Shannon frowned.
“Hey, at least you don’t have to worry about Scarface taking you out. Since he’s dead.” Avery’s off-color words made everyone pause.
She looked up. “What?”
“Whoever hired him isn’t,” Reed reminded her.
“Don’t you have clients to see, Lori?” Trina redirected the conversation.
“This has been more important.”
“I won’t disagree, but you need to get back to your life, too.”
“Trina—”
“I have bodyguards and Texas law behind me.”
“And me.” Wade reached out for her hand and laced his fingers through hers.
“Didn’t I hear something about a Vegas show you’re scheduled to perform?”
“I’ll cancel.”
Trina lost her smile. “No, you won’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“Wade. That’s ridiculous.”
He matched her frown with one of his own. “You are more important than a crowd full of strangers.”
As much as she wanted to fall into the image he was painting, reality kicked her. “I don’t know when things are going to settle down. You have a life, and I’ve taken you away from it since the day we met.”
“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.
Lori opened her phone and showed him the pictures in silence.
Reed’s smile fell.
She pointed toward the camera at the door. “Nothing new,” she said.
“Let’s get you home, then.” He ushered them into the car and out of the parking lot.
“This stays between us,” he said without offering any other words on the subject of a dead woman at Ruslan’s hand.
“We’re one step ahead of you,” Lori told him.
Trina glanced out the back window of the SUV and wondered just how many eyes could possibly be on her at that moment.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“I don’t want to leave.” Wade stood on Trina’s porch, holding her in his arms. Jeb sat in the car with the engine running to keep it cool in the Texas heat. Even though fall was nipping the air in the rest of the country, Texas didn’t get the memo.
“I know. I appreciate the thought of you wanting to stay, but it isn’t practical, Wade. My life is complicated, and it isn’t fair that I’ve monopolized yours as much as I have.”
“That’s my choice.”
“Is it? Wouldn’t you rather have taken me out dancing, made love to me out in a field somewhere, and sent me flowers in the morning instead of spending all our time in hospitals and talking to the police?”
Wade blinked a few times. “Sorry, I’m stuck on the image of you naked in a field.”
She playfully slapped his chest. “None of this, of us, has been normal.”
“Yeah, and I’m usually the cause. It’s kinda nice to have the crazy on the other side of the relationship.”
Trina smiled. “Glad I could help with that.” She slipped her hands around his waist.
He pulled her closer. “I miss you already.”
Her eyes grew misty.
“Hey . . . no tears.”
“Sorry.” She looked down.
“Don’t be. A woman crying over me is wildly exciting. But if it hurts too much, I’ll unpack my bags now.”
Trina swallowed back her mist and faked a smile. “I’m good. Besides, you need to stock up on supplies while you’re gone.” Supplies meaning condoms. They’d talked about it the night before when they burned through the last of them.
“Nawh, I’m going to see my doctor and ditch the need.”
She liked the sound of that.
He looked over his shoulder at the car before pulling her as close as two bodies could be with their clothes on.
“I’m going to miss you,” he whispered as he leaned down to kiss her.
The tears were there again, fueling her response and making her cling to him. What if he walked away and realized he didn’t want the drama anymore? What if he found Jordyn more appealing when he got home? What if his fans reminded him of all the things he would give up by having an exclusive girlfriend?