Page 105 of Blood in the Water

My pulse picked up speed. A sense ofrightnesssettled in my gut. “It has to be the reason.”

“It’s definitely possible.”

I dropped the paper and rifled through the rest of the stack in this box. More and more commercial invoices. More and more lists of items. Sweat beaded on my forehead, but then I paused with a frown.

“Ciel, this one goes back fiveyearsago,” I whispered, staring at the document. Another random list of items I figured to be drugs or other contraband, to the same port, under the same shipping company. Max would have been twenty. Had he been going behind my father’s back that long ago?

A question started to form in the back of my head—a little worm of doubt whispering preposterous things—but I smashed it down, unwilling to think of it.

There was a simple explanation. My father had caught Max making enemies, and Max killed him.

The calm ofrightnessreturned. There was a reason for everything. Max waswrong. My father caught him.

In the background, I heard the door to the van pull open and sounds as Wynn and Ryuji maneuvered Cas inside.

“How’s Cas?”

“As good as he can be,” Ryuji grunted. Cas grumbled something in the background, and I bit back a sigh of relief that he was out of this godforsaken house. “He’s about to pass out. We need to move, Leona. Stop fucking around.”

“Alright,” Wynn interjected between us. He’d acted as the barrier between us since we left the penthouse. “We’re headed back, Leona. Get what you need and get out of there.”

I had a theory but needed more proof than just one box. Maybe my father had been building evidence against Max for a while now, and Max was trying to bury it.

I yanked open the lid to another box. These files looked different, not shipping invoices but something else. Some of it was handwritten, in a thin chicken-scratch I could barely read. Finally, it clicked. “Ciel, this is in a different language.”

It wasn’t Italian. It wasn’t Russian. And it wasn’t Greek.

I texted Ciel a photo.

“It’s Albanian,” he said after a few moments of furious typing. “These are… numbers. It’s a crude ledger? Tracking the sale of some product, transported to and from New York.Vajzë.”

“What’s that?”

The keyboard sound clicked in the background until he sucked in a breath. “Leona...”

Instantly, chills went up my neck at his tone. My fist crumpled the paper. “What is it, Ciel?”

“Vajzëmeans girl in Albanian.”

My gut dropped through my legs, and my pulse pounded in my ears. “It’s dated two years ago.”

How long had Max been selling women? How long had my father known?

I pulled out paper after paper, checking the dates. Going backyears.Vajzë. Vajzë. Vajzë.Page after page. Sale after sale.

“Why would my father have these?” I breathed. My stomach rolled. That thought teased at the edge of my mind, but ithadto be wrong. “It’s evidence, right? Against Max. It has to be. God, if I brought this to the heads of the other mafias, Max would be over. Done.”

The only explanation that made sense was that Max had been making money behind my father’s back through the skin trade, and once my father caught him, Max killed him. There was no other option, no other thought I could entertain.

I should be fuckingelated. I’d just found information that could destroy Max’s reputation.

But it was all wrong.

That sense of rightness was twisting into a lead weight sitting at the base of my spine.

“Ciel, tell me this is evidence my father collected against Max. That my father caught Max doing all this shit, and that’s why Max turned on him.”

My earpiece was quiet.