Shattered (Dividing Line #5)

by Heather Atkinson

  Beautiful women had always been Sheridan’s weakness, or more specifically, her need to hurt and dominate them. Of course she knew it was wrong but she couldn’t help it. She’d had to pay off more than one woman she’d hurt a bit too much. That was why Alex’s brothel had been such a blessing because she could hurt them as much as she liked without fear of them running to the police or the newspapers. On two occasions she’d come close to killing the women but Alex had always assured her that it was okay, he’d sort it out and she’d always been welcomed back. She only realised too late that he’d only been so understanding so she would be completely at his mercy and he could get her to do anything he wanted, no matter how illegal. Now she was in it up to her neck. On the bright side, her gift for bending the law without getting caught made her an asset to Alex and had encouraged him to post the two big men with guns in her house as protection should the Laws come calling. Somehow she knew they wouldn’t be enough to keep them at bay.

  Her hand shook as she poured herself out another neat gin, her third of the day, even though it was only ten in the morning. The sense of impending doom that had gripped her since this whole nightmare began had only got stronger and she felt it was reaching its crescendo.

  Sheridan hesitated, the glass halfway to her lips, when she heard a loud bang and then shouts from the direction of the kitchen. There was the sound of something breaking, another muffled yell, then silence. Sheridan held her breath when she heard staccato footsteps approaching, high heels. A woman.

  Rachel was here.

  Alex had specifically told her not to call the police but now the danger was here she thought, screw that. She made a lunge for the phone just as the door burst open. Sure enough there was Rachel Law bringing the fury of hell with her.

  Deciding to abandon the phone Sheridan raced for the connecting door leading back into the hallway but Rachel grabbed her before she could even reach it. A fist was slammed into her face and Sheridan found herself on the floor, looking up at Rachel.

  “I’m sorry,” Sheridan managed to whimper, fear constricting her throat. Already she could feel her cheek swelling from the powerful blow.

  “You will be fucking sorry you ever set foot in that brothel you twisted bitch. I’m not tied up now.”

  Rachel punched her twice more in the face then kicked her hard in the ribs. Rachel straddled her then grabbed her by the front of her blouse. So strong was she in her rage that she lifted Sheridan’s head and shoulders clean off the floor then head butted her. White light filled Sheridan’s head at the force of the blow and she marvelled at the power inside Rachel. What the hell had she been thinking, walking into that room?

  “Easy Babe,” said a deep gentle voice.

  Sheridan’s eyes slowly opened and she felt sick with fear when she saw Ryan Law standing beside his wife. His grey eyes were cold and filled with loathing as he looked down at her.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” Sheridan begged him. “I’ll do anything you want.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, that pleasure is all my wife’s.”

  Rachel gave her an evil smile.

  “Before she really goes to work on you,” he continued, “we want you to tell us why you visited Alex in hospital.”

  “Why should I tell you if you’re going to hurt me anyway?”

  “If you cooperate I’ll let you live,” said Rachel. “If you don’t I will kill you right here, right now. But you are going to suffer not just for what you did to me but for every girl in that disgusting brothel. What right have you to call yourself a woman? Because you’re rich and well connected you think that gives you a free pass to do what you like, to abuse the vulnerable and helpless. We’re here to show you that no one has that right and that it always comes back on you. When we’re done with you, you won’t dare look at another woman again.”

  Rachel’s eyes turned jet black. Sheridan had heard of this phenomenon but actually seeing it in the flesh was unnerving. She looked like a predator about to devour its prey and the knowledge that she was the prey was enough to turn her bowels to ice.

  “He wanted to change his will,” she began.

  “In who’s favour?”

  “Katia’s. She’s to inherit everything with a provision for their child when it’s born.”

  “What about Beth and his children with her?”

  “He disinherited them all. They get nothing.”

  “The bastard,” yelled Rachel, making Sheridan jump. “Where’s this new will?”

  “In my safe. He doesn’t like me keeping his documents at the office, he’s paranoid someone will get at them.”

  “Is the old will here too?”

  Sheridan nodded.

  Rachel got to her feet and glared down at her. “Open the fucking safe.”

  “O…okay, it’s just behind the desk, under the floor.”

  Ryan and Rachel followed her round the back of the desk and watched in silence as Sheridan scrabbled about on her hands and knees.

  “Hurry up,” snapped Ryan.

  “I’m trying,” said Sheridan. Her hands were still shaking and it was an effort for her to tap in the combination on the key pad. “I’ve done it,” she cried with relief when there was a click and she pulled the door open. “Here it is,” she said, handing Rachel a single sheet of paper. “That’s his new will.”

  “Where’s the old one?”

  She handed her that too and Rachel read through them both before tearing the new one up, throwing the pieces onto the fire and pocketing the old one. “Katia gets nothing. Beth is his wife, it will all go to her because believe me when I say that Alex is living on borrowed time.”

  Looking at these two, Sheridan didn’t doubt it.

  They sat her down on the couch and got her to go through everything she knew about Alex’s businesses and she had plenty to tell. The business she knew most about was his money laundering operation. Her main role was dealing with the integrating stage. She dealt with the money when it had been ‘washed’ and arranged for it to be transferred into a UK business account in the form of a bank transfer from abroad, making it look like an investment in one of Alex’s legitimate companies. The money was then clean and free for him to use. Someone else Sheridan didn’t know and was prevented from meeting did the actual laundering, placing a cash deposit in a bank then layering it - sending it through several financial transactions in different countries, changing the money’s currency and buying high value items to change the form of the money. This made it almost impossible to follow before it was integrated back into a legitimate UK account by Sheridan. Both Ryan and Rachel were very familiar with this process, having used it themselves regularly in their dark pasts. Now everything was legal and above-board and went through the books, nevertheless they both experienced a surge of excitement when they considered how they could use Alex’s own operation to hurt him, which was large and complex with tentacles in the Bahamas, the Caymans, Bahrain and Singapore. Millions of pounds were currently floating around in these offshore accounts going through transfer after bank transfer before being integrated back into his UK accounts.

  “Can you take money out of the accounts?” Ryan asked Sheridan.

  “No, I can only put it in. But I do know he uses shell companies too to launder the money.” A shell company provides absolutely no goods or services but takes money for them and produces fake invoices and receipts to give the money a legitimate place to go.

  “He’s been laundering money for other people too,” said Sheridan, willing to tell them anything to make them go away. Rachel was still glaring at her with her black eyes and she couldn’t stand it.

  “Who?”

  “Bad people as well as rich people who don’t want to pay tax.”

  “People who wouldn’t like it if he lost their money?”

  Sheridan nodded, the shaking in her hands becoming violent. This was growing seriously scary.

  “Can you turn the money around and send it back to where it came from?” said Ra
chel.

  “I…I don’t know,” she said, wiping her clammy palms on her skirt. “I’ve never tried. What would it accomplish?” she said, trying to reason with them and hopefully talk them out of whatever plot they were coming up with.

  “Turn one large sum around and send it back into one of the offshore bank accounts it came from. Such a large sum going into one account would set alarm bells ringing.”

  Ryan shook his head. “Most of these countries have bank secrecy laws so everything’s anonymous. It wouldn’t be traced back to Alex. We need to stop that money being integrated back into the UK.”

  “How do we do that?” said Rachel.

  Ryan looked to Sheridan. “You can’t withdraw any money from that account, but you can divert it into another one.”

  “I can’t,” she said, horrified.

  Ryan pulled a gun and pointed it at her head. “You will if you don’t want your brains all over this very nice antique furniture, after Rachel’s finished with you of course.”

  Sheridan’s knees went weak. “Alex will kill me.”

  They appeared unsympathetic. “If you don’t do it we’ll kill you,” said Rachel.

  Sheridan started to cry. “Please, I don’t deserve this.”

  “No, you deserve much worse. You deserve to be handcuffed to a bed and beat up and abused, just like you did to those women. Look at me,” Rachel yelled.

  Sheridan’s head snapped up, unable to see Rachel because of the tears blinding her, which was a bit of a relief.

  “Did you ever touch Laila?”

  “Laila?” frowned Sheridan, trying to recall one face from a long line of many.

  “Beautiful, black haired, blue eyed.”

  “Err, yes I think so.”

  “And her sister, Sabine?”

  Sheridan gave one slow nod just before she was knocked back to the floor by a another blow to the face. Ryan had to gently pull Rachel away when she started to lay into her again.

  “Not yet Babe. Soon.”

  She remained rigid in his arms as she fought with herself before taking a deep breath and nodding.

  Ryan kissed her and the genuine love in their eyes when they looked at each other surprised Sheridan. She had assumed people like them weren’t capable of real emotions, but clearly they were. She wasn’t sure that didn’t make them even scarier.

  “Sabine’s only a teenager,” Rachel shouted, making Sheridan cringe, expecting another onslaught. But instead Rachel took a seat and gestured for Ryan to continue.

  When Ryan’s eyes fixated on Sheridan she recoiled. She held her breath as his hand slid into his jacket pocket, terrified he was going to pull out a weapon. She almost fainted with relief when he produced a mobile phone instead.

  “Mikey, Jez. I need you both here. Bring Frankie,” he said before hanging up.

  “Now what?” she asked him.

  He sat down beside his wife and took her hand. “Now we wait.”

  CHAPTER 24

  They sat in silence for almost twenty minutes, Rachel glaring at Sheridan the entire time with those unnerving black eyes. Sheridan tried to look everywhere but at her, however her gaze was inexorably drawn back to Rachel.

  “Can I get the first aid kit for my injuries? It’s only in the kitchen,” Sheridan asked them.

  “No,” replied Rachel.

  Sheridan was permitted to take a tissue from the box on the sideboard to dab at her cut lip. She could feel her whole face swelling but felt she couldn’t complain. She’d inflicted much worse on other women, some of them only girls. Was this some sort of reckoning for the misery she’d meted out to others?

  Ryan and Rachel didn’t even react to the sound of the front door opening, of footsteps approaching. Sheridan shifted in her seat, a little gasp of fear escaping her lips when Mikey Maguire and Jez Law walked in, accompanied by someone she’d never expected to see in her own home. Frankie McVay. She watched, open-mouthed, as one of the most terrifying figures in the country poured himself a scotch from her bar and sat on her couch.

  “What does this old tart want?” said Frankie, looking at Sheridan curiously.

  “Do any of you know anything about Alex’s money laundering operation?” said Ryan. “It’s alright, you can talk in front of her. She’s part of it,” he added when they all seemed reluctant to reply.

  “I know he uses offshore accounts to move his money about,” said Mikey.

  “Did you know he’s laundering it for other people for a fee?”

  Mikey’s tight expression told Ryan everything he needed to know.

  “This,” he said, gesturing at Sheridan, “works on the operation. She integrates the money back into the UK once its been laundered and apparently there’s millions of pounds of Alex’s out there just waiting to be brought home. With a push of a button she can have it diverted elsewhere.”

  “That’s a hell of a risk for Alex to take,” said Frankie. “What’s to stop her nicking the lot?”

  “Alex will no doubt rely on the fear factor. Plus there’s nothing linking him to it should the authorities click onto what’s going on.”

  “Great, we’ll take the fucking lot,” grinned Frankie, clapping his hands together.

  “There’s a problem with that. Sheridan told us that the money doesn’t actually belong to Alex, it belongs to some very dangerous people.”

  “Not more dangerous than us,” glowered Frankie.

  “Possibly not but if we’re careless it could rebound on us. So I take it none of this money is yours Frankie?”

  “No but I appreciate you asking first.”

  Ryan didn’t let this sudden bonhomie fool him. He knew Frankie was trying to build a mutual respect between them in the event of their partnership. From the look on her face Rachel realised it too and was unimpressed.

  “Let’s lose the money then all those people will be out for Alex’s blood,” said Jez.

  “That’s all well and good,” replied Rachel, “but I’m concerned those people will associate the money laundering operation with Mikey and want recompense from him.”

  “They wouldn’t dare,” said Mikey in a cold hard tone that surprised Rachel. It only now occurred to her that his usual lost puppy dog act was just that, an act. It hid a will of steel and the ability to savagely defend himself should the need arise. She should have spotted it sooner and it just went to show how rusty she was.

  “You’re willing to take that risk?” she asked him.

  “To fuck Alex up, yes. I can take care of myself now Rach, you don’t need to worry about me anymore,” he added in a softer tone.

  “I’ll always worry about my little brother.”

  He gave her a small smile.

  “Brother?” said Sheridan, puzzled.

  “It’s a figure of speech, that’s all,” snapped Rachel, her eyes turning black again, causing Sheridan to recoil.

  Mikey frowned. He knew there was more to this than met the eye.

  “So what do we do?” said Jez.

  “How do you feel about doing something incredibly benevolent?” said Ryan, amusement playing on his lips.

  “Not too fucking happy actually,” said Frankie.

  “Giving’s good for the soul.”

  “As my old mum keeps telling me, I don’t have one.”

  “I think you’ll find this very entertaining Frankie. I know how much you like a good laugh. We can use Jeremy Hammond to put out the message.”

  “What message?” said Mikey.

  When Ryan related where he wanted the money transferring too, they all burst out laughing.

  “Fucking beautiful,” exclaimed Frankie. “I’m willing to give up the cash for that. I just wish I could see the look on the prick’s face when he realises what’s happened.”

  “Do it,” Ryan told Sheridan once they’d all calmed down.

  “I can’t, he’ll, he’ll…” The thought of what Alex Maguire would do to her for this made her positively faint. When she fell backwards in a daze Rachel slapped
her repeatedly around the face until she came round then steered her into the chair at her desk, opened up the laptop and switched in on for her.

  “Do it,” Rachel spat.

  The five of them watched over Sheridan’s shoulder as she made the transaction, so terrified she was hardly able to grip the mouse.

  “There, it’s done,” she sighed, petrified of what the consequences of this treachery would be.

  “Think of it as atonement for all the terrible things you’ve done,” said Ryan. “Rachel will now give you more penance. Come on lads, let’s wait outside.”

  The three men were a little confused but did as he asked.

  All Sheridan could do was stare at Rachel in mute fear as she stared right back at her. She didn’t make a move until the door had closed behind the men.

  “Please don’t kill me,” whimpered Sheridan.

  “I’m not going to but you’ll wish that I had. I’m going to make sure I’m imprinted on you for life,” said Rachel before drawing back her fist.

  “What’s the deal with Rachel and that woman?” said Mikey as the men waited in the hall listening to Sheridan’s screams and cries of pain.

  “She hurt Rachel,” was all he was willing to say.

  Soon the sounds died down. The door opened and Rachel walked out breathing hard.

  “Feeling better?” Ryan asked her.

  “Much thank you,” she replied casually, patting her hair to make sure it wasn’t out of place. Her scars ached from the exertion but she was still on too much of a high to let it bother her. That had felt so good, righteous even.

  “What’s your problem with her?” said Frankie.

  Rachel hesitated, attempting to think up a lie. Then she thought she’d never get over it if she didn’t face it head on. “She attacked me in the brothel when I was tied up and helpless. That’s how the sick bitch gets her kicks. I owed her some payback.”

  As always Ryan was amazed by her strength. Rachel would let nothing defeat her.

  “I hope you gave her a fucking good hiding,” said Mikey, furious.

  “I did. She won’t be hurting any more women any time soon. Shall we go?”