Chapter 27
twenty-seven
Agony is tearing at my chest like a wild animal.
Three days.
Ava has already been missing for three days without any trace of where she has gone.
The tracker Vas installed in her necklace is silent.
Not even a blip. Footage from our security satellite shows her abduction just minutes after the building collapse, but there is no way to gain facial images. They are too distorted.
“Fuck,” I roar, sweeping my hand across the desk.
Glass shatters, screens crack, and papers scatter under the weight of my frustration.
The monster inside me wants blood. When I get my hands on whoever betrayed us, on whoever took my wife, I will rip them apart piece by piece and bathe in their blood.
“You know—” I look up to see Vas leaning against the doorframe of my office. “There was some good whiskey in that glass. Expensive too.” He shakes his head in mock disappointment. “What a waste.”
My lips curl in a sneer, and I shoot him an icy glare. “Stuff it,” I grumble.
Vas shrugs. “I’m just saying,” he advises with a smartass smile. “Kavanaugh won’t be too happy that you’re destroying his things.”
I groan. Running a hand down my face, I stand from my chair and slowly begin to clean up the mess I made. “Fucking stuck here,” I mumble. “No idea where my wife is. There’s a mole somewhere in our operation. Whole place reeks of piss beer.”
“That’s Corona you’re thinking of.” Liam’s voice drifts in behind Vas. “We serve Guinness. Big difference. Not that I expect you to understand such finer tastes when all you drink is that swill you call vodka.”
“It’s not swill.”
“Tastes like water,” Liam counters. “Stale water, in fact.”
“Says the man whose beer curdles when you drink it,” I sneer. “And who always stinks like cabbage.”
“And you smell so much better?”
“Anything is better than cabbage.”
“You reek of desperation.” The leprechaun sniffs. “That’s definitely worse than cabbage.”
“That’s the pot calling the pan, don’t you think?”
“Kettle.” The Irish asshat smirks. “It’s the pot calling the kettle.”
I shoot him a confused look. “What? That makes no sense. Pots and pans go together. Why a kettle?”
Liam thinks about that for a moment before he shrugs. “Have no idea,” he admits nonchalantly. “Now, if we’re done, my hacker and yours have something for us.” He looks down at the mess I created in his spare office. “Unless you’d like to continue with your Neanderthal temper tantrum, that is.”
I growl when he turns his back and strides from the room. “Neanderthal,” I hiss. “I’ll show you a fucking Neanderthal, you fucking leprechaun. Choke you on your goddamn lucky charms.”
Vas barks a laugh as we exit the room, following my wife’s father.
Since the collapse of the Dashkov building, he has graciously allowed us to take over one of the empty floors in the building above his bar.
Most of my men have been assigned to the compound to continue training and preparing our people for war, but it is too far away from the city for me to set up shop at.
Kavanaugh has his own similar setup in the basement that rivals ours back at the bunker. It is more rustic than what I am used to, but it does the job, and that is what matters.
Mark sits at one of the operation stations next to a blonde girl whose hair is tied up in space buns. She is wearing bright red flare pants and an orange tank top. Her face is covered in a layer of heavy makeup of bright rainbow colors. Bridget, I believe, is her name.
She is the Kavanaugh family’s hacker, with a resume that leaves most speechless. Ivy League graduate. Valedictorian. Bridget Jones is a mechanical and technological prodigy, and yet she is down here in the basement of a bar, working for a crime syndicate.
“Where are we at with finding my daughter?” Liam questions the pair as he stalks through the door. Neither hacker turns to look at him, their hands busy flying across their keyboards, eyes scanning the brightly lit monitors in front of them.
“Her tracker just became active,” Mark announces.
“Why weren’t we able to get a reading until now?” I ask. “Or at least track where she’s been?” The tracker should have the capability to store Ava’s route inside of the mainframe, giving us her GPS footprint.
“The tracker wasn’t activated,” Bridget explains. “Your wife probably never had a chance to activate it before she was taken from the scene. She probably tried to activate it sometime later, after we had already tried, but there was something blocking it. A jammer of some sort, most likely.”
“Why can we see it now?” I wonder.
“We think that wherever she’s being held has a similar setup to the Ward stables,” Mark comments. “The jammer only worked below the surface of the barn. Just in case someone came snooping around. Cops would be more suspicious if they suddenly couldn’t make a radio or cell phone call.”
“Where is she now?” Liam steps forward, peering at the screens.
Mark points at a large piece of green land near a small town called Kangley. Houses out there are few and far between. “Here.”
“We believe she’s still there,” Bridget sniffs, “but her tracker cut out again about five minutes ago.”
“Is that land registered to anyone?” Kavanaugh asks tersely. His eyes are narrowed at the screen, jaw tight. Does he recognize that area?
“Um…” Mark inputs the address into the federal database. “Yeah. It is registered to a Dearbhla O’Malley, but according to record, she died several years ago in a car crash.”
“Who inherited it?” I ask. Mark scrolls through the documents, trying to source a name.
“Seamus McDonough,” Liam hisses. “Seamus McDonough inherited that land.”
I frown. “Ava’s grandfather?” He was at the gala. I remember the way Ava looked at him. Not with the newfound awe of meeting her biological grandfather, but with suspicion and fear.
“Whoever is holding her isn’t her grandfather,” Liam sneers. “He’s just wearing his face.”
Bridget snorts. “That’s not creepy.”
Liam rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean.” He gives her a pointed look. “The man may look like Seamus McDonough, but he isn’t.”
“Then what happened to the real Seamus McDonough?” Mark’s brow furrows. “If this man has been parading around as him, he would have had to get rid of him, right?”
Liam nods. “Ava suspected that whoever this guy is, he’s been playing at being Seamus for a while now.”
“How long?” I wonder. “Someone would have had to notice at some point that he wasn’t really Seamus.
Mannerisms. Vocal pitch. The way he drank his coffee.
Unless he had been studying Seamus for years and practicing each and every little thing, someone would have picked up on the fact that he wasn’t who he appeared to be. ”
“Someone like Katherine McDonough,” Vas speaks up from behind me. He is leaning against the wooden table situated in the middle of the room.
Liam turns to my sovietnik. “Why do you say that?” he demands roughly.
Vas smirks, his eyes lighting up with a challenge. He knows something that Liam doesn’t—or something Liam already knows but refuses to acknowledge.
“You should really listen when your daughter tries to talk to you about her,” he reprimands.
“Katherine ran away,” Liam snarls. “There was nothing to talk about.”
“We all know that isn’t true,” Vas barks. “The proof was in Portland. You’re just refusing to accept it because you know what it means.”
“It doesn’t mean anything!” Liam roars. The Irish leader takes a heavy step in Vas’s direction.
I am tempted to intercede, but something tells me a few fists might need to fly in order for Liam to see some sense.
“Katherine McDonough ran because she was scared. She didn’t want to commit.
She didn’t want the pressure. She caved, and she told me as much. ”
Vas snorts. “A letter told you as much,” he points out.
“A letter in her handwriting.” His words drip venom.
“And someone’s handwriting can’t be replicated?” I ask, tilting my head at him. “Like two people can’t be in one place or share the same face?”
“That’s not the point…” he trails off.
“Think, Kavanaugh,” Vas hisses at him. “Think about everything Ava has told you. About how her mother first disappeared. It was the day after Seamus sent you to Portland, right?”
Liam pauses for a moment, his eyes raising up and to the left.
“She went missing the day after you left,” Vas tells him. “Katherine didn’t show up for class that day. Another student went to check on her because they were supposed to meet for lunch. That student found her apartment door open and the room trashed.”
“That wasn’t in the report.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Vas sniffs. “Whoever took her wanted it to seem like she disappeared. You know this. Neil Romano told you this. His parents died saving her the first time.”
“Just because he said it—”
“Why would he lie?” I question Liam. “Stop blinding yourself to the truth, Kavanaugh, when it’s written in blood right before your eyes.”
“There is something big going on here,” Vas continues. “It’s been going on longer than any of us can imagine, and if we don’t get to the bottom of this, none of us will survive this war.”
Liam hangs his head. His shoulders are stiff, fists clenched at his sides as he wars with himself.
Everything he has known is being obliterated, piece by piece.
Katherine being abducted means he failed to protect her.
To believe her. The man he looks up to isn’t who he appears to be, and if I am right, reality is about to get even harder for him and his family.
But that isn’t my story to tell.
“What do you want to do?” He raises his head and stares at me. “My men will follow your lead.”
I nod at him graciously and turn to the hackers. “Get me a layout of the house and the surrounding terrain. See if we can get our security satellite in place. I want infrared alerts.”
“Got it,” the two acknowledge in unison.
Closing my eyes, I breathe in, taking a long, calming breath before letting it back out.
My eyes fly open, and I stare at my father-in-law.
“Let’s go get my wife.”