Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 105825 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105825 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 529(@200wpm)___ 423(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
“Which means?” I asked, my chest tight.
“It was a professional job,” said Callahan.
I thanked him, he paid for the candles and we headed outside, Callahan making a beeline for a hot dog stand.
Someone had killed Lorna’s father. And if they’d done it because he was CEO, she was now a target.
I cursed and pulled out my phone. Lorna answered and I could hear the wake going on in the background. She must be in hell, right now: she’d be the center of attention in a room packed with people, a nightmare for someone so shy. She was suddenly responsible for a billion- dollar company with thousands of employees and she’d just lost her father.
She probably thought her life couldn’t get any worse.
“JD?” she asked, surprised. “Are you at the airport?”
“No.” I took a deep breath. “We need to talk.”
14
LORNA
A half hour later, I was standing under the bandstand in Central Park.
The wake had left me emotionally wrung-out and shaky. Remembering my dad and seeing all his old friends had been hard enough. But what was worse had been standing next to Miles, as one person after another told him that he had big shoes to fill. Each time, Miles would wince and nod at me. Actually, it’s Lorna who’s going to be taking over. Each time, he seemed to get a little smaller. It was heartbreaking to watch.
And the way the other person reacted didn’t make me feel any better. They’d turn to stare at me, eyes wide, and then give me a fake-cheery smile. Oh, that’s…great, they’d say. And they were right to be worried. I didn’t know how to run a company.
I’d been glad to get out of there. Then JD arrived and I saw his face…and suddenly, I wished I was back at the wake.
He laid it all out for me and the world seemed to spin and tip under my feet. My dad hadn’t been snatched away by bad luck or fate. Someone had taken him from us. Now that I was CEO, they’d be gunning for me, too. But more important than any of that—
“Cody?” I asked. “Is Cody in danger?”
“They were trying to pull both of you out of the car in Mexico. At best, these people don’t care who they hurt.”
I remembered arriving home from the hospital with Cody. Every knife in the drawer was a weapon, every chemical under the sink a poison. I’d looked down at the little life in my arms and wished I could lock the two of us away in a cozy nest because the world was just too dangerous. Now I felt that way again but it wasn’t just motherly paranoia: someone actually wanted to hurt him.
“Could you be wrong?” I asked in a small voice.
“I can’t be a hundred percent. There’s no evidence.”
I could see it in his eyes. “But you’re sure.”
He grimaced. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
My stomach churned and I staggered as my knees weakened. Cody! I could feel an iron band tightening around my chest. Cody being in danger, me being in danger, everyone relying on me as CEO...it was just too much.
JD stepped closer and gripped my arm, his face like thunder. He looked ready to annihilate whoever had done this. “Who’d want to kill your dad?”
I almost said no one. Everyone had loved my dad. But then I thought about the business we were in and the amounts of money at stake. “We’re building a hydroelectric dam in Poland,” I said slowly. “If we finish it, their government’s going to be shutting coal-fired power stations, so the coal industry’s pissed.” That opened the floodgates. “We just won the contract to build an airport terminal in Mexico: if we have to pull out, one of our rivals steps in and gets hundreds of millions of dollars. Even right here in New York, the new high-rise we’re building is going to affect property prices and there are some serious people in the property game: Konstantin Gulyev, for one, he’s meant to be part of the Russian Mob. Or there are the people who want to buy the company, people like Van der Meer.” Jesus. I was staring into the abyss.
“You need to hire someone,” JD said gently. “Protection.”
Protection? A bodyguard? Our family had never needed that sort of security: we drove our own cars, walked the streets alone. At events, my dad would chat to anyone, he’d always believed in being open and accessible.
But my dad was dead and Cody could be next. I nodded. I was shaking. I couldn’t stop shaking.
“I can make some calls,” JD told me. “Find you someone here in New York who knows what he’s doing.”
Private security. Some smoothly efficient guy in a suit. Sure, he’d protect us if we paid him. But he wouldn’t know us, wouldn’t care about us. It was a freakin’ arms race: some rival had hired men to kill him, so now we had to hire someone to protect us and hope we could trust him. A strange man, in our apartment, in our lives, close to Cody… No. I didn’t trust anyone, right now. Not with my son.