Page 93 of Her Selfless Warrior (Omega Sky)
“Rhianna’s a sweetheart, and if she’s a good friend of Dawn’s, I’m betting Dawn is too. She didn’t mention Candy, but she did say that Dawn had family in town. To begin with, Dawn was really excited, but by the third day, she was shaky and asking for the extra shifts. When Rhianna asked what was going on, Dawn asked her if she knew of any places out of state that might pay under the table.”
“Did she?” Kostya asked.
Ryker nodded. He pulled out his phone. “Rhianna knew about a place in Florida that hired girls and they never looked closely at their paperwork and didn’t have any problem paying in cash. This isn’t a place we can just call.”
Lark looked at the establishment that Ryker had up on his phone and winced. She’d been to Florida, and these types of strip joints littered the sides of different interstates. She hated the idea of Candy having to quit her job at the bank and having to start a job as a stripper just because her sleaze of a husband got her mixed up in some shady shit.
“Thanks, Ryker, I really owe you.” She kissed his cheek. “I really owe all of you,” she said as she glanced at Amy and then at Kostya. “I guess I have a plane to Florida to catch.”
She heard Ryker’s laugh and turned away from Kostya to look at him.
“What’s so funny?”
“Look back at my lieutenant,” he said pointing at Kostya.
She turned back to look up at Kostya. He had a fierce look on his face. She frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m going to speak in a calm voice. I will use a respectful vocabulary.”
He was vibrating with some kind of strong emotion, but he couldn’t possibly be mad, because she wasn’t planning on doing anything dangerous. “You’re acting kind of odd, Kostya. But I know you can’t be upset like you were when I confronted Jay Jensen because now I’m just going to find Candy and Dawn.”
She spun around and glared at Ryker when she heard his choked laughter. “Fuck you, Ryker. What is so goddamned funny?”
“Nothing is funny,” Kostya damn near roared. He moved so that he was now between her and Ryker. “If you think I’m letting you go chase after Dawn and Candy down to Florida when they’re both scared enough to drop everything because they think a bogeyman is after them, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“They’re in hiding, it’s fine. I just need Candy to confirm my suspicions that it’s Schroeder who’s behind everything at Sanofi, and then I can start doing all of my due diligence and write my story. When I’m done, the Feds will come in and scoop them all up, and Candy and Dawn can come home. It’s easy.”
“Don’t you think that if Candy is going to this level of trouble to hide herself it should tell you just how bad it is?”
“Yeah, for her. But they don’t know about me,” Lark said reasonably.
“God save me from new recruits and neophytes! You are not going down there alone,” Kostya growled.
“This is my job, Kostya. You just got done telling me how much you admired my abilities.”
“Yeah, I did. Tell me something, Lark—how much money do you think Schroeder is making selling secrets?”
“If he’s doing it right, just the microprocessors and memory chip tech that they delivered to China from Rey-Con had to be in the tens of millions of dollars. And that’s just one of the hundreds of projects that Sanofi engineers are in on.” Lark shrugged.
“People are willing to kill a liquor store owner for fifty bucks,” Amy said. “Seems to me that for tens of millions of dollars, traitors at Sanofi would happily murder you and whoever else got in their way. You don’t need just Kostya, you need his whole damned team to go with you.”
Lark looked from Ryker to Amy and then back to Kostya.
I am so fucked.
