by Chiah Wilder
As if sensing me, Ms. Pierce whirled around. Our gazes locked and her face went as white as death, her lips trembling. After several tense minutes, she cleared her throat. “I’ll have copies of the file ready for you first thing Monday morning.”
“Don’t insult me. I want to know who the fuck is behind DTG.”
She shrugged.
“Now!” I was next to her in a flash, grabbing her phone and squeezing her upper arm hard. “I’m not in the mood to fuck around. You’re going to tell me who you’ve been working for.”
She broke down, crying hysterically. Half of what she said I couldn’t understand, so I eased her into a chair and waited for her meltdown to stop. It finally did, and she took the tissue from the box I gave her, wiping away the wetness from her cheeks and blowing her nose. Looking down at her hands in her lap, she grabbed another tissue and began to tear it up in tiny pieces.
“I didn’t want to do it. Honest. It was just that I needed the money so badly. My brother’s a drunk and my mother’s addicted to pain pills. I’m the only one who works, and money is so tight. Their disability checks go to booze and pills. I know people say it’s not my problem, that they’re grown up, but I can’t turn my back on my family. When you love someone, it’s not just during the good times, but the bad ones too. You have to believe me. I was desperate, and Cory offered me so much money.”
My ears pricked up. “Do you mean Cory Bracker?”
She nodded. “I was having lunch a few months ago and he came over to me. It was super crowded in there and I was sitting at a table for two. It was at Luthey’s. The food’s real good. Have you ever been there?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers. A bad headache threatened to attack; I could already feel the dull throbbing in the base of my skull. “No. Go on.”
“Anyway, he asked if I wouldn’t mind sharing my table with him. One thing led to another and he asked me out. He took me to real nice and expensive places, and then he asked me to help him out. I didn’t agree to do it at first. He had to work real hard to convince me, but he kept offering me more and more money that I couldn’t refuse. I hated doing it.” Her voice cracked and a few tears slipped down her cheeks. “Being broke makes a person do a lot of things they’re ashamed of.”
“Where does he live?”
“I don’t know. We never met at his place. He’d take me to real fancy hotels.” She looked down at the floor. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m no whore.”
“I don’t care about your sex life. What’s his number?”
“It’s always something different. He uses burner phones.”
“Are you supposed to meet him tonight?”
She shook her head. “Tuesday night. After your meeting with Mr. Dowling.”
A long pause filled the space between us. I had to find out what Cory Bracker’s game was. He was fucking Ms. Pierce, stalking Cierra, and trying to ruin Velocity. And the common denominator in all of it was me. For some reason, he was out to get me.
“Did he tell you why he wanted the information?”
“He said you owed him. He wasn’t too fond of you.”
“I don’t even know him.”
“Well, he knows you, and he has it in his head that you’re the cause of all his problems.”
“What time are you meeting him on Tuesday?”
“Around seven. He’ll call me and let me know where. What’s going to happen to me?”
“I’m not going to lie to you. You’re in serious trouble. What you did is illegal. You stole and copied confidential documents and sold them to a competitor. If you cooperate with me, it’ll help a lot.”
“Are you going to call the police?”
“We’ll see what happens on Tuesday. Don’t tip him off. And don’t think of leaving or screwing this up. You will be watched.”
I uploaded the photographs onto my computer. “Does he call you at work?”
“Sometimes when I don’t pick up my cell.”
“Then that’s how you’ll connect with him.” I placed her phone in my briefcase. “I’ll be keeping this for evidence.”
“I’ll cooperate any way I can. I really loved Mr. Linder, and I like you too. I hated betraying you and your family. It was just that I needed the money so badly.”
“If you cooperate, I can help make a case for you with Mr. Linder. Let’s just see what happens on Tuesday.”
An hour later, I pulled into my parking garage, exhausted to the bone. Ms. Pierce is the snitch. I must’ve repeated it a hundred times since I’d found out. I couldn’t believe it. What was up with this Cory Bracker guy?
On the ride to my condo, I’d telephoned Ivan and told him everything that had happened. He’d told me he’d found out DTG was owned by Cory Bracker, and he had several photos of Ms. Pierce and him together. He suspected she was the leak, but he wanted to wait until money was exchanged to be sure. As it was, it looked like they were only dating. I told him to drop the photographs by the following day. I wanted to get a good look at this asshole who was vying to take me down. The night we’d beaten the shit out of each other, I hadn’t seen him all that well. It’d been dark and I was more focused on smashing his face than looking at it. Who knew… maybe I’d crossed paths with him before.
I called Cierra and told her I was home. She came over in fifteen minutes. I poured a couple of shots of vodka for me, a glass of red wine for her, and we sat on the couch.
“I can’t believe Chandra’s the turncoat. I never figured it was her, but if she’s telling the truth about her dire home situation, I feel sorry for her. I guess I can sort of see why she did it.”
She sat cross-legged on the couch, her hair tousled around her, her tight T-shirt clinging to her perfect tits. She’d just come back from a three-hour shift at the shelter, and she felt sorry for Ms. Pierce. My chest tightened. This woman is amazing, and she’s all mine. I placed my hands on her shoulders and tugged her toward me, then leaned over and kissed her deep and wet. “I love you so much,” I whispered against her lips.
“Wow. What prompted that? I want to know so I do it more often.” She giggled and kissed me softly.
“Just being you. Anyway, I’m going to see how Ms. Pierce does on Tuesday. I’ve also asked Ivan to check out her story about her home life. I’ll talk to my grandfather tomorrow to see what he wants to do. I’m sure we’ll call the police.”
“Definitely. I don’t want you facing off with Cory. I wonder if he was trying to prime me to be a snitch. I knew something wasn’t right with him, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Anyway, he didn’t have a chance with me.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “No way. I was hopelessly falling for my boss when we met.”
“Seducing your boss. You’re a naughty girl.” I started tickling her and she fell back on the couch, laughing her head off. I hovered over her, smothering her with kisses and bites. I wanted to cover her body with love bites, marking her as mine.
I pushed her shirt over her head and unsnapped her bra. Her luscious tits popped out and I bent my head to feast on them. I’d go slow; we had time. And when she trembled with desire, begging me to fuck her, I’d make love to her.
Ms. Pierce was kissing my ass big-time, telling me she was ready to do anything I wanted her to do to catch Cory Bracker. When I’d told my grandfather about it the day before, he’d been adamant about handling the situation internally. He said the publicity wouldn’t be good for Velocity, and the stockholders and board of directors would blame me if revenues slipped and they lost money. No police involvement was the way my grandfather handled things, so I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t want me to call the cops.
Cierra and I talked at length about it, and in the end, I agreed with her and called the cops, then listened quietly as my grandfather read me the riot act. I understood where he was coming from, but the way he’d handled the kidnapping had left me wondering for years if Ryan would’ve been found had the police been involved.
Also, if my grandfather trusted me to run Velocity, then he had to trust the decisions I made, even if they weren’t in line with what he would do. It was that simple.
My intercom buzzed and Ms. Pierce announced that Ivan was waiting to see me. He carried a large manila envelope in his hand as he walked in. Slumping down in the chair, he slid the envelope over to me and began munching on jelly beans in a bowl on my desk.
“What’s this?” I asked as I unsealed the package.
“Pictures.” He popped an orange jelly bean in his mouth.
I looked at the numerous pictures of Cory Bracker. In some of them, Ms. Pierce had her arm looped through his, in others, he was leaning against a blue Toyota Matrix in front of Cierra’s building. Muscles tightened and I rubbed the back of my neck.
“When did you take these pictures of the bastard in front of this building?” I slid the photos back to Ivan.
“Last week,” he said as he picked through the bowl.
The fucker’s still stalking Cierra. I’m going to beat his ass. “How often did you catch him there?”
“A lot. Sometimes three and four times a day. One of your employees lives there.” He glanced down at a notebook. “Cierra Duncan. If you ask me, the suspect’s obsessed with her. You should warn her.”
“I caught him bugging her a while back. I didn’t know he was involved with DTG.” Ivan tilted his head back and stared at me. “Cierra’s my girlfriend.”
“Really. Does the old man know about it?”
I shook my head. “Not yet, but I want Cierra to meet my grandparents. Anyway, this is disturbing that he’s still tailing her, and he’s using a different car. I thought after we beat the shit out of each other it had ended. I guess I was wrong.”
“That probably explains why I never saw you over at her place when he was there watching her. He probably made sure you weren’t around. But I found out a lot more about the asshole.”
I glanced at the pictures, Cory’s dark eyes stared back as if they were mocking me. “Like what?”
“First of all, the only Cory Bracker I found in St. Louis has been dead for the past fifteen years. He died in a motorcycle accident.”
“So this ass has assumed this guy’s identity?”
“For a long time.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“Ryan Prescott.”
Sudden coldness hit me and I drew my head back stiffly. Fuzzy thoughts raced through my mind and I couldn’t think. I just sat there speechless, looking down at the man in the photos.
Ivan cleared his throat. “When I was doing all this digging, I found an article from about fifteen years ago asking where Ryan Prescott was. It seems the person they were talking about in the article was your half-brother and he just seemed to have disappeared. That was around the time Cory Bracker appeared on the real estate scene.”
“What’re you saying? My brother was kidnapped twenty-one years ago. I’m sure there’s more than one Ryan Prescott in the United States.” I darted my eyes back to the photo and stared at it. There was something familiar in his face. The wide nose reminded me of my dad’s, and the gray eyes looked very much like mine.
It can’t be. I’m just imagining things. It isn’t him.
“Cory Bracker is your brother, Ryan Prescott. I had the fingerprints examined. Before Ryan became Cory, he worked at a government job that required fingerprints. Ryan got into a fight when he was eighteen years old and living in North Dakota. He was arrested and fingerprinted. I found the connection because he took on a couple of other government contract jobs when he’d already assumed the real Cory Bracker’s identity. That was a mistake, because the prints came back as Ryan Prescott. There was an investigation lodged, and he just disappeared. I came across the investigation during my background checks, and that led me to unraveling the truth behind the man.”
I scrubbed my face with my fist over and over. “I can’t believe this. If it’s true, why wouldn’t he have contacted me or my mom? And why the hell would he be trying to destroy me? This isn’t making any sense. And what about the fucker who snatched Ryan?”
Ivan stared at me for a few seconds then splayed his hands out on the table. “There was no kidnapper. Ryan Prescott staged the whole thing to get money from your family so he could start a new life.”
It was like he’d rammed a steel pipe into my stomach and knocked all the air out of me. What he was saying couldn’t be true. All the nights of worrying, the money, his scared voice over the phone, and the years of missing him, feeling awful that I was alive and he wasn’t, and it was all a hoax? It couldn’t be true.
“I wished it hadn’t turned out like this.”
I shook my head. “If this is all true, why is he doing this to me?” Images of Ryan reading to me, playing with me, taking me to the movies raced across my mind. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“That I can’t answer.”
For several minutes, neither of us spoke. It was too overwhelming and crazy. The reality I’d lived for the past twenty-one years had suddenly been turned upside down and inside out.
Breaking the silence, Ivan shifted in his chair and closed his notebook. “I’m meeting another client. Are you going to be okay?”
I nodded, my gaze still on the pictures.
“I’ll call you later. The cops will be there tomorrow night, right?”
Another nod.
“If you need something, call me.” He stood up and walked out.
After what seemed like hours, I picked up the phone and called my mother, telling her to meet me at my grandparents’ house. Even though she kept pushing me to tell her the reason, I didn’t. I wanted her to hear it in person. She wouldn’t believe it. Hell, I didn’t believe it, but all the reports, the fingerprints, the photographs, and the copies of driver licenses with Ryan’s picture when he was eighteen years old sprawled before me. The facts didn’t lie.
Cory Bracker was Ryan, and he’d come to San Francisco for no other reason than to destroy me.
And now I had to do the same to him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Trace
As I sat with Ivan in his car, waiting for Ryan to show up for his meeting with Ms. Pierce, I couldn’t believe how drastically my life had changed in twenty-four hours. When I’d told my family about Ivan’s investigation, they didn’t believe it just as I hadn’t at first, but when they’d seen all the insurmountable evidence, disbelief had turned to anger and hurt. My mom started blaming herself, as did my grandmother. I silently blamed myself, but my grandfather had nipped all of that in the bud by telling us the only one to blame was Ryan. And even though I knew that was true, a big part of me kept wondering what we had done to Ryan that would’ve made him do something so awful to us.
After I’d left my grandparents’ home, I went home and told Cierra who Cory really was. Shock had covered her face, and she said that when she’d first met him at Tipsy Cow, he’d looked familiar, and now she knew why. Then she pulled me into her embrace and held me for a long time without saying anything. It was exactly what I needed, and I was grateful for her comfort and support. She made a long, sleepless night more tolerable, and I loved her for it.
“Want some coffee?” Ivan asked as he unscrewed his thermos.
“Nah, I’m good.”
Ms. Pierce pulled into a small lot near the restaurant where she and Ryan were going to eat. She said they’d normally exchanged money and information before beginning their meeting. Climbing out, she waited near her car. A blue Maxima pulled in a few seconds later and Ryan got out. He was the brother I’d looked up to, but the Ryan I remembered as a kid was incompatible with the man who walked toward Ms. Pierce.
“He doesn’t suspect a thing,” Ivan said as he poured his coffee back into the thermos, then secured the lid.
Ms. Pierce waved at him and leaned against her car. They said a few things to each other, and then she opened her large purse and took out a legal-sized folder. She handed it to him and he pulled a wad of bills from
his pocket. The minute she took it, several men in uniforms and suits descended upon them.
Ivan turned to me. “It’s time for your reunion.”
With pounding temples and racing heartbeat, I got out of the car and approached. The detective had already handcuffed him when I came over. Ryan glared at me, hatred flashing in his eyes. I just shook my head and asked, “Why did you do this? Do you know how much pain you put the family through all these years?”
“Your family, never mine.” His voice was hard and angry.
“It was your family as much as mine. Mom loved you like you were her own, and Grandma and Grandpa were always good to you.”
“You were the one they loved. I was there because my dad died. They felt obligated. Every fucking thing was about you. Now look at you. A big CEO, a beautiful girlfriend, and more money than you can count. Do you think your grandfather would’ve made me CEO? No fucking way. I hate people like you who think they’re fucking entitled.”
“I’m not ‘people,’ I’m your brother.”
“Only half, and it’s the half I don’t want.”
The detective pulled Ryan toward the car. “We’re going to the station. If you want to tag along, you can, but we’ll do the questioning.”
I shook my head. “Just let me know what’s going on.”
Ms. Pierce, handcuffed, was escorted to another car. “You promised me,” she said to me.
I walked over to her and whispered close to her ear. “I’ll post your bond. We’ll talk later.”
I watched as the blue and red flashing lights faded into the misty night. All at once, I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to be with Cierra, my head in her lap and her fingers running through my hair.
I sent her a quick text and had Ivan drop me off at her place. When I walked in, the tantalizing aroma of onions and bay leaf greeted me. I glanced at the counter and saw two place settings and a glass of red wine. Wearing a cute black apron with white polka dots and stripes, Cierra set down the wooden spoon and came over to me, looping her arms around my neck and kissing me deeply. She tasted of wine, and smelled of flour and carrots.