Page 1 of Locked and Loaded

PROLOGUE

“You need to take care of this.” It wasn’t a request; it was a threat.

Eli Fisher mopped his brow and then adjusted his laptop cover to fix the camera angle. It still wasn’t flattering. There was very little that could make Eli Fisher appealing.

“But how?” he whined. “Don’t you have people for this? I know you have people. You had them take care of Bunny and Stuart Wellington.”

The Curator and his minion wife. Such ego. Such a waste. That mess had forced her hand. She hadn’t been exposed, but it had been close. Too close. She was no longer willing to take the risk. Now it was time to extract herself from the game but not before she inflicted as much damage as possible on her enemies.

She leaned forward. “I need information. I need to know what the Society knows about Lennox Crowe.”

Panic flickered across Fisher’s face. “Why can’t you do it? You’ve always done all this before.” His whining set her teeth on edge. But he continued, “My job has only ever been⁠—”

“To do exactly what I tell you. I created you, Eli. Brought you into the circle. I gave you power. I can make that go away just as quickly.”

Fisher mopped his brow again. “I still don’t understand how I am supposed to get information out of Armand Fontaine. The man doesn’t trust me. He doesn’t trust anyone as far as I can tell.”

“That’s precisely why Archer Gray chose him,” she reminded Fisher. How had she gone so far wrong with this man? At times, he was more tedious than she could have imagined. Austin Davis had been completely egocentric and easy to manipulate, but he was never tedious. So much had gone wrong since… But now was not the time to dwell on that.

In a voice that brooked no rebuttal, she told him, “You must find a way in. Use a secretary or security personnel who is unhappy. Find some way into the inner circle. I must know what they know.”

Fisher leaned back in his chair, and the screen wobbled as he moved the laptop lid yet again and then crossed his arms over his chest. “Fontaine doesn’t know anything. I keep telling you that. He thinks the whole thing is over. That Stuart ran everything. We’re in the clear, and with Gray gone, there’s nothing left to cause interference. You’re being too paranoid.”

She tried not to grind her teeth. What did he know of paranoia? She hadn’t been paranoid enough in the past, and it had cost her dearly. The struggle to rebuild her life… her empire… had cost too much. She wasn’t willing to take that kind of risk again. “We wouldn’t be in this situation if you had taken over the Lock and Key Society as you were supposed to.”

Fisher pressed his too-thin lips into a stark, tight line. “That was not my fault. How was I supposed to know that Archer Gray left a directive behind or that people would vote for it?”

“You were supposed to know because that’s what you get paid for. It is your job to know everything. You are falling down on the job.” The icy words held a menacing threat. It didn’t need to be spelled out for Fisher. He knew what he was being told.

He swallowed. “I—I’ll find a way. I just need more time.”

“Time is running out.” The woman leaned forward and killed the call.

Fisher was becoming a liability, just like Austin Davis before him. He had gotten a taste for power and now he thought he was untouchable. No one was untouchable. No one. Which was why knowing what Armand Fontaine knew about Lennox Crowe was so important. She was the key to the downfall of the Lock and Key Society. It had to go well. Decisions had to be made but they could not be made when she lacked all the relevant information.

If Fontaine knew about Crowe, then he should want to silence her, a fact which worked nicely as long as it didn’t happen too early. Crowe needed to stir up enough trouble for the Lock and Key Society that they were dragged into the open. To do that, she’d been fed the right information at the right time. But there was no guarantee. If Crowe didn’t reach out to the reporter soon, then she was just a nuisance, but one that could bring much trouble.

And then there was the question of proof. Crowe had proof of the mastermind’s existence, although she didn’t realize it. It was proving much more difficult than first thought to get that proof back. Her stuff had been searched multiple times but turned up nothing. The idea had been to follow her until they could get what Crowe had, but, as she’d told Fisher, time was running out. And Crowe was digging into things she shouldn’t.

Her whole plan had been to discredit the Lock and Key Society. To drag it out into the open and watch it go down in flames. What better way than to let some grieving woman search for her trafficked sister and then tell the world what she found out? The story practically wrote itself. She rubbed her palms together gleefully. Every journalist would be chomping at the bit to write about a secret society that catered to the biggest desires of wealthy and powerful people. It was like a Category Five hurricane, larger even than Epstein and all his cronies. Not a single country, not one government, would be untouched. Archer Gray and the Society would go down in flames.

It had all seemed so…delicious. Eliminate the Society and exact her revenge. She hadn’t anticipated that Gray would die, if indeed he was dead. She wasn’t convinced he was actually gone. Not sure at all

She tapped her fingernails on her desk. Archer Gray was definitely missed, and that thought was a surprise. She loathed the man. He’d caused her a great deal of difficulty. It had been a shock when that little tidbit of information, of Archer Gray’s death, had been released.

He was smarter than he was often given credit for. Most people saw him as a powerhouse, but few, if any, saw just how diabolical he could be. Tangling with Archer Gray was like playing three-D chess when everyone else was playing checkers. He was always steps ahead. Hatred coursed through her sharply, a vicious, angry spike lodged between her shoulder blades.

Still, in a way, she mused, he was responsible for her turning her life around and for her becoming the mastermind behind one of the biggest human trafficking networks in the world. Perhaps she should have thanked him. She would have loved the opportunity to meet with him face to face. She’d dreamed of it many times. Of course, her dreams had involved sticking a knife between his ribs. Too bad some dreams did not come true.

But the thing about Archer Gray had been that a person always knew what he would do because he lived by the rule book. It had been so easy to manipulate him into doing her bidding on occasion. He’d had no idea that he’d been her pawn, but she’d reveled in it. All she ever had to do was force one of her rivals to break the rules of the Society, and Archer would take them out for her. It had been divine.

Of course, not all of her rivals were members of the Society, but it was amazing just how many were.

Sadly, Armand Fontaine was proving more difficult. She was quite sure the man had thrown the rule book in his fireplace and toasted marshmallows over it. And that was a serious cause for concern.

A small frown marred the mastermind’s face. There were unexplained things going on within the Society. Things that had started before Archer died. Maybe left was a better word? Regardless, the Society was making moves that didn’t add up. Selling real estate. Closing some of the small, lesser-used locations. Gray had started the process, but Fontaine was continuing it. There was something going on just under the surface which could have a catastrophic impact on the current state of business. Fisher, as inept as she was finding him, had to find out. Lives depended on it.

Fisher was not wrong, though. There were people to deal with Lennox Crowe. And that time was rapidly approaching. If Crowe didn’t go to the press with her proof about the Society soon, it would be too late. The risk wasn’t worth it. The mastermind drummed her nails on the desk.