A Silent Reckoning: Sinner's Empire by Nikita Slater (ereader iphone .txt) 📗

out to close the safe, using the light filtering through the clothes to see. She’d dropped her phone. Hopefully somewhere not visible to Leeza. The door to the safe was blocked and Saskia had to feel around to figure out why. A stack of bills had wedged itself in the door.

She pulled the stack loose and shoved it down her shirt, then closed and locked the safe as noiselessly as she could. It didn’t matter. Leeza was completely engrossed in her conversation.

“I’ll try to bring him, but everyone makes such a fuss when I take him off the property. Especially now, with Jozef cutting himself loose.” Leeza listened for a moment. “I know, but for now that’s how things will have to be. I can’t confuse my son; you know I can’t.”

Saskia peered through the rack of jeans and watched her sister as she jerked a pair of yoga pants off a hanger and strode from the closet, leaving the door open.

Saskia crawled along the back of the closet wrinkling her nose at the smell of carpet cleaner. Seriously, Leeza had the carpets in her closet cleaned too? She was such a weirdo.

A weirdo with a secret.

Saskia grinned and leaned against the wall next to the door, still hidden behind a rack of clothes. She listened intently as Leeza’s conversation continued.

“Can you meet me somewhere? I don’t think I can find the cottage again in all that wilderness.” She paused. “Do you need groceries? Anything you can’t get in that tiny village?”

Saskia frowned. Who was she talking to?

“I have to run, Dad,” Leeza said, her voice clear as day as she stepped up to the closet, the legs of the yoga pants she’d just changed into visible to Saskia as she started to push the door closed. “I have to get back to Kristoph before he throws a fit. He doesn’t like his new tutor.”

Dad?

Saskia leaned back against the wall, stunned.

Just before the closet door shut, Saskia heard her sister say, “I love you, too.”

Which was how Saskia knew there was no way Leeza was talking to their father. Krystoff Koba did not tell his daughters he loved them.

Chapter Thirty-One

“Can I sit here?”

Jozef glanced up and nodded, closing his laptop and setting it in the empty seat on his other side.

They’d made it out of South Sudan as easily as they’d made their way in. Their trip through Somalia back to Mogadishu had been similarly without difficulty. Jozef had worried that Ayaan wouldn’t be able to keep up with him and his team during the terrain trek part of their journey, but she’d proved herself as fit and capable as his men.

When a patrol had passed on the road beneath their position, she had been one of the first to take cover, automatically reaching for a weapon. When she remembered she didn’t have one, she’d dropped her hand. Jozef had been watching her like a hawk and had noticed her unusual action. She was clearly trained in combat.

Once they’d made their way back into Mogadishu, they’d checked in at their safe house, repacked their equipment and headed to the jet for their flight. They’d been in the air for two hours and had six more to go. Jozef was planning on finishing up his operations report and then sleeping for the remainder of the flight. Apparently, his charge had other ideas.

Ayaan sat next to him, her curious gaze on first his face, then his throat. He wondered if she was looking at the scar that had led to his inability to speak or his plethora of tattoos. She didn’t seem to be afraid of him or his men, and they were an intimidating lot. He supposed hanging around her brother would expose the young woman to men who lived dangerously.

“We didn’t get a chance to talk when we were travelling,” she began. “I want to thank you for bringing me to safety, even though you hadn’t originally agreed to it.”

Jozef grunted and continued to look at her steadily. He had no quarrel with the young woman; his ire was directed at Radik for deliberately misleading Jozef.

Perhaps Ayaan sensed Jozef’s annoyance toward her brother. “You must not blame Muhammed. He knew you wouldn’t agree to transport me because you don’t deal in the flesh trade. I asked him to explain our situation, but he insisted we had to use deception. He said you wouldn’t agree because you don’t like to take responsibility for anyone outside of your team and your family. Is that true?”

Jozef nodded his acknowledgment. Radik had been correct in his assessment of the situation. Jozef wouldn’t have agreed to the job, even if he’d understood the full story. Quite aside from the potential of aiding in human trafficking, Jozef despised human cargo because they were unpredictable, difficult and often ungrateful.

“I want to tell you my story so you can understand why my brother did what he did.” She bit her lip and glanced away.

Jozef wanted to tell her he understood and might have done the same with Shaun or his cousins, had they been in danger. Just because he understood Radik’s actions didn’t mean he would forgive them. Nor did it mean he wouldn’t seek retaliation eventually.

“I know what you’re thinking. You are very similar to my brother,” she said, looking back at him, her dark eyes meeting his. They were earnest and unafraid. “I’ve lived with my brother for most of my life, except for a few years of boarding school in England.”

Jozef nodded; it was the same with his family. Leeza and Saskia had been raised in the bosom of the Koba family except for a few years each in England. It was considered finishing school for the world’s wealthy, where they would go to learn history and politics.

“I understand the dangers of living with a man like Muhammed. He has led armies into battles on both sides of the law. Sometimes he was the revolutionary and sometimes he was the military. Governmental allegiances changed,