Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy #1)(10)

Montgomery frowned slightly, as if bothered. “I’m showing one full-time and five part-time employees. Call your people in and concentrate on it.”

“Have you checked the DOBs on those part-time employees? Let me save you the trouble: three of them are under the age of sixteen, and one is barely nineteen. They are my sisters and cousins. You’re asking me to go after Adam Pierce with children.”

Montgomery clicked the keys on his keyboard. “It says here your mother is a decorated army veteran.”

“My mother was critically injured in 1995 during operations in Bosnia. She was captured and put in a hole in the ground for two months with two other soldiers. She was presumed dead and rescued by pure chance, but she suffered permanent damage to her left leg. Her top speed is five miles per hour.”

Montgomery leaned back.

“Her magic talent is in her hand-to-eye coordination,” I continued. “She can shoot people in the head from very far away, which will do absolutely nothing, since you want Pierce alive. And my own magic . . .”

Montgomery focused on me. “Your magic?”

Crap. Their records said I was a dud. “. . . is nonexistent. This is suicide. You have twenty times the resources and manpower we do. Why are you doing this to us? Do you think we have any chance at all?”

“Yes.”

My magic buzzed. He just lied. The realization hit me like a load of bricks dumped on my head.

“That’s it, isn’t it? You know bringing Pierce in will be expensive and difficult. You’ll lose people, trained, skilled personnel in whom you’ve invested time and money, and in the end it will cost more than whatever the family is paying you. But you probably can’t turn House Pierce down, so you’re going to give this to us, and when it ends in disaster, you can show them our records. You can tell the Pierces that you assigned it to your best outfit with six employees and a ninety percent success rate. You’ve done all you can. You expect us to fail and possibly die to preserve your bottom line and save face.”

“There is no need to be dramatic.”

“I won’t do it.” I couldn’t. It was impossible.

Montgomery clicked a couple of keys and turned his computer monitor toward me. A document with a section highlighted in yellow filled the screen.

“This is your contract. The highlighted section states that turning down an assignment from MII constitutes a breach of contract, with the payment due in full.”

I clenched my teeth.

“Can you pay the balance of the loan in full?”

I wished I could reach across the table and strangle him.

“Ms. Baylor.” He spoke slowly, as if I were hard of hearing. “Can you pay the balance in full?”

I unlocked my jaws. “No.”

Montgomery spread his arms. “Let me be perfectly clear: you do this or we will take your business.”

“You’re not giving me a choice.”

“Of course you have a choice. You can take the assignment or vacate your premises.”

We’d lose everything. The warehouse was owned by the business. The cars were owned by the business. We’d be homeless. “We’ve always been on time with payments. We never caused you any trouble.” I pulled my wallet out of my purse, slid out the picture of my family, and put it on the desk. It was taken a couple of months ago, and all of us barely crowded into the shot. “I’m all they have. Our father is dead, our mother is disabled. If something happens to me, they have no means of support.”

He glanced at it. A shadow of something crossed his face, then it went blank again. “I require an answer, Ms. Baylor.”

Maybe I could just half-ass it. It went against the grain, but I had to do what I could to survive. “What if the cops catch him first?”

“Your business is forfeit. You have to bring him in, alive and before the authorities get their hands on him.”

Damn it. “What happens if I die?”

Augustine raised his hand, moving the text up on his screen. “You’re the licensed investigator in the firm. When we purchased the firm, we invested in your ability to earn. Without you, we have no interest in your enterprise. Under the terms of your contract, your assets will be written off as a loss. We’ll confiscate any cash and liquid assets, those would be stocks, money market instruments, and so on that the business holds, and write off the loan.”

“What about the agency’s name?”

He shrugged. “I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”

I was carrying a million dollars in personal insurance. I paid for it out of my own paycheck, because I was paranoid that if something happened to me, the family would end up destitute. Short term, I was worth more dead than alive. With a million dollars, Bern could stay in school, nobody would be evicted, and if they were, there was enough money to keep the family afloat. Mom could buy out the name and hire an investigator.

“Yes or no?” Augustine asked.

On one end of the seesaw my family, on the other, possibly my life.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re a terrible person.”

“I’ll just have to live with myself.”

“Yes, you will. Write an addendum to the contract that in the event of my death, my family can buy out the agency’s name for a dollar, and I will go after Pierce.”