Chapter 24 Saoirse
SAOIRSE
“Saoirse?” Cian’s knuckles tap lightly against the door, then he leans on the handle and opens it enough to allow a crack of light to streak across the room. “You awake?”
I glance at the clock. It’s after ten.
I should have been up hours ago but it’s getting harder and harder to face the world.
Cormac is angry with me. The Italians and Irish continue to lock horns, and I accidentally shot Bruno.
An accident that’s turned into fuel against us even though I took him to the hospital and did everything I could to make sure he got the best treatment.
“Careful,” I mutter into my pillow. “You don’t wanna be near me. I’m bad luck.”
“Ah, fuck that.” Cian opens the door fully and strides in. I track his heavy footsteps crossing the room until he drops down onto my legs at the end of the bed. “C’mon, Saoirse. This isn’t like you. I’ve never seen you wallow, not once.”
“This is different.”
“Is it?” His hand lands on the duvet just above my knee. “Talk to me. I’m worried.”
“Why?” Opening one eye, I peer through the dull light where the sun fights to get through the gaps in my blackout curtains. “Shouldn’t you be busy with Cormac?”
“Fuck Cormac,” he replies gently. “I can feel you’re in pain. I want to help and I’m tired of you closing me out. Since when is that a thing we even did?”
He’s got a point. As twins, we’ve been inseparable for as long as I can remember and becoming adults didn’t change that. Until now. Slowly, I sit up and a deep sigh rushes out of me.
“If I tell you, you have to promise not to react.”
Cian arches one brow. “Weird but alright.”
“I mean it, Cian. Not a word. Not to anyone.”
“Of course.” Growing serious, he holds up one hand and wiggles his pinkie. “Promise.”
We haven’t done that since we were kids but right now it feels fitting. I hook my pinkie around his and squeeze, then I sit up fully and situate myself back against the pillows.
I tell him everything. From how Bruno and I met, the fight we had and the agreement to work together, the investigation that Cormac gave me permission to spearhead, the women we found in the house and the strange connection to the Chinese Triad.
I lay it all out with every single detail, including my new suspicion which feels like fact now.
“It’s him,” I say quietly. “It has to be. There’s no mystery fucker using his name for clout or taking advantage of a weakened Italian family. It’s him. Domenico. He’s the one in charge and I don’t know how we missed it.”
“You’re saying there is no set up?”
“Nope. Domenico is either the leader of the trafficking ring or he’s working for the person who is.
Either way, it’s the only explanation. Why else would he be so set on turning Rocky against us and making it look like we’re the one’s who are up to the shady shit?
Anyone else would be doing everything they could to clear their name but not him. He’s doubling down.”
“And Bruno?” Cian’s expression twists as he processes everything. “Do you think he knew?”
“I…” Bruno. My chest squeezes just at the thought of him. “No clue. But I know one thing. He was desperate for daddy’s approval.”
“So he betrayed you to get it?”
I shrug one shoulder. “Believable.”
“Shite.” Cian rubs the back of his neck. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“There’s more.” My heart suddenly picks up, beating like a drum and growing stronger by each passing second.
“What is it?” Cian fixes me with an open, honest look. He won’t judge me and I believe him.
“I’m pregnant.”
“What?” He nearly leaps right up from the bed. “Are you serious?”
“Four months, actually.”
“There’s no fucking way you’re— wait, four months?” His attention drifts down to my flat stomach. “But you look—”
“Normal? Yeah, doc says it’s a cryptic pregnancy so the baby’s sitting really far back.”
“Who the fuck is the—” He halts and his eyes widen. “The green masked fuck. That’s the father, isn’t it?”
I nod and suddenly tears warm my eyes. “I didn’t know.
At the time it was just some fun, y’know.
I wasn’t thinking. I was just enjoying the party and life, and there was this handsome man and I—” It’s like a damn cracks.
The tears flood my eyes and the next thing I know, I’m sobbing while Cian wraps his arms tight around me and holds me.
“And it’s Bruno,” Cian says, stroking my hair while I sob on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Saoirse. I’m sorry.”
He holds me for a long time while I clutch at his shirt and cry out everything I’ve been holding in for weeks since Rocky’s wedding.
The pain of Bruno’s betrayal, the agony of losing him and realizing just how much I liked him, the shame of what my actions have done to this family.
I cry like I’m ten years old again and Cian is protecting me from our tyrannical Uncle before Ma did a way with him.
By the time I’ve sobbed my last, my face aches and my throat is scratchy. Coughing softly, I lean away from Cian and gently push him away but he remains close by.
“So,” he says once he’s certain I’ve calmed down. “What’s the next step?”
I wipe my eyes, sniffling. “Huh?”
“I’m going to fix this.”
“I don’t need you to fix it, I just need you to listen to me.”
“Fine, what’s our next step. I’m going to help you so what’s the next step?”
“I can’t ask you to do that. Cormac needs you in his corner.”
“I’m in his corner, and so are you. And when we fix this, he will see that and whoever has caused this will face the wrath of the Irish. Besides, have you got any idea what Ma will do when she finds out you’ve been running around pregnant? So tell me, Saoirse. What’s next?”
My vision finally clears enough for me to look Cian in the eye while trying to organize my thoughts. “Well… I guess we need to find out the truth about Domenico. Is he the leader of some dark underworld human trafficking ring or not?”
“Right.” Cian slaps one hand lightly down on his thigh. “Domenico it is. That fucker better be really fucking guilty, or really fucking gracious if we’re wrong.”
Fuck. If we’re wrong, I’m going to owe him one hell of an apology.
I should have asked for Cian’s help sooner. Within a day of me sobbing my heart out on his shoulder, he’s wiped out three Triad dens in our territory and sent all leaders off for questioning. The last one he invites me to with a very stern warning to stay back.
“You wanna tell me how you even found these places?” Standing at the trunk of his car, I quickly check the condition of my gun.
“What can I say, I’m motivated,” Cian smirks.
“No, honestly I just followed the money. One thing I noticed after you explained everything to me is that we were missing guns and drugs but not money. I know Rocky might have been kind enough to keep paying for what wasn’t being delivered but if you didn’t have the manifests and the shipment numbers, looking at our finances wouldn’t tell anything that something was missing. ”
I pause my work while trying to wrap my head around it. “Huh?”
“Basically, whoever has been stealing the drugs and weapons while trying to make it look like they just got lost or whatever, has been doing it in a way that doesn’t disrupt our finances.
So on the surface we’ve lost nothing and neither have the Italians.
It would take someone pretty high up in either organization to make sure income isn’t affected by missing product so either they’re footing the bill themselves—which makes no sense because at that point, just buy more—or they’re fudging things to make it look like everything that is missing is actually delivered.
So there’s no missing product to trace.”
“But I have the shipment numbers, and the serial numbers of the missing weapons. I know they’re missing.”
“Of course you do.” Cian hands me another clip and closes the trunk.
“Because you were looking closely enough to see the discrepancies. Think of it like this. You have ice cream on the receipt, the store has CCTV of you buying it and the box is in the freezer so to everyone else, it looks like the ice cream is there. But you looked in the box and saw the ice cream was already missing before it got to the freezer. Most would assume it was eaten after it got to the freezer.”
“So someone with enough power to fudge numbers and shipment information means…?”
“It means you might be right about Domenico and I think the Triad are the ones eating the ice cream. So I called in a favor from a friend and started looking into the accounts the Italians use to pay us, and a few of them were making ‘untraceable’ payments to several accounts which just so happen to be Triad.”
“If it’s Domenico, is he really dumb enough to pay the Triad from the same account he pays us?”
“If he wants to keep the money flow hidden, sure. Each payment was disguised as something related to our account so again, at a glance, it would look like he was paying us reparations for the missing drugs.”
“Cian, if we’re right about this then you know what that means, right?”
“Yup.” Cian sighs deeply and pulls his phone out his pocket. “Cormac is going to be pissed. Oh, one more thing.” He hands the device to me. “You remember the tracks you put in those drug shipments to try and find out where they were vanishing to?”
I nod while staring down at his phone. “Hold on, all those crates came through here?”
“Yup. Something tells me they found your trackers and made sure those continued onto their destination.”
“Motherfuckers!”
“Exactly. So, you ready to get some answers?”
I pass the phone back to him. “Oh, you have no idea.”
With Cian leading, we burst into the apartment building with several armed men from Cian’s squad.
They immediately take the upper floors and within seconds, the building is flooded with explosive gunfire, screams of injured men, and the curses of angry Triads.
Getting someone to interrogate becomes much more difficult when every person we come across is determined to either kill us or take their own lives but we manage to corner two Triad.
Just as we do, Cian tackles one last man at the bottom of the stairs and is about to knock him out when I catch a glimpse of his face.
“Cian, wait!” My cry comes just in time and Cian swerves his powerful punch into the man’s chest, winding him.
“What?”
“I know that guy. Stephen, what the fuck are you doing here?”
Stephen’s far too winded to answer. As Cian’s men secure the rest of the building and keep the two Triads under armed guard, Cian drags Stephen into an adjacent room and throws him to the ground.
“Who the fuck is this guy?” he demands, breathless from the shootout.
“Stephen. McCillon. I know him from uhm… a few weeks back when Cormac was trying to soothe some tension with smaller families after Rocky’s wedding.
Stephen was here with his brother, Angus and they were so pissed off about uhm…
” The memories are hazy with how many people Cormac had meetings with.
“They run that bar, the Clover down near the docks? Apparently the Italians like to drink there and the current situation affected their income.”
“Then why the fuck is he here?” Cian looks past me to where Stephen is still panting on the floor. “I’ll take him, you take the Triad. Let me know what you find.”
“Alright, be careful.”
Our shoulders nudge gently as we pass and the doors close on our respective rooms. The two Triads I have to interrogate are badly injured, and one only has a few curse words left before they succumb to their gunshot wounds and die right in front of me.
The other is much stronger but he doesn’t hold out for long.
Not many people can when I start digging around in their bullet holes and wounds.
There’s something sickeningly unnatural about having someone pry apart your body with their fingers and as strong as the Triad are, this guy gives out after three of my manicured fingers rip a wound across his ribs wide open.
He doesn’t have much to spill, only that he doesn’t handle the drugs. He deals with the weapons. He swipes them from our trucks and redirects the shipments back overseas, only instead of them returning to one of our facilities in Mexico, they get sent further abroad, like China and Saudi Arabia.
By the time he finishes talking, he passes out and I order him to be taken back to one of our warehouses until we can get more out of him. Cian joins me in the hall ten minutes later. Stephen sits on a chair in the middle of the room with his head hung low and his face beaten.
“Well?” I prompt. “What the fuck was he doing here?”
“Honestly, no fucking clue,” Cian mutters, shaking pain out of his bloodied fist. “Fucker claims he’s in debt and nothing can make him talk. Triads don’t offer debt relief as far as I know.”
“The last Triad I interrogated mentioned the Irish. Could that be the connection?” Is this fucker, our own blood, working with these fucks against—
“Cian, phone!” I lunge past my brother as Stephen bolts from his chair with a phone in his hand.
“What the fuck, I searched him!”
“Not well enough!”
Cian reaches him first and tackles Stephen to the ground. They land with a clatter and the phone shoots from his hand, sliding across the wood and hitting the far wall. I reach it a half-second later and pick it up.
“Who were you calling?” Scrolling through the recent calls I find one and only one.
“Who?” Cian yells, slamming Stephen’s head against the floor.
“No one!” Stephen chokes out.
“Bullshit.” Hitting redial, I press the phone to my ear.
“What the fuck is it, Stephen?” barks a thick, female Irish accent. “Domenico wants these girls now, I don’t have time for your bullshit!”
My heart drops and my eyes meet with Cian’s as the woman’s enraged rant is so loud I don’t even need a speaker phone. Stephen sags under Cian, defeated.
“Shit,” Cian pants. “We gotta call Cormac like, right now.”