Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
CIARA
I double-check the time on my phone and hold my breath as I unlock the front door of my family home.
Callum’s car is gone, just like I knew it would be, but I know I only have an hour or so before he gets back from his weekly meeting with our accountant to go over the family accounts.
The irony isn’t lost on me, considering what I’m about to do.
I let myself in and shut the door quietly behind me.
Even though I’m alone, my pulse still thuds in my ears as I stand in the middle of the foyer because I haven’t been back here since Callum confirmed the rumors about my father to be true.
Since then, everything has fallen apart, and I feel sick to my stomach as I realize there are likely even more secrets that my father took with him to the grave.
I move quickly up the stairs, cringing as each step creaks, and dart down the hall to Callum’s office.
He refused to move into our father’s old office after he died, considering what happened in there. Perhaps it might just be better to burn the entire estate to the ground because once all these secrets get out, there’s no chance of our family ever recovering.
I doubt even being married to Ronan Sullivan can restore the McCarthy name.
The door is unlocked, and I quickly dodge inside and close the door behind me.
Even though I have every right to be in this house, I have no right to be inside Callum’s office.
It’s like going through a girl’s purse. It’s strictly off-limits.
So, if my brother comes home early, I need to make sure I’m as far away from this room as possible because I’m a terrible liar and wouldn’t be able to hide the fact I’ve been snooping through his computer.
A quick glance around the room has me cursing under my breath. It’s a complete mess, with books and papers covering every available surface.
“How the hell can he work like this?” I wade through the sea of boxes to get to the desk, which is also covered in papers and empty beer bottles.
I think of how terrible my brother looked the last time I saw him and feel a pang of guilt.
It’s clear he’s hurting and using alcohol and god knows what else to slowly self-destruct, but my sympathy only runs so deep because I’m hurting too, all because he decided to keep the truth from me. So, I push past the guilt and pull his laptop toward me and start trying to guess his password.
I try my father and mother’s names and the years they died, then type in the name of our first and only dog followed by the year he died.
I get in.
“Seriously, Callum? Remind me to give you a lesson in password security.”
I reach into my tote bag and pull out the laptop Ronan bought me, setting it beside Callum’s before logging onto the Sullivans’ payment system.
“Here we go…”
For the next twenty minutes, I lose myself to spreadsheets and bank statements as I comb through my family’s accounts, comparing the dates and numbers against the encrypted payments I found in Ronan’s system, but nothing matches. Not one single entry.
In fact, there is no trace of the money at all.
I double-check every business account linked to McCarthy Enterprises, but I still come up short.
What am I missing?
I know for certain that the money passed from Seamus Sullivan to McCarthy Enterprises, but apparently not to any of the accounts I was aware of.
Sighing, I scroll back through the encrypted trail, retracing every transfer Ronan flagged for what feels like the hundredth time. “Come on, there has to be something.”
Then I see it.
It’s barely a blip, but it’s there. A redirected payment buried beneath layers of proxy routing.
I follow it through a tangle of dummy corporations until I finally land on a single offshore account tucked away in a Cayman-based bank.
An account in Callum’s name.
“Oh, my god.”
This wasn’t just some accounting error or misfiled record. This was intentionally hidden, which means my brother has known about these payments from Seamus Sullivan as well as everything else.
“Son of a bitch.” I slam my laptop shut.
What else has my brother been keeping from me?
My body practically vibrates as I log out of Callum’s computer and leave the office, making sure to leave no signs I was ever here.
When I’m back behind the wheel of my car, I pull out my phone and scroll through my contacts until I come to Max’s number—because if there’s one person who can help uncover what the hell is going on with this account, it’s Mila’s brother.
Thankfully, he answers my call immediately. “Ciara? Is everything okay?”
“Not really. Can I come over?”
Mila’s brother opens the door to his run-down apartment building, wearing a black hoodie and sweats, his dark hair disheveled and falling in front of his eyes.
“I was wondering when you’d pay me a visit,” he gives me his signature smirk. “It’s been a long time, McCarthy. Or is it Sullivan now?”
“Are you alone?”
“Always.”
I step inside, and he leads me upstairs to his apartment.
It’s even smaller than Mila’s, which is saying something, and it perfectly reflects Max’s somewhat reclusive hacker-genius vibe that he has going on.
But the state of his apartment is of little consequence to me.
What’s important is that he’s good at what he does.
If anyone can help me figure out what the hell is going on with this account, it’s him.
He leads me into his bedroom, which more so resembles the control center of an alien spaceship, with four huge monitors above his desk, each one running pages and pages of code.
“I need to trace a series of offshore payments. I thought they were going to my family’s accounts, but now I’m not so sure.”
Max raises a brow. “How illegal are we talking?”
“It’s a gray area, the moral justification is pending.”
Max chuckles under his breath. “Good enough for me.”
I hand him my laptop already loaded with the encrypted payments, and he sets it up on his desk and starts working, his fingers flying across the keys.
“These payments came from an account linked to Seamus Sullivan?”
“Yes.”
“And you thought they were going to your father’s accounts?”
I nod. “But they weren’t. I just checked, and there’s not a single trace of the payments coming into McCarthy Enterprises. None of it makes any sense.”
Max frowns as he links my laptop to one of the huge monitors and starts uncovering even more layers to the payments.
I perch on the edge of his bed, nervously picking at my nails as I watch him work. Occasionally, he mutters a curse under his breath before furiously attacking his keyboard.
“What is it?” I get to my feet to peer over his shoulder.
“Here.” He points to the name of a shell company. “It seems the money was funneled through a dummy account in Belize set up under a fake name, but it looks like the passport used to open it was real.”
“Whose passport?”
He clicks a few more times, then freezes as the photo ID fills the screen, clear as day. “Callum McCarthy.”
“That’s impossible.” I look at the date the account was created, a date I will never be able to forget. “He was with me the day this account was created. W-we were at the hospital with Mom...”
“Well, someone used his identity to open this account in person, which means either he has a twin you don’t know about, or someone forged this using legitimate credentials.”
My mind races as I consider the date, the signature, the in-person verification.
Clearly, someone not only had access to Callum’s documents, but they could also imitate him well enough to slip into a bank under false pretenses and set up an account.
“Can you try to see who it was? Because it sure as hell wasn’t Callum.”
Max frowns. “I can try…”
I pace anxiously around the cramped bedroom as Max works his way into the CCTV cameras inside the bank. It takes him some time to scroll back to the date the account was made, but then he finds it.
He pauses the footage and zooms in. “Here. Do you recognize this guy?”
It’s grainy and blurred, and I can only see the side profile of the man, which makes it hard to make out his face beneath the baseball cap he wears. But I can’t deny there’s something familiar about him, and not because he looks a little like Callum.
It’s because he looks a little like one of Ronan’s men.
“I need a copy of this. Now.”
Max nods and transfers the file to a USB drive.
I have no idea if Ronan’s aware of this, but what I do know is that if he finds out before I tell him, it could tear everything apart.
“I have to go.” I clutch the USB drive like it’s my lifeline.
“Be careful, Ciara. Are you sure you want to get caught up in this?”
“I don’t think I have much of a choice.”
The drive back to Ronan’s estate is a blur. My thoughts are spinning so fast I barely register the road ahead of me, and it’s a miracle I don’t drive headlong into oncoming traffic.
Does Callum know that an account has been set up in his name? Or worse. What if this isn’t the only one?
My blood runs cold at the thought.
If someone is going around pretending to be Callum, there’s no telling what sort of trouble this could get my family into. Though at this point, I’m not sure it’s possible for our reputation to get any worse.
I just hope that this one tiny thread I’m holding on to is enough to undo the mess my family, or rather my brother and I, have found ourselves in.
By the time I get home, the house is empty. Ronan’s out, which is probably for the best. It gives me some time to get all of the evidence together, ready to show him when he gets home.
I head straight down the hall to Ronan’s office and plug in the USB to his computer, cueing up everything that Max found, including the account history as well as the screenshot from the security footage.
I stare at it all until my vision blurs, hoping that it might rearrange itself into something less horrifying, but it doesn’t.
This is real.
The payments Seamus made weren’t to my family’s accounts. They were to Callum, or rather someone pretending to be Callum.
My stomach tightens as I consider the reality that Callum might have been behind all of this. If it really was him, what the hell was he doing taking money from Seamus Sullivan? But if it wasn’t, why would someone go to so much trouble to make it look like him?
It seems the deeper I dig into my family’s secrets, the more I unearth. But I know in the end, the truth will always come out. I just have to hope that I’m the one to uncover it first.