my father... who is? And why don't we just make my marriage to Archer public knowledge. Our pre-nup safeguards my assets from passing to anyone but him, right?"
Kody shrugged. "So Kruger's guys kill Arch first, then you. Boom, boom, done."
Archer's phone rang, cutting through the heavy tension of our hypothesizing, and he frowned when he looked at the screen.
"What's happened?" he asked when he answered the call on speaker.
"You might want to get over here and check this out," Leon replied. Danny was cursing something wicked in the background, and I shot a worried look at Archer. "I'll send the address and a couple of pics. Dan and I have to get going, but chat to management if you want us to loop back when we get a couple of days off."
Archer grimaced. "Will do. Thanks Leon."
"Thank you," he replied with a laugh. "It's nice to be hired for brains over brawn sometimes."
Danny muttered something to him in the background, and he cracked up laughing, then ended the call.