Page 80 of Bought for Blood

“We do.” Crowe stands. “And here’s my half of it. You’re compromised. You bought her outright, and a man who already owns something doesn’t keep going back to buy more of it. Every visit you make now is a visit somebody could ask a question about. The clean way through this is you stop. Everything. I put someone else into that building over the next six months; they carry on from what you’ve already built, slower, and your name never comes near any of it.”

“Six months is too long.”

“Six months is safe.”

“Six months is six months for whoever’s hunting her to find her first.” I put both hands on the desk. “I’m not stepping back while that clock is running.”

“Then what’s your plan instead of mine?”

“I’ve spent my time there letting Vasile believe I’m exactly what he thinks I am. A man with money and no restraint, who’s found something he can’t stop buying. He trusts that version of me enough that he’s already talked about taking me to the people above him; not the ones who run one building, the ones who run all of them. I don’t need six months. I need him to make one phone call.”

“Why wouldn’t he wonder why you’re going there when you already have her?”

“Because he thinks I’m an addict, Crowe. Someone who gets off on variety. Stopping cold the day I bought her would havetold him more than continuing ever could.” I straighten. “He calls me his best client. He’s said as much to my face.”

Crowe lets that sit. Not for long.

“Why did you buy her?”

“Because she was going to die in there if I didn’t.”

“And that’s all?” he says.

I don’t give him anything else, and he doesn’t ask twice.

“So how does that get us in with the upper levels?”

“I’ll tell him I’m interested in more options, that I want to see what other stock they have in the system. Getting him to arrange the introduction is a matter of asking. Not persuading.”

Crowe doesn’t move.

“You’d be walking into a room full of criminals on the word of a man who sells people for a living.”

“Yes.”

“And there’s no six months of careful work standing between you and them if it goes wrong. There’s just you.”

“Then I’d better not let it go wrong.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that. He picks his coat up off the chair, and at the door he stops.

“I still think six months is the safer number.”

“Safer for who?”

He doesn’t reply to that either, and we both know why. He goes.

Yves sees him down.

I stand at the shuttered window with my hand on the latch until the car’s gone off the drive. Then I go back to the desk and stare down at the notes I’ve been making.

I have to get Vasile to make that call. Soon. Before whoever’s looking for her gets any closer. I saw how Rouvel and Tavora looked at her the night they came here. And they were allies.

I think back to the young one who got his hands on her that day. I think of how I drank without being able to stop just nights ago.

I’m not going to let that happen.

I don’t care what I have to walk into to stop it.