CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Balor
W ith Shea gone, the weekly meeting resumes. This is my shot to tell them Corvin Snow is working for me. I’m comfortable mentioning it since he hasn’t breached my most secure sites in the three weeks he’s been working for me.
“What’s up with you?” Eoghan asks me, looking at my lap.
Jesus, do I have a boner?
I admit, watching Ella punch that mannequin, taking back her power, yelling, and screaming in the store was sexy as hell. It turned me on.
Then spending so much of my money?
She can spend every penny of mine, but now I have to fuck her to punish her, deliciously.
“Balor?” Eoghan nudges me.
“What?” I ask him, shifting my legs.
“Your knuckles are white?” He frowns. “Something wrong?”
“Balor?” Kieran calls out to me.
“I’m fine.” I turn back to Eoghan. “Can Jillian come by my house? I want her to meet my new assistant who’ll be...” I stop when jaws tip open all around me.
“Assistant?” Lachlan crows.
“I’ll get to that.” I wave off the curious gapes and return to Eoghan. “I want Jillian to work with her, she’s privy to the weapons project and can help with the patent filings. We toured the chip facility yesterday.”
“You got stuck Upstate in the snowstorm until late at night.” Eoghan cocks his head. “Was that assistant with you?”
“Aye, and Trace,” I say to get him off my back.
Kieran covers his face. “The weapon patents, Balor. ”
“I have the final specs from the manufacturer. Jillian can update the patent applications.”
“Balor, I’m not Jillian’s secretary,” Eoghan pushes back. “If you want a meeting with her, call her yourself.”
“You’ve changed your tune about her now that you’re married,” I scoff. “You acted like you owned her and controlled every facet of her life a month ago.”
“That’s how I got her to marry me. Now I can dial things back.” Eoghan smiles.
At least I haven’t gone off the rails the way Eoghan did with Jillian. He’s lucky he didn’t get arrested for the shit he pulled with her.
Even if it worked.
I don’t have to go all psycho stalker with Ella.
She wants me. I want her, too, but I’m blocked. I’m stuck. Chained to the only way I know how to be with a woman. No feelings. No strings.
Being with Ella every day these last couple of weeks and not being able to touch her has the emptiness gnawing at me. I can call my service any time. Any second. Right fucking now, and have a beautiful, sexy woman sucking my cock in ten minutes.
Only every time my dick gets hard, I think of Ella. And it’s her cunt I imagine when I jerk off.
Fuck, I’m in trouble.
“Whatever,” I snap at Eoghan. “I’ll call your wife.”
Eoghan’s lips twitch. “Never mind. I’ll do it.” He stands up and leaves the office.
He’s too fucking easy, but I’m thinking he’s using this as an opportunity to have phone sex with her. Those two are addicted animals.
“How is this new assistant working out?” Riordan asks, breaking me from my thoughts of Eoghan.
“Fine, but I have something more important to announce.” I stand up to take command of this meeting. “ I found Iceman.”
My words wipe the perpetual grin right off Lachlan’s face. “Where?”
“I hired him when I was in Sydney.”
“What?” Riordan shrieks. “He nearly breached our network.”
“I know better than all of you what he did. He did it to hundreds of businesses and financial websites. It wasn’t personal. He cast a wide net and our sites and accounts got swept up in it.” I take a breath. “His name is Corvin Snow.”
With Eoghan conveniently out of the room, I don’t have to worry that his HR paralegal mentioned that name to him.
“How do you know it was him?” Kieran asks, sitting back. “I assume he didn’t admit it.”
“Of course not. I tracked his digital fingerprints and his signature code entries. And I have state-of-the-art backups that not only prevent attacks, but reverse-engineers them. I had a special team tracking him down. Then he had the balls to show up at the global conference three weeks ago.” I sit down. “The bank he was working for didn’t renew his contract. So, I scooped him up.”
“Why in the world would you want a man like that anywhere near our network?” Kieran asks, anger in his eyes.
“I’m logging his keystrokes. I threw a ton of money at him and have him doing bullshit coding to see his skills firsthand.” I take a breath.
“What’s your end game?” Riordan asks, leaning toward me, looking concerned.
“To learn his methods. The thing about serial criminals, they keep it all bottled up when they’re actually dying to talk about it. He thinks he’s in a safe space right now. Only a few of my most trusted developers know who he really is. They’re gushing over him. He’s eating it up and spilling more and more to them. I’ll have that ransomware code he wrote, or at least the framework, in a month.”
“You’re playing him,” Riordan says. “How do you know he’s not playing you?”
I don’t. But I’m fairly certain.
“Trust me. He’s got an ego the size of the Empire State Building. I’ve been feeding into that. I gave him an office. I took him to dinner. I invited him to the fundraiser gala next week.”
“That may work for a while, but he’ll eventually get bored and want more,” Kieran says.
“Or get on your nerves,” Riordan adds.
“I’ll have what I need from him by then. But there’s more.” I stare at eyes like mine except different colors, eager for me to continue. “His daughter is my new assistant. It was a condition he made for me.”
I don’t know if the tone of my voice changed, but the way my brothers’ eyes widened when I said daughter , I might as well have played a video of me fucking Ella for them.
“Daughter?” Kieran drawls.
I go to answer, but Eoghan comes back in, zipping his pants. “Jillian will be at your house Monday morning.”
“Great.” I put my head down but lift it at the silence. “What?”
“I asked you about hiring the man’s daughter.” Kieran’s voice is low and sounds miffed from being interrupted.
There are fucking five of us, what does he expect?
Shaking my head, I say, “I only agreed to hire his daughter because he told me she got abused by a boyfriend six months ago. She moved with Iceman to Australia when he got an assignment there. He’s worried about her. He’s got issues, but he loves his daughter. And well...” I close my eyes ready to light the bomb I dropped. “I fucked her in Los Angeles without knowing who she was.” I won’t mention that I mistook her for an escort or that I gave her twenty-thousand dollars.
Who I fuck is my own damn business, and I’ve always been discreet. Although the way Eoghan smirks at me suggests he’s figured out what my large cash withdrawals have been for.
“I’d only found out about her ex after I agreed.” I don’t mention he’s a cop. Yet. “I want to keep her close to me so the eejit ex doesn’t get any ideas that he can hurt her.”
“Close, as in on your cock? She works for you,” Eoghan says with unmitigated gall, considering the crimes he committed in Las Vegas with Jillian.
I glare at him.
“Her father has no idea?” Lachlan says, playing with a knife.
“Snow didn’t crash Kieran’s plane recently, did he?” Although that might be the least of what Snow would do to us if he knew we were on to him.
Or what he’d do to just me if he knew I slept with his daughter.
He sees her as fragile and vulnerable. I see her as strong and taking control of her life. Pushing away the fear. Not letting that prick win.
“I just want Snow’s ransomware code.” I look around the room, knowing my brothers trust me to keep them safe this way.
“Then what?” Eoghan asks, crossing an ankle over a knee. “What are you doing with Iceman after you get what you want from him?”
“We kill him,” Lachlan sneers. “What do you think?”
My stomach twists because Lachlan killing Snow is the force field that will keep Ella and me apart forever.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I immediately argue out of the ache in my body to make Ella mine.
Lachlan stands to his full height. “You hired a madman with cyber skills that could decimate us. And you’re screwing his daughter.”
Anger floods my veins, but I keep my cool. It’s my signature position in this family as the smart one, the sane one. Just as they fear Corvin Snow after seeing what he did before Christmas, they secretly fear me as much.
Mafia families are notorious for infighting. Some dons put hits on their own brothers.
We’ve never come close to falling apart like that until women came into our lives. Eoghan stood outside this very office last month threatening to disappear with Jillian.
Fuck, it’s in our blood to bond so viscerally with a woman once she gets her hooks into us. I thought I was immune. And never more wrong about anything in my life.
“I’m insulted you think I can’t protect us. His virus hit us. It hit everyone. Your damn credit cards didn’t work because of the shitty banks. Unless we want to start our own bank...”
“Nooooo,” Eoghan groans.
“Exactly. I’ll deal with Corvin, and as far as his daughter—”
“Balor,” Kieran interrupts.
“What?” I stop talking because he’s in charge.
“I know you can protect us. But being overconfident is a blinding mistake we can’t afford. We all have faults. No one here is perfect.” He turns his glare at Lachlan. “You think you are, Lach. All those scars on your body say otherwise.”
“Kieran,” I keep fighting.
“I’m sorry, Balor,” he says in his savage tone. “We kill Snow once you have his code. He’ll be a liability. Lachlan, he’s yours.”
I feel like a wall of bricks just fell on me. Any thought of making Ella mine has gone up in flames and Lachlan is holding the fucking can of gasoline.