Say It Again (First Wives, #5)(81)

Sasha squeezed his leg. “Professional, huh? And here you thought no one knew.”

He switched lanes. “What I did twenty minutes ago was anything but . . . Amelia told you I was a thief?”

Olivia laughed. “I told her. She didn’t want to believe it. But once I found out, I didn’t keep it from her.”

Damn.

“She loved you anyway.”

“How do you know what my sister loved and didn’t?” he asked.

Olivia stared out the window. “Because she was my only friend. I loved your sister and now she’s dead.”





Chapter Twenty-Nine



Claire sat on the sofa, hands on her knees while Sasha reported in on the speakerphone.

“I’m outside of Alamo rentals.” She rattled off the address. “We need a car. There’s three of us now. I don’t have a lot of time and we need to put some miles behind us.”

“Who’s the extra wheel?” Neil asked.

“Olivia, our missing link. Amelia was her best friend. Olivia tried to leave Pohl’s organization and people around her started dropping.”

“Why the other roommates?”

“Olivia believes Pohl got word of a friendship from Richter and took them all out one at a time until he hit the right one.”

“To make her come back,” Neil said.

“Or teach her a lesson.”

Claire watched as Neil paced the room. “Get back to Texas. We need to regroup.”

“And bring a known assassin into Trina’s home. Not in this lifetime. I have no way of knowing what she said is true. Only thing going for her is the fact that we were both dodging bullets.”

Neil stopped moving. “Care to elaborate?”

“Are you okay?” Claire jumped in to ask.

“I don’t have any extra holes. We need a car and time. Oh, and we may have liberated a vehicle from the parking garage of Amelia’s office building.”

Cooper started to laugh. “Let me guess, AJ.”

“Yeah,” she huffed. “Might need to run some interference with that one. When the smoke clears, Amelia Hofmann’s condo is going to be found full of bullet holes and DNA. Won’t take long for whoever is behind this to figure out that we’re still alive and for the authorities to find us and make our jobs even harder.”

“Police and questions.”

“Right. Since we sent AJ to the office today . . . ,” Sasha said.

“Someone is going to put this together.”

“Alex Hofmann said he was hiring someone to look into his daughter’s death. Might be a long shot to reach out to him to keep AJ’s face and name out of anything that comes up. I’m buying twenty-four hours and then I’m headed back to Germany.”

Claire cringed.

“Sasha!”

“I’m going, Neil. With or without a team. The answers are at Richter.”

“And if that’s Olivia’s plan all along?” Neil asked.

Yeah, that’s exactly what Claire was thinking.

“Then sending a team to be there will keep me alive.”

Everyone in the room tensed.

“Twenty-four hours, Neil. Plenty of time to come up with a plan. Run away, or toward. You know my direction.”

Tension rolled off of Neil in hot waves. He turned to Isaac. “Do we have a car?”

“Already called in,” Isaac reported.

Neil put his head closer to the phone. “You have a car and twenty-four hours. I want a report every six.”

“I’m capable—”

“We need to know you’re alive.”

For a minute Claire thought Sasha had already hung up. But her voice cracked when she came back on the line. “Copy that.”

The phone disconnected and Neil snapped. “We need maps, aerial and surrounding areas of Richter. Claire, I need to know every last detail of that campus, cameras, security, lighting . . . everything. Someone get some coffee going. No one is getting any sleep tonight.” He stormed from the room with a slam of the door.

Claire stood next to Cooper. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s fine.”



They holed up in a tiny town not far from Heritage Airfield, an airport large enough to land a private jet and small enough to avoid hassle.

“Can we trust her?” AJ asked. His eyes traveled over Sasha’s shoulder to the woman standing in the small kitchenette of the motel room they rented.

Sasha wished she could answer that question without any skepticism. “Sixty forty,” she told him.

“I don’t like those odds.”

“We don’t have much of a choice right now. Friends close and enemies closer.” Much as she hated to say it.

“I can hear you.” Olivia jumped up to sit on the counter, her legs dangling. “Looks like you guys are all rock and a hard place.”

Sasha crossed her arms over her chest, expression neutral. “You need to give me something or you’ll be sleeping tied up.” Not a bad option.

“I don’t do kink.”

“You do have a bad attitude,” AJ growled.

Olivia glared. “You would, too, if your friend was killed just to make you submit. Amelia’s death is on my shoulders. The only thing keeping me from putting a bullet in Pohl personally is needing to know who he hired to do the job. I want them, too.”