Chapter 43
forty-three
Ava has been restless all night. Barely sleeping, even in the secure warmth of my embrace. We are all exhausted in the morning. Vas, Liam, Ava. Even the twins wear haggard expressions when they sit down at the dining room table that morning.
My little wife is quietly thinking to herself, her cup of coffee held tightly to her chest. I have come to realize that it is a form of security for her when she is out of sorts or contemplating something.
She drags the warmth of the cup into her and concentrates on the peace it brings her in that moment.
It centers her.
Her leg bounces anxiously beneath the table, and she bites her lip. I can’t help but smile at how she is chomping at the bit to see her mother again. Radick has informed us, however, that we should wait until the afternoon to visit so her mother can have enough rest.
Liam has his chin in his hand, elbow braced on the table, eyes cast down in thought.
I can only imagine what he is going through, finding out that the woman meant to be his wife is alive and that it is his current wife who tried to murder her.
It has been unanimously decided that we will wait until it is time for Katherine’s discharge to include Liam in everything.
Unless she asks for him, but I have a feeling that she won’t.
“Any news on Christian?” Ava asks me once I kiss her good morning. I nod.
“Mark has been monitoring internet chatter with Bridget,” I say. “But your brothers have been coming up with a plan to draw him out.”
Ava raises her brows in surprise and glances over at the twins. “Ooh,” she grins excitedly. “Do tell.”
“You’re gonna be bait.” Seamus grins at her. I growl quietly next to my wife with my arms crossed against my chest, glaring at the smug bastard.
This is the part of the plan I don’t like.
There is no mistaking that Ava has become well trained while we have been separated, but she is nowhere near mastery level.
She is small and slight, which gives her an advantage, but if her opponent gets her in a compromised position, she could have a hard time getting out of it.
Especially if it is a man twice her size.
“I do make good bait,” she teases, her eyes twinkling mischievously when they flicker my way before she glances back to her brother.
“He’s been following you,” Kiernan sneers. “The fucking cockroach has had you under surveillance this entire time, and we barely caught on to it.”
“How?” she wonders. How indeed.
“We thought the hack into the Dashkov building was planting the virus that triggered the explosion,” I tell her. And we were fucking wrong about that. “It wasn’t,” I continue. “The hack spread a virus through our entire system that was searching for one thing only. You.”
“Umm.” Ava shifts in her seat uncomfortably. “What do you mean searching for me?”
“Keywords mostly,” Seamus explains. “We believe that whoever set the virus in motion before the explosion had our information being filtered through a program that searches out specific keywords.”
Ava still looks confused.
“It’s similar to putting words into a search engine,” I explain to her. “Like ‘red hair’ or ‘Dashkov.’ Any time their program picks up keywords they entered into their parameter filters, it alerts them.”
“That’s not creepy.” She wrinkles her nose. “Wait,” she looks around, “are they watching us?” She turns a fresh shade of red. “Like in your office or…” The twins exchange mirrored looks of amusement and disgust.
“No, Red,” I assure her. “My office doesn’t have cameras, and your father’s system is completely separate from ours.”
“But—” Kiernan chimes in, “we believe they’ve been tracking you using CCTV footage as well.”
Ava’s mouth parts slightly. “This is like a spy movie or some shit,” she murmurs. “Except I’m not James Bond.” She pouts slightly at that, and I can’t help but smile a little.
“So how do we use me as bait?” she asks.
“You’ve had a guard or one of us with you since we rescued you from the McDonough mansion,” I tell her. Ava lets out a dramatic sigh.
“Is there a point to this somewhere?”
Her father chuckles. “They’re going to make it look like you’re alone, lass,” he explains. “Make it seem like he got the drop on us while our guard was down.”
“Great,” she agrees. “How are we going to do that?”
Liam leans back in his chair. “Christian doesn’t know that Kenzi isn’t playing his game,” he tells her. “He thinks she’s on his side.”
“That is where she’s been?”
I shrug. “Sort of.”
Ava shoots me a quizzical look. “If she is ‘sort of’ with him, then why doesn’t she just kill him?”
“Because she’s in contact with him, but not in person,” I explain. “Paranoid motherfucker.”
Ava takes a deep breath and lets it out. “All right.” She leans forward in her chair slightly. “Break it down for me.”
I drop Ava off at the clinic later that afternoon after we go through our plan on how to corner Christian.
Kenzi will float her own plan to her brother about luring Ava away to meet her and reconcile over the past. Some undisclosed spot she will mention to him.
He will be hiding with his men, and so will we.
My focus now is on finding Sheila and Remus.
The pair have managed to somehow slip under the radar.
Whoever they work for has skills and deep pockets.
Not even the dark web has been able to pick up a trace of them.
I had thought that the organization started and stopped with Sheila, but my gut tells me she is just another pawn in a game no one knows the rules to.
“From what I can find, Sheila McDonough was born Sheila Islandier, a native born Irish,” Bridget tells me.
She has been leading the charge on Sheila and Remus McDonough, while Mark is set on finding the mole and Christian.
“On paper, she was born in the late 1950s, lived and studied in Cork, and met Seamus McDonough at age eighteen. Had Katherine McDonough less than nine months later.”
“That is rather suspicious,” I sigh. “And what do you mean by ‘on paper’?”
Bridget clicks her tongue and shoves the small screen aside for another one.
“I mean that Sheila Islandier never existed.” Jesus, this family is complicated. “There is no proper birth record for her. The one on file is a fake and the worst but, it was the fifties, so.” Bridget shrugs.
“Who is she then?”
“Well.” Bridget blows out her cheeks. “When you told me about the creepy as fuck human barn in Portland where you believe Marianne was kept, I did a little digging.” She pauses to swipe left. “A lot of digging, actually, and there are things I cannot unlearn.”
“Like?” I am beginning to get impatient.
“A girl fitting Sheila’s description was reported missing by her family,” Bridget sniffs in disdain. “Except that they reported her missing a week after the authorities believe she was taken. Now, local police couldn’t tie anything back to the prominent family.”
“How prominent?” I ask, eyes narrowed at the screen.
“A senator with a very large gambling debt.”
Just like Senator Crowe. Except the daughter he tried to sell was not his.
“Sounds like a theme.”
Bridget snickers. “Well, I did say to myself, ‘Bridg, if one disgusting baldheaded Senator sold his daughter for money, how many others did as well?’ And you know what I found?”
“The jackpot?”
“The jackpot,” she confirms.
“Why am I not surprised?”
“You shouldn’t be,” Bridget teases. “I’m amazing.”
“It would be amazing if you got to the information I need.”
“Pfft,” she snorts. “Spoilsport.”
This girl is going to be the death of me.
“I did a facial match on the current Sheila to the girl in the photo the Senator and his wife provided to the police,” she tells me.
“Let me tell you. The 1950s sucked. Luckily, most of the precincts nowadays are scanning everything into the system, otherwise I would have had to dig through the newspaper archives, and those archives are so messy, and you can’t really find anything because they don’t—”
“Bridget!”
“Right.” She coughs awkwardly. “Sheila’s real name is Margaret Melozzi, Italian. Born to Greg and Jane Melozzi in 1958 in Portland, Oregon. Went missing when she was three. Police chalked it up to a kidnapping, but the timeline didn’t match up.”
“Where are they now?” I ask.
“Dead. Died in a house fire in 1976.”
“The same year she married Seamus McDonough.”
Bridget nods.
“Funny thing is,” she clicks over to another screen, “there are more than five dozen cases of missing children, mostly girls, in the last sixty years.”
“That can’t be a coincidence.”
Bridget shakes her head. “It isn’t,” she agrees. “Especially since the one thing that links all of those children is the fact that their parents were killed on their eighteenth birthday.”
I curse under my breath. This is much bigger than anyone thought.
“What else can you tell me?”
Bridget rolls her shoulders. Her fingers fly across the neon keyboard like a rocket. Soon, the screen fills with images, documents, and video footage. Fuck.
“Now that I know the link, I went searching for the missing children using a combination of an age progression matrix and significant facial structures that remain the same over time, like eye color, hair color, etc.”
“The problem is that even though CCTV was invented in 1929, the ability to record said footage didn’t come around until the 1970s when VCRs were invented,” she rambles.
“So anything before that is pretty done for, and honestly, most places don’t store CCTV for longer than a few days after the incident unless a crime was committed or something. ”
“Back to the point,” I guide her back toward the topic. Liam warned me she is a bit squirrely with her thoughts and often goes off on tangents.