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.
Nash leaned on the doorway, a grin on his face. “You were watching porn, huh?”
“No!”
“Mmm-hmm. Sure. It’s okay, Bliss. Nothing wrong with a little porn to get you through the working day.”
My heart pounded. But standing in front of me, Nash was as charming and handsome and harmless-looking as always.
I was letting my head get away from me. So I glared at him, just like I would have if I hadn’t seen those things on Axel’s email.
He chuckled. “Sorry. I forgot you rich uptight people think it’s dirty and forbidden.”
“We don’t think that. We just—I just—don’t watch it personally.”
His teeth dug into his bottom lip. “Never?”
“No!”
“You realize how ridiculous that sounds, right? You own a sex club.”
“I own a dive bar.”