Blood Money Read online

  Blood Money

  Lynx Shorts Book One

  Matt Rogers

  Copyright © 2019 by Matt Rogers

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Onur Aksoy.

  www.onegraphica.com

  Contents

  Reader’s Group

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  Books by Matt Rogers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Announcement

  Afterword

  Books by Matt Rogers

  Reader’s Group

  About the Author

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  Books by Matt Rogers

  THE JASON KING SERIES

  Isolated (Book 1)

  Imprisoned (Book 2)

  Reloaded (Book 3)

  Betrayed (Book 4)

  Corrupted (Book 5)

  Hunted (Book 6)

  THE JASON KING FILES

  Cartel (Book 1)

  Warrior (Book 2)

  Savages (Book 3)

  THE WILL SLATER SERIES

  Wolf (Book 1)

  Lion (Book 2)

  Bear (Book 3)

  Lynx (Book 4)

  Bull (Book 5)

  Hawk (Book 6)

  THE KING & SLATER SERIES

  Weapons (Book 1)

  Contracts (Book 2)

  Ciphers (Book 3)

  LYNX SHORTS

  Blood Money (Book 1)

  BLACK FORCE SHORTS

  The Victor (Book 1)

  The Chimera (Book 2)

  The Tribe (Book 3)

  The Hidden (Book 4)

  The Coast (Book 5)

  The Storm (Book 6)

  The Wicked (Book 7)

  The King (Book 8)

  The Joker (Book 9)

  The Ruins (Book 10)

  1

  Ruby Nazarian slipped eighteen-carat rose gold Etincelle de Cartier earrings into place.

  She was careful with the diamonds. She had every reason to be. They’d cost her ten grand.

  She stood on the balcony of her sea-view room at the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, overlooking Port Hercules. She didn’t know they made boats as big as the ones in her field of view. “Megayachts” were an understatement. The behemoths were, at the bare minimum, a few hundred million apiece. It was an alien world to her — hell, it was alien to everyone on the planet bar a few hundred billionaires with more resources than they knew what to do with.

  It was, quite frankly, a disgusting amount of wealth.

  She was putting on a respectable performance — the earrings, the backless Yves Saint Laurent dress, the aura of regality and poise, the outrageously expensive hotel suite — but she knew she didn’t belong.

  She finished fixing the earrings and slipped into her heels. One quick glance in the ornate floor-to-ceiling mirror taking up half of one wall told her everything she needed to know.

  She looked stunning.

  She didn’t shy away from complimenting herself — it was a fact, and she’d been trained to deal with nothing but the cold, hard, objective truth. Everything else could be discarded.

  Her glowing amber eyes, rimmed by thick long lashes and tastefully applied mascara, would seduce anyone she damn well wanted to. Add in the bronzed skin, the straight brown hair framing her perfect face, the striking jawline, the lithe body, the permanently seductive half-smile that always played at the corners of her lips — she was a bombshell.

  And it was no accident.

  She was blessed with good genes, but the rest — particularly the body — came from intense fixation on her craft. With her physique she’d be indistinguishable in a line-up of pencil-armed, wide-hipped Victoria’s Secret models, but her body was deliberately deceptive. Every ounce of muscle on her frame had been forged in fire, carefully constructed to give her the look of a swimsuit model with triple the strength. Anyone with a keen eye for detail might see the callouses on her hands, or the sinew shifting below the surface. But through a combination of posture training and expertly-applied concealer makeup, she’d perfected the art of masking her danger.

  She had to mask it.

  This world of luxury wasn’t hers.

  No, her world was visceral, primal. There was no hierarchy. No assumed power. No nepotism. No curried favours. You either lived or you died, and all the money in the world couldn’t protect you from a blade slipping into your throat. No amount of resources could make you bulletproof. Sure, you could surround yourself with all the protection in the world, but she had ways around that. She’d been trained to do many, many things. Not all of them immediately resorted to violence.

  She belonged to a grey zone few had the privilege of glimpsing.

  A grey zone that’s no place for a twenty year old.

  Just one of the many untruths she’d convinced herself of in the past.

  Those doubts were gone now, shattered into a million pieces, reduced to atoms through the application of pure discipline. It hadn’t been easy. In fact, it was the hardest thing she would ever do — she knew it. Nothing in the field could rival what she’d been put through, to become what she was now.

  That was the point.

  They’d taken an ordinary twelve year old and broken her down so completely that nothing but a skeleton framework remained. Then they’d built unshakeable foundations, and developed her talents until the relatively normal childhood prior to the Lynx program was like a phantom memory, something surreal and incomplete.

  There were snippets of warmth buried underneath the cold, but they would never again see the light of day.

  Now, she flooded her face with artificial warmth, assessing her performance in the mirror. She lit up her eyes with the haziness of alcohol, inflating her emotions, making a mental note to raise the volume of her ordinary speaking voice.

  Underneath, dead sober.

  On the surface, a ditzy socialite.

  She tottered out of the suite, the dress clinging to her frame, her confidence sky-high.

  Like she’d been rubbing shoulders with the wealthy for years.

  A goddess in the warm Monaco night.

  2

  The cobblestone street seemed to glow at dusk.

  The gradient was steep as it swept down toward the port, and the wrought-iron streetlights gave off dull yellow light that threw broad shadows across the sidewalks. Despite the slope, Ruby kept her footing in the lavish heels without so much as a
single misstep. Tourists and locals swept past her — no matter who they were or where they were from, they all stared. She didn’t mind. Her greatest weapon was attention — she could use it to make herself a commodity, a prized possession, an object of burning desire. Although she’d only been in the field for a year, she’d quickly come to understand how stupid people get when they’re swept up in the social contest.

  Men wanted her, and women wanted to be seen with her.

  But only when she put on the show.

  When it was time to blend in, she could collapse her face and relax her posture and dissipate her confidence and make quick changes to her appearance. Then she was just another statistic, another anonymous face flowing with the crowds, perhaps a little more attractive than the usual twenty-something, but not by much. It took considerable talent — her genetic blessings were hard to mask. The key was avoiding eye contact like the plague. Her glowing amber irises were her defining characteristic.

  Now, though, she flaunted everything.

  The bronzed cleavage, the full breasts, the toned hips, the rock-hard stomach outlined against the backless dress. The straight shoulders, the strong jaw.

  All part of the show.

  All with a single purpose.

  Below her, above the fabled Yacht Club on the hillside, sat a brand new establishment.

  Sapphire.

  An exclusive nightclub, positioned on prime real estate overlooking Port Hercules. Right now, the hottest ticket in Monaco. Her target resided within. All she had to do was get confirmation.

  On cue, her iPhone vibrated in its Dolce & Gabbana protective case. She extracted it from her clutch, read the familiar Courtney, and answered it with the swipe of a finger.

  ‘Hi, love,’ she purred. ‘Are you close?’

  A deep male voice responded, ‘He’s in there.’

  ‘I’ll be five,’ she said, continuing her imaginary conversation. ‘Running a touch late. Sorry, love.’

  If she said she’d be ten, they would have extracted her, no questions asked.

  A hard abort.

  But everything was going according to plan.

  ‘Five guards,’ the voice said. ‘Three are Zafir’s. Two are Wayne’s. Nine girls. They all went in together.’

  Ruby let out a ditzy laugh, high-pitched and shrill. ‘Passionfruit, white chocolate, vodka? Order me one of those, will you? I won’t be long.’

  If she’d listed the ingredients for an old-fashioned, they would have extracted her, no questions asked.

  A hard abort.

  She thought the code was a little too precautionary. It already wasn’t an ordinary call — instead of going through cell towers, they used web data, hosted by a Skype-equivalent with the help of encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels to protect the connection. There was a ninety-nine percent chance no one was listening. But this was the realm of billionaires and titans of industry, and if there was anything they were good at, it was being meticulous.

  So, precautions.

  There was nothing left to say. She hung up and slipped the phone back into the gusseted compartment of the Louis Vuitton clutch. She could hear the reverberations of Sapphire’s bass-drenched speakers all the way from the top of the path. The club didn’t mesh with the neoclassical architecture and quiet atmosphere of some of Monaco’s most regal establishments. It catered to the new rich. The young titans, the tech giants, the disgusting amounts of money that poured into their accounts and poured straight back out to buy every piece of designer clothing and exquisite champagne bottle on offer. Some bucked the trend — the ones that made billions but kept a low profile. Lived a normal existence.

  The smart ones.

  The dumb ones came to Monaco.

  There were at least a hundred people in line when she made it to the entrance. She tried not to gawk at them, tried not to think about just how much the queue was worth. The women outnumbered the men three to one, obviously by design. Ruby took in her competition at a single glance — the girls were beautiful, done up with the most expensive makeup, clad in the best dresses, their physiques toned, their lips full.

  She didn’t bat an eyelid.

  They didn’t have the fire.

  They didn’t have the it factor.

  No one had it like her.

  She waltzed right up to the three bouncers at the door, and one of them saw her coming out of the corner of his eye. His face hardened, but his eyes remained apologetic. As if he were about to say, I know you’re a supermodel, but there’s rules here. Back of the line, please.

  Before he could utter a syllable, she reached out and placed a hand on his forearm and stared him dead in the eyes. When he turned to face her, he saw her fully for the first time, and his face softened. Which was impressive in its own right, because Sapphire scoured the globe for the best doormen money could buy. This guy, with his military buzzcut and hard face and squashed nose and thick jawline, was not a pushover. Not the type to cave to pressure.

  But she wasn’t applying pressure.

  She was approaching with a little more refinement than that.

  She purred, ‘Darling, I’m with Wayne.’

  He started, ‘Even so—’

  Because Aaron Wayne was important, but he was also a man, and there’s an underlying contest beneath every comparison men make with one another. The bouncer didn’t like the mental image of the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life sauntering inside to fawn over another guy.

  Ruby had to use the name-drop to get inside, so she persevered.

  ‘He’s hired me for the evening,’ she said, keeping her wide eyes fixed on the bouncer’s. ‘But, honey, you’ve seen how many girls are in there with him. You think he’s got time for all of us?’

  The merest hint of a suggestion.

  It was enough.

  The bouncer visibly perked up.

  Keeping her palm flat on his forearm, she said, ‘Why don’t I come say hello at the end of the night? Just to say thank you…’

  She blinked once.

  He half-nodded.

  He’d been open, vulnerable, daring to dream of a night with her, but now he squared up and straightened his shoulders as he turned back to the line. A consummate professional. Showing the rest of the crowd that he was no sucker. He didn’t get swayed so easily.

  Oh, but you do.

  Without looking directly at her, he reached back and unclipped the rope from its stanchion.

  She ran her hand down from his forearm to his palm, held it there for a second, and then breezed past into Sapphire.

  When the shadow of the entranceway fell over her, her face became ice.

  3

  There are hierarchies everywhere.

  Even amongst the ultra-rich.

  There was no better visual representation of it than Sapphire’s main room.

  The entire space was constructed like an oversized staircase; an Alice-in-Wonderland fun house for the one percent of the one percent. There were four tiers — thick platforms cascading up to the overly high ceiling. The ceiling was a normal height for the fourth tier, then the floor progressively descended down to the ground in giant blocks, where the distance between floor and ceiling widened with each chunk. On the ground tier, Ruby could barely see the roof.

  It was like a church down here.

  One wall of the ground floor consisted of a lavish bar, with ultra-expensive bottles of rare spirits lining the dimly lit shelves. Bass-drenched minimal house music pulsed in the background, maintaining a consistent unchanging rhythm that allowed even the most uncoordinated patrons to bob and nod along to it. And it was much-needed — becoming a billionaire, especially before you were fifty, took a level of dedication to a single pursuit that few could comprehend. Often, it meant forsaking interpersonal relationships and practically all social interactions outside of business, so when you made it, you had no idea what to do with yourself without looking like a fool.

  Ruby saw that in spades on the ground floor.
/>   Unconfident pencil-necked guys clutched drinks with white knuckles, their shoulders slumped and their eyes darting everywhere at once. She understood. Spend long enough at a computer, your attention switching from program to program in a blur, and it’s hard to pay attention to anything for more than a couple of seconds. When you stepped out into society, the stimuli could be overwhelming. Especially here. Other men, deeper into the drinks, had started to come out of their shell.

  The second tier was livelier, and the third and fourth were downright rowdy.

  Ruby looked up and saw your standard ultra-rich socialites populating those levels. Men, and some women, who had money to burn and knew how to use it. They were dressed in tailor-made Armani suits and exquisite figure-hugging dresses, and they twirled glasses of champagne and crystal tumblers of whiskey around with poise. They pulsed as one to the music, their bodies looser, less uptight. They knew how to unwind, and how to detach from the stresses of their careers.

  On the third tier, Ruby spotted Aaron Wayne.

  He seemed different in person to the intelligence photos she’d studied. She should have known by now that pictures didn’t convey personality, but even from a distance she was struck by his charisma. She didn’t know what he was saying, but he had his entourage wrapped around his finger. He floated from person to person with a measured warmth, leaning in a little closer than necessary to speak to the women, putting an arm around the men’s shoulders, pulling them close, making them belly laugh.