Nate(9)

“You do, and you’ll have help. I think that’s the last thing you need to worry about right now. Get some of the other roadblocks out of the way first, then freak out.” He brought over my coffee and sat on the couch with his own. He nodded to my phone. “What other calls have you made? What do you know?”

“I got a preliminary file sent to me thirty minutes before you showed. Quincey Royas, like I said. She’s a principal dancer in the Seattle Ballet Company.”

Mason whistled.

“Or she was up until six months ago when her half-sister died in a car accident. Val was driving on the coast when she lost control and flipped her car during a storm. It went into the ocean, and she drowned.”

Mason winced. “Shit.”

Shit was right.

But I was emotionally locked down.

I wasn’t letting myself think about Valerie right now, thinking about the what-ifs or why-didn’t-I’s.

“She’d divorced her husband, Nico Mancini, and had filed for a restraining order two months before she died. He was threatening to take her daughter away, but that ended when she told the attorneys Nova wasn’t his. A birth certificate was produced, and she had put my name on it. The guy demanded a paternity test, and that was negative. Guardianship transferred to the godmother, Quincey, and Quincey is now living at her father’s estate. Both of them are raising my daughter.”

“That was all in the preliminary file?”

“My PI is good.”

“He’s damn good.”

“She.”

“Right.” Mason grinned. “I forgot. This Nico guy, is he going to be a problem?”

“I don’t think so.” I expelled a breath. “Restraining order was because he hit her, stalked her. He’s in jail for another case. My PI is looking into it more, but she doesn’t think he’s a problem.”

Mason grunted. “Wanna know for sure about that.”

“No shit.”

“What about the grandad. Who’s he?”

“He runs Royas Casino, but he also runs a national cleaning company that, dude, we’ve used at the house multiple times.” I had a bad taste in my mouth. “She’s rich.”

That meant power. That meant resources. That meant we were fighting a battle where both parties had a PI.

“She’s more than rich. She’s wealthy.” His voice sounded clearer. “But so are you. So am I. So’s my family. This family isn’t anyone we can’t take on if we need to. But, having said that, maybe we’re jumping the gun.”

I looked at him and scoffed. “Mason Kade? Being the voice of reason in a fight? Since when?”

He smirked. “I’ve matured.”

“Yeah, well, your brother hasn’t.”

As soon as the words were out, a different heaviness came over the room.

“When you want the bomb to explode, you call Logan.” His words were quiet.

It was almost sacrilegious that we hadn’t called Logan from the jump, but he was right.

When Logan came in, everything ramped up five levels. He was the dynamite we could send in to mess everything up if that was what we wanted, but right now, in my state, I needed studious and calculating.

I needed Mason.

I just hadn’t fully expected him to come right away. I thought within a day or two. He must’ve been out the door within thirty minutes, flying from Boston straight here.

“Thanks for coming.” My voice was a little raw, but that was how I was feeling.

“Thanks for asking.”

I glanced over, and he was watching me steadily.

There was a message there.

I never asked when we were younger. He was right.

“Thank you.” I said it again because it felt right to repeat it.

He nodded. “You gotta know that the Royas Casino…”

“Yeah?”

“Rumor is that there’s a mob connection to it.”

“How do you know that?”

“My dad. He looked into expanding up here with a couple of his companies and ran across the Royas Casino. Corporate world is sometimes a small world. I recognized the name when you said it.”

“He backed away because of the connection?”

Mason’s face hardened, which it normally did when he talked about his father. “Let’s just say there was a conflict of interest. Don’t give James any credit.”

I nodded, sipping my coffee as I mulled that over.

James Kade was not an upstanding businessman, so the way Mason talked about that topic told me there was a whole lot there I probably didn’t want to know. Noted.

“You know how strong the connection is? If there’s a fight, that’s who we’re really fighting?”

He let out a sigh, raking his hand down his face. “I don’t know. I hope not because we don’t take on those kinds of fights.”

“Channing could maybe help.”

His whole face tightened. “No. He couldn’t. That’s the conflict of interest.”

I stared at him a moment, letting his words digest. Then I got it.

That wasn’t good.

Channing was another friend from high school who had connections to a powerful motorcycle club. If that was the conflict of interest, then he was right. Channing couldn’t help us, but besides Channing’s connections and Mason’s father’s illegal connections, we had nothing going for us if it was a fight like that.