hadn’t checked the finer points of the law, but she was certain that helping a foreign drug cartel establish an organized-crime syndicate on United States soil was a treasonable offence.
When she didn’t find anything in the briefcase, she started on the desk, just in case he’d slipped something in the drawers since she’d searched last night. She knew Cesar, or thought she had. He was meticulous about keeping records; the paperwork had to be somewhere. “Where is it?”
Cesar shoved papers back into his briefcase, his face flushed. She could smell the alcohol now, which accounted for his passivity. He had moved the money, then anesthetized himself.
And what better financial pipeline for the Chavez cartel to utilize than the Morell Group? On the surface Cesar was solid gold, a business prodigy with the Midas touch. Until recently his assets had rivaled those of some of the most powerful men in the States. She yanked open a drawer.
He slammed it closed. “Don’t bother looking, there’s nothing here.”
“Liar.” Whatever he had done, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to store the records in his office downtown. Carmita had said he’d been home briefly at lunchtime. He would have hidden the papers then.
She began opening drawers that held hanging files. Not bothering with the contents, she searched instead between the files. She hadn’t thought to do that last night. Cesar had a good brain, usually—he was analytical with just the right amount of greed and ego to ensure success—but his mind wasn’t serpentine. If she hadn’t been so panicked, she would have thought about searching between the files last night.
She pulled the final drawer open. Her fingers walked through the files. Nothing.
Her temper erupted. With a jerk, she hauled the drawer off its runners and let it fall to the floor. A neat manila folder was stored at the base of the cabinet.
Cesar grabbed, but he wasn’t fast enough. Papers scattered, numbers leapt at Esther, the configuration as familiar to her as her own name. An account number in the Cayman Islands. Her gaze flowed down the page and stopped, the chill congealed into ice.
Not seven figures. Eleven.
Her heart stopped in her chest. More than thirteen billion dollars.
Numbly, she transferred her gaze to Cesar. “What have you done?”
The blow was short and vicious, an openhanded slap that caught her on the side of the jaw. She staggered back, almost tripping over the drawer she had pulled out of the filing cabinet. Her hand shot out, connected with solid wood, clutched at the edge of the desk to keep herself from falling. Sucking in a breath, she wiped blood from her mouth and waited until the room stabilized. It was the first time Cesar had so much as raised a hand to her, but Esther barely registered the blow.
They were dead.
She knew it as surely as she knew her marriage to Cesar was over.
Lopez—Chavez—was using them. They were his doorway into the States. He was the predator who had systematically ruined them. He had set them up with breathtaking brilliance, his plays elaborate and perfectly executed, turning them into puppets. When he no longer needed them, he would kill them: all of them.
Fiercely, she stared at Cesar, no longer seeing the brilliant man she’d fallen in love with and married, but the man who was responsible for putting her baby in danger. She had been thirty-four when she had given birth to Rina. She had lived life to the full, but never more so than that first moment she had held her own child in her arms. The thought of all that bright promise, of Rina’s quirky intellect, the fun and the dreaminess being snuffed out, was wrenching.
She couldn’t allow it.
With everything that was in her, she would stop that process, but she was going to need help. Lopez had gone too far, done too much; she was out of her depth.
Cesar’s hand closed on her wrist. She wrenched free.
Something cold and feral flashed in his gaze, and Esther fought down another surge of panic. It was tempting to ignore Cesar, but she couldn’t forget that he had made this deal. He had climbed into bed with the Chavez cartel, and if anything was precious to Cesar, it had always been his own skin. His quick instincts and visceral reactions had made for good business decisions, but right now she was in almost as much danger from him as she was from Lopez.
She clenched her jaw as she rubbed at her wrist, the words she wanted to spit locked at the back of her throat. She would stop this madness, and if she had to lie through her teeth to do it, then that was what she would do. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything. I can’t, it’s too late.”
“Okay.” Some of the feral tension abated. He let out a breath, dug in his pocket and handed her a white linen handkerchief. “I know it doesn’t look good. It’s not what I planned, but I’m handling it.” He turned away. “If I hadn’t signed with Lopez, we would have been out on the street within a week.”
Esther blotted blood from her mouth as he shuffled papers and slipped them back into the manila folder.
Fool. Lopez was the one who had put them there.
Four
Esther locked the door of her office and crossed the room, blind to the morning sun flooding through the French doors and gleaming off the rich hardwood floors. Cesar had finally left for work, an hour later than he usually did, and Tomas had just pulled out of the drive with Rina in the passenger seat. Esther had asked Tomas to take Rina to school on the pretext that she was feeling unwell after slipping on the steps of the pool, the piece of fiction Cesar had devised to explain her split lip and bruised jaw. She had iced her jaw before going to bed, and a few minutes spent applying makeup this morning had hidden most of the damage.
Bending, she opened the doors of an exquisite Louis XV bureau. Reaching inside, she pressed on a section of paneling and a secret drawer at the side of the bureau slid open.
The address book in the drawer wasn’t secret—Cesar knew about it—but it was sensitive and entirely her business. With the media’s interest in Cesar, and now her, it was expedient for the stability of their business that certain details of her past were never revealed to the press, and one relationship in particular.
The book in hand, she walked to the French doors and stared in the direction of the garage, which was partially hidden from her view by a screen of shrubs and palms. Cesar had said he would be out all day, but she didn’t trust that he wouldn’t turn up unexpectedly to check on her.
The previous evening she had convinced him that she was prepared to go along with his partnership with Lopez. By the time she had gone to bed they had reached a fragile accord, but she had no illusions that would last. Cesar had promised to give her breathing space to allow her to “adjust.” The offer had made her skin crawl and she had finally given in to the fact that Cesar was no longer operating in a normal way.
Despite his formidable business talents, Cesar couldn’t work out an equation that to Esther was obvious. She and Lopez existed on different sides of a very stark line; it was a truth that had been acknowledged on a subtle level the first time they had met and that had been reinforced at her dinner table. Lopez could control Cesar—to the extent that he had entrusted him with the bank transfer—but if he didn’t know it already, he would soon know from his research into her background
