Half Empty (First Wives, #2)(79)

“My choice.” He wasn’t backing down.

“Vegas is a short flight. You have two shows scheduled, right?”

He didn’t answer.

“Wade. Be reasonable.”

“We’ll discuss this later.”

“There isn’t anything to discuss. If things were calm, I’d go with you.”

His thumb stroked the inside of her wrist. “We’ll see.”

“Your mother hates me enough as it is. If you start canceling shows on my behalf, I’ll never get on her good side. If this is gonna work”—she pointed between the two of them—“then your mom has to tolerate me.” Trina wasn’t about to hope for more.

“What is your obsession with pleasing my mother?” he asked.

“Hey, my last mother-in-law left me a zillion dollars. It’s important.”

Wade cracked a smile. “My mother doesn’t have any money.”

“Great, then maybe I can leave her some of mine. The point is, you have a life. It isn’t all about me.”

Wade broke eye contact with her and looked around at all the faces staring at them.

“Let’s have Jeb meet you at Trina’s. We already have more security en route to your home. All I suggest is avoiding any after-parties or breaches in backstage security. Like everyone else here, you’ve been privy to all the conversations, and there is always a chance someone is watching you as closely as everyone else. But unlike the rest of us, you have a harder time blending into the background, and that will come in handy if you need help,” Reed said.

“So we’re all set.” Trina grasped Wade’s hand.

Wade grumbled but didn’t argue again.



Trina’s hands shook as she entered Interstate Bank. When she gave them her ID, she half expected them to tell her they didn’t have a box with her name on it.

They did.

She and Lori were led into the locked room full of locked boxes.

Once the bank manager left the vault, Trina found the box number that matched her key. She slid the metal container from its slot and placed it on a table at one end of the room.

“Well . . . here we go.”

Trina opened the box. Inside were two large envelopes. She opened the first and removed familiar paperwork. “Samantha’s contract.” The only proof that her and Fedor’s marriage was secured even before they said I do.

“Sasha knows about Alliance.”

Fedor would have placed the paperwork in his office safe, a safe that was virtually empty when they finally opened it just prior to closing up the house. There had been a stack of euros to the tune of fifty thousand.

Trina pushed the contracts aside and opened the second envelope. This one had several pieces of paperwork bundled together.

A photograph of Alice when she had to have been in her twenties fell out. She had a black eye and a battered soul. Along with the image was a copy of a hospital report. She used a fake name and said she’d fallen. Trina kept reading until she found a doctor’s note saying that the injury didn’t match the story, and that he suspected she was being abused.

Several other images through what seemed to be a couple of years followed. One had a social service referral, along with an agency in place to protect children.

“He was beating her.”

Trina kept flipping until she found an even more disturbing image, Ruslan in midswing and a woman falling to the ground. Only this wasn’t Alice, it was someone else. Tall, exotic. She couldn’t be more than twenty, if that. It was hard to judge, since the image was faded and printed on plain paper. The next two pictures were of Ruslan standing over the same woman.

The last one was of the lone woman’s lifeless body.

“Jesus.” Lori blew out a breath.

“This had to be how Alice got away from him.”

“She had something on him.”

Trina turned the paper over, and on the bottom, there was a name.

Lori removed her cell phone and started taking pictures of the images and a close-up of the name.

“The fewer people who know about this, the better,” Lori said before they left the bank.

“If I tell Wade, he might never leave.”

“Avery has had enough trauma, and Shannon needs to distance herself.”

“No texting, no phone calls. In person only and in secure places.”

Trina glanced at her purse and thought about her phone. A phone that had a bug in it so deep, it took a week to find. She now had a new phone, and the one in question was sitting at the ranch, where she wanted whoever had tracked her to think she was.

“When will we take this to the police?”

“When we can prove something. Otherwise all we do is poke the sleeping bear. And Ruslan pokes back, as Reed keeps pointing out.”

“Good thing I don’t have anywhere to be for a while.”

“Everyone vacating will give the illusion that we’ve found nothing.”

“You’re starting to sound like your boyfriend,” Trina told Lori.

“I like to think he’s starting to sound like me.”

They exited the vault and signed out of the bank before meeting Reed, who stood by the front door. He didn’t dare walk in with a sidearm attached to a holster.

“Well?” he asked once they joined him.