Page 124 of Before Broken Vows

"If I tell you, I'm dead anyway."

"You're already dead," I say flatly. "The only question is how long it takes and how much it hurts."

Cosmo looks at me.

"Look. Your father. He found out. And… there was too much at stake. I was forced. I didn't even know him, but you know how it is. Money is everything."

"So if you're just a puppet, then who's controlling you?" I ask.

Dimitri steps forward. "Answer him, you piece of shit."

Cosmo starts to sob and raises his weapon pointing it directly at me.

I can see it in his eyes. "You don't want to do this?—"

I move fast, firing my gun. My bullet finds a home just above his right eye. His gun goes off and hits the floor inches from my foot. He stumbles back and falls, crashing into the monitors and hitting his head on the table.

Blood pours from him.

"Fuck!" I yell and put my gun away. "He was our link. We needed him alive."

Cosmo's body stares back with empty eyes, all his secrets dying on lips now forever silent.

So close. We were so fucking close.

Dimitri exhales sharply. "He was going to shoot. You had no choice," he says, walking into the panic room. "On the bright side, he admitted to having Dad killed."

"Yeah, but by pressure from someone else. That's the fucking person I want. Now we're back to square one."

"Maybe not," Dimitri says. "There's always a trail."

I look up at the monitors on the wall and see my men making their way to us. This was supposed to be clean. Get in, get Cosmo, get answers. Now we have more questions than when we started.

"Here," Dimitri calls out, crouching beside a small cabinet next to the monitoring equipment. He pulls out a phone. It's sleek, black, and looks expensive despite its basic appearance. "It's a high-grade burner phone. Encrypted, from the looks of it."

I step closer, taking it from his hand. The screen glows with a complex lock pattern and what looks like a number already dialed. When I try to press another button, nothing happens. The keyboard is locked.

"Shit," I say. "It's secured. Can't dial out without some kind of code."

Dimitri takes it back, examining it closer. "Look at this," he points to the call history displayed on the screen. One number, called repeatedly in the last twenty minutes. The contact is simply labeled 'S.'"

"'S,'" I repeat, looking back at Cosmo's body. "He was calling someone while we were breaking down his door."

"Yes, and may I remind you, thanks to our little drone flying outside, he wasn't able to make contact. Could have been asking for reinforcements or something," Dimitri says.

I tighten my jaw out of frustration. "Still reporting to someone, even as we were banging on the door. Crazy."

"Look, this is a win, bro. This motherfucker ordered it and he's dead now. From your gun. Take it. You got Stassi and Xander now."

He's right. My life has changed so much since I started down this road.

"Okay, this is good for now," I say and turn to walk out.

Dimitri slips the phone into his pocket. "Let's see who you were calling, asshole," he says to the corpse. Then to me, "I know a guy who can crack this. Might take some time, but we'll get in."

He follows me out and calls to the men approaching us.

"Gather anything that looks suspicious. Hard drives, computers, papers—anything that might tell us who he was working with."