Don’t Love, Don’t Lose

He nodded.

“It was meant to be caught. Just not by me.”

“They’re underestimating you. I wonder why they’re underestimating you.”

“Nobody except Della knows that I suspect anything’s off. Della and Roger, and Jennifer. Everybody else thinks it’s business as usual. But this is sloppier than it was before. See here? The older forgery was better. It still wouldn’t have passed muster but it was difficult for me to spot it.”

Jasmine looked at it closely and nodded. The work was getting sloppier.

So the spy was getting sloppier. Why?

Jasmine frowned and looked at the two documents again, comparing it carefully.

Could it be? Maybe she was making too much of it. She couldn’t really tell.

“What is it?”

She should’ve known that he would catch on.

“It looks like… See here, the date – that was changed in the first one. And look at this curve here – it looks different.”

“You think two different people did this.”

Jasmine frowned.

“I can’t really tell, but I would consider that a possibility.”

“Why would there be two people doing it? Why would there be two spies?”

Jasmine shook her head. She had no answers to those questions, either. It didn’t make much sense to her.

“Maybe in case one was caught?” she suggested, but the real reason occurred to her quickly enough. “Because the original one might have gotten fired,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I… I found something, too. I didn’t tell you.”

“What did you find?”

Jasmine looked away for a moment before telling herself that she had made up her mind.

“I need you to promise me something first.”

“Tell me, Jasmine.”

She ignored that.

“I need you to promise me that you will use whatever you have, do whatever you need to, to make sure that my sister and my aunt are protected, no matter what. No matter what comes to light, no matter what kind of ruthlessness Sanders might plan, I want to be sure that Rita and Aunt Della will be safe. Not just physically safe. I need them to be safe from any kind of potential retribution.”

She looked at him steadily and waited. It was a lot to ask. She knew that.

But she had to ask it. Without that promise, she wouldn’t be able to help. Without it, she wouldn’t help.

“I will do everything in my power.”

She shook her head.

“Your power has to be enough. Unless you can give me that assurance, I’m out from here. I’ve given you my opinion – that it’s the temp agency and that you need to find another one. The rest of it will only come to you if you give me that promise.”

He looked like he had grown older in the last few minutes. Why was that?

But he nodded.

“I promise.”

It wasn’t a promise made lightly. She didn’t think that Anthony Malone had ever made a promise lightly in his life. She suspected that he rarely made promises at all.

But she knew that once he’d made them, she could expect him to honor them. So she chose to trust him, and she took a deep breath, nodding.

She felt shaky.

But she could do this.

She would do this.

“I have the proof you need to be sure that the temp agency is a Sanders company.”

Everything went still.

“What?”

“He’s not just using somebody who worked there. The company belongs to him. Most of it does, anyway. I followed trails, and shadows of trails, and it was buried pretty deep, but I found it, finally. It was set up with what I think is laundered money. It’s his, and I think he uses it to sabotage his competitors pretty often. I looked up the companies that got temps from that agency. Whenever his rivals, or anybody who was causing him any trouble, used that agency, things went wrong. There was a fire in a building that he wanted to buy. The building had two offices that were still occupied. One had two employees from this agency. There’s another that went bankrupt. I think that was personal. It looked like the owner of that business was his third wife’s boyfriend.”

Anthony’s face looked like it had been carved from granite. She’d never seen him look so unmoving and so intimidating.

“You have proof of this?”

“I have proof that he owns the business. I have proof of connection between him and the people who used this agency and who mysteriously had to deal with all kinds of terrible misfortune. I can’t call it conclusive, and I would agree that it is circumstantial, but it’s happening to you, too. It’s not just undercutting your bids and hiring your preferred contractors and making them sign non-compete contracts. He has done that before, by the way – and he has destroyed contractors that he didn’t like by doing that, too. He pretends to make nice and then destroys them. He’s an evil man, Tony. He has no empathy. He doesn’t care about how his games affect real people. You’re probably the biggest adversary he’s ever taken on, and so far, it doesn’t look like there’s anything personal there. But as soon as he figures out that I’m working for you – and he will, he’ll already know that Aunt Della is working for you – it will become personal. I don’t want you to be hurt. I don’t want you to get caught in this. I don’t want my sister and my aunt to get caught in this.”

“And what about you? How do you feel about getting caught in the middle of all this after you spent a decade and a half distancing yourself from him in every way?”

Jasmine sighed and let herself sag a little bit. She was exhausted. Maybe there were some things that even a sister’s unconditional support could fix for you. She wanted things to go back to how they were.

She’d been right. Life was easier without attachments.

Easier isn’t always better, she reminded herself, and made herself sit up straight again.

“I walked into this with my eyes open. I will stick till the end. But I’m not going to watch the people I love buried under apparently unrelated misfortune.”

Anthony nodded.

“They won’t. I give you my word, Jasmine. And you’re right, I don’t give my word lightly. I give it to you now, freely. You won’t pay for this, and neither will your family.”

Jasmine looked at him, and despite everything, despite knowing that he was handicapped by the fact that he had morals and principles when Sanders had none, she was glad. She believed him.

So she let everything go, and tired, let herself lean her head on his shoulder. He wrapped an arm around her and they sat in silence for a while.

Neither of them saw the flash or heard the muted clicking of the camera.