Page 66 of Untouchable

No way would Breah get back from the grocery store that quickly.

She was about to close out the main folder when she saw a subfolder titledCorrespondence.

Out of curiosity, she clicked on it, discovering folders by date again.

She sighed. Didn’t the man ever delete anything?

She found the dates just before her father’s death and started opening them.

They were all interoffice memos and saved emails. They were mostly innocuous—about boring, mundane items connected to the project.

She’d already copied all of them so she could sort through them at a different time. But as she was closing the documents, she noticed a few words that made her halt.

The note was from Caleb, written to his father, Arthur Marshall, and made up of only one lines.

The problem we discussed is being dealt with. Let me know if there are more loose ends.

Kelly stared at the screen with a sickening churn of her gut.

It was too vague to be compromising, but she knew—sheknew—it was referring to her father.

Caleb. He’d “dealt with” her father, having the man killed instead of leaving a loose end that could compromise the family business. And he’d reported it as blandly and impersonally, as if he were writing normal work correspondence.

It didn’t matter that he wasn’t completely a monster. Even a semidecent man might cross a moral line if the reward was substantial enough.

Caleb had always wanted the career he had now, the legacy left to him by his father. He wanted to be a successful white-collar businessman instead of one of the mobsters on his mother’s side of his family.

His career was his priority. Everything else fell in service to that. Including her father.

Including her.

She’d known to expect it, but it still made her shake helplessly with emotion. There might be more in these documents. Maybe something genuinely compromising. She pulled out her drive.

She closed out the computer quickly and turned around to leave, feeling shaky and heavy and profoundly angry.

She’d only taken one step toward the door when she heard the key turn in the lock.

With a gasp, she reacted instinctively, ducking down to hide under the desk.

It was probably just Breah, straightening up or something. It wasn’t even four thirty yet, so Kelly couldn’t imagine how she’d returned so quickly though.

It wasn’t Breah. It was a member of Caleb’s security team, and she heard him talking in his earpiece. “There’s no one here. I told you it was just that damn misfiring sensor again.”

Shit. How stupid could she be? Of course Caleb had some sort of extra security on his office. He might not have cameras, but he evidently had motion sensors.

The man continued, evidently responding to something said through his earpiece. “I’m not sure how you think someone managed to get onto the grounds and into the house and then into the office without being caught on camera or triggering an alarm. But you still send me out to check every fucking fly that triggers a sensor.”

Kelly wasn’t even breathing, afraid of making any sort of noise. To her infinite relief, the voice got softer as the man evidently backed out of the office, and then the door shut and clicked as it locked again.

She waited five minutes before she dared to crawl out from under the desk, then she took her jump drive and ran back to her room.

Kelly dreamed of her father that night.

She’d had dreams about him before—a lot of them just after he’d died, when she was just a kid—but the dreams now were rare enough to be memorable.

This one wasn’t made up of a real or coherent narrative. It was all just flickered images and feelings. Nothing she could really make sense of, but the fragmented pieces fit together into what felt like an actual experience.

And it was so concrete, so absolutely visceral, that it might as well have been real.