Start a War (Saint View Psychos #1)(72)

My heart gave a little squeeze, realizing this was as close as I’d ever get to talking to my brother again. I was about to put the paper back into the box when Axel’s email address caught my eye.

The police had seized all of Axel’s possessions from the club in the days after his death. His house was still locked up as a murder scene under investigation, until whenever the gang task force got around to Axel’s case, so I hadn’t been able to get in there yet to search through any of his things.

But this email address was web based. I hadn’t thought much about it until now, because it’s not like he would have just been sending emails back and forth with drug dealers.

But he clearly did have an email he used.

I glanced out of the doorway, but Nash was still nowhere to be seen. Shoving aside the masks, I uncovered Nash’s laptop but was halted at the sign-in page. I didn’t know his password.

I pulled out my phone instead, bringing up the email website’s login page. I hesitated for a second, because trying to break into someone’s email didn’t sit well with me. But neither did the notion that Nash might not be what he seemed. And maybe Axel’s emails would hold some sort of clue as to what had been going on in his life.

I desperately wanted to know.

So I pushed aside the part of me screaming that this wasn’t morally right.

Neither was selling drugs or running a sex club, but those lines had already been crossed. Might as well jump a few more.

“Okay, username or email. That one is easy.” I copied out the email address from the top of the invoice and then sat back, staring at the password field.

The cursor blinked at me accusingly.

“If I were Axel, what password would I choose? Maybe something to do with football.” I knew he’d played in school for Saint View High, so I plugged in their team name, plus a couple of variations. They all came back with a red “Incorrect password or username” message.

“Okay, fine. Not football. What about Psychos…”

That was a no-go too.

“What’s the password, Axel?” I drummed my fingers on the desktop.

It jogged a memory loose in my head.

“You need to say the magic password to get those candies.”

“Sandwiches!”

With trembling fingers, I typed it in.

Axel’s email opened in front of me. “Oh my God. I can’t believe that worked.” I glanced up at the ceiling, like Axel might be lurking up there somewhere. “I really hope your bank account passwords were harder to crack than that one.”

Though I knew that not just anyone would have guessed it. Only me, him, and Nash had been there that night in the tent where I’d forgotten my manners because I was desperately hungry.

Axel’s inbox had a red circle around the number 1587, and I cringed at the number of unread emails. “I don’t think even death excuses an inbox this out of control.”

I scrolled through the main inbox page, reading the titles of emails and not finding anything all that interesting.

It wasn’t until I was four pages of unread emails in, that I found one that caught my eye.

I clicked on it to open it.

___





Dear Mr. Fuller.

Thank you for meeting with us earlier today. We appreciate the opportunity to assist you with the sale of your business. Please find attached our rates and charges. If you have any questions, please forward them at your earliest convenience. We’d be happy to assist.

Regards,

High Street Real Estate.

___





I checked the date on the email.

Two days before his death.

A sinking feeling washed over me.

With a nauseating gut instinct, I searched Nash’s name in Axel’s emails. It brought up a whole list of results. Some just silly things, like memes and YouTube videos they’d passed back and forth between them. But there were a ton of automatic bank receipts too. They were all addressed to Axel’s email, but Nash’s name was listed as the owner of the receiving bank account, which was why they’d shown up in the search.

There was one for every month, going back as far as I could find.

I sucked in a breath when I saw how much each transaction was for. It was far more money than his salary.

If Axel sold Psychos, he wouldn’t have had the money to keep paying Nash, surely. I knew how much the business was worth, and it wasn’t much. What if Nash had found out? What if they’d argued, and it had escalated into something more? I had no idea why Axel would even want to sell the business or why he’d be paying Nash so much money, but the proof of it was right there in front of me.

A more sinister thought crept into my mind.

What if the man who’d come to my room wearing a mask in the middle of the night and demanding his monthly payment had actually been Nash? These payments were regular as clockwork, one a month, just like he’d demanded when he’d told me he didn’t run credit.

I shivered, remembering the man’s threats to take his payment out on my body if I didn’t produce the money.

“Jesus, Bliss. Could you have made any more of a mess in here?”

I snapped my head up, frantically jabbing at the buttons on my phone, trying to get Axel’s bank account receipts off it. “What? Sorry! I’ll clean it up.” I shot to my feet, shoving my phone quickly into my pocket.