His to Take (Wicked Lovers #9)(5)
Author: Shayla Black

“Not much about her specifically, other than her name. I’m more familiar with her father’s work.” Logan cocked his head. “Do you know Callindra Howe?”

“The heiress who was missing for, like, a decade? I know of her.”

“Yeah. I know her personally, so I know what she went through to escape the bastards pursuing her because of Viktor Aslanov’s research. There’s more to the story than they’re saying on the news.”

“You seriously know her?” Joaquin was about to call bullshit.

“Before he got married, he had the chance to know her up close and personal,” Hunter added.

“And you passed that up?” Now Joaquin just wanted to call the younger Edgington an idiot.

“Hey!” Logan objected. “We were both in love with other people.”

Was this guy for real? “So? That pic someone caught of her and her former ‘boss’ looking mighty cozy in Tahiti a few months back?” That had been one hell of a lip lock. “She looks insanely hot in a bikini. As long as her fiancé gets some, too, I kind of see why he just looks the other way.”

The Edgington brothers exchanged another glance. Okay, they knew something else he didn’t. He’d come back to it later. Right now, his goals were to avenge Nate and stop other women from dying, not worry about some pseudo-celebrity.

“So through Callindra Howe, you know something about the Aslanov case?”

Logan nodded. “Callie’s fiancé, Sean, still consults with the FBI. What we know is that the bureau is convinced that no scientist, especially one doing Aslanov’s sort of groundbreaking genetic work, would intentionally hand over every scrap of his research to her father, knowing that he would only destroy it.”

“What?” Joaquin hadn’t had much time to devote to the news lately, and he was a little embarrassed to admit that he knew more about how Callindra Howe looked on a beach wearing next to nothing than about her case.

“Her father, Daniel Howe, hired Aslanov to find a DNA-based cure for cancer when Callie was a little girl,” Hunter explained. “Howe threw millions at the Russian geneticist to try to save his wife from dying of ovarian cancer. When that didn’t work, he pressed on, hoping no one else would have to suffer as he and his family had.”

“Right.” He remembered that part.

“Then when Howe figured out that Aslanov had stumbled across other genetic markers that had nothing to do with the grant he’d funded and the scientist had sold that information separately to make a buck, Callie’s father demanded that Aslanov turn over his findings since it had been created on his dime. Aslanov supposedly gave Howe every bit of research he’d ever conducted with the funding. But the end of their business relationship was contentious, and the scientist had to know that the billionaire was going to turn his life’s work into dust. Which is exactly what he did.”

“But everyone thinks Aslanov left a copy somewhere else?”

“In his shoes, wouldn’t you?” Logan challenged. “Would you endure years of advanced schooling, being ostracized in your own country for your controversial experiments, and work like a dog for a dozen years so that you could hand everything over and know it would all go up in smoke?”

His pride would never allow that. He didn’t think most men’s would, either. “No.”

“So the FBI is speculating that another copy of this genetic-altering research is somewhere. What we know is that Aslanov sold his initial findings to some well-funded, fuck-all-crazy separatist group with delusions of a super army. They experimented with some U.S. soldiers they abducted in South America. When these loons came back to Aslanov for the rest of the research, the Russian told them he didn’t have it anymore. They shot his family deader than dead—wife and two kids. They tortured him mercilessly for nearly two days before they killed him, too.”

Joaquin absorbed all that and let it rattle around in his brain. “That’s all terrible, but what does it have to do with my case?”

Logan clapped him on the back. “Well, the separatists never got their hands on all that research. Aslanov had three children, but authorities only recovered the bodies of two. This organization might seem insane, but they aren’t stupid. I’d bet they found the obscure news story of a little girl covered in blood and walking a dirt road the same November day as the murders, less than a mile from the crime scene, then decided that she was Aslanov’s missing daughter.”

“So you’re saying that’s Tatiana Aslanov and she’s still alive?” Joaquin’s blood started to spark and race. Finally, after a frustrating few weeks, he might be onto something.