CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Balor
A few days later, I bring Ella to her father’s apartment. I see it as his and not hers because she lives with me. She will live with me, forever.
The kind of disaster we found ourselves in requires a lot of cleanup. Dealing with this apartment is one.
Lachlan’s team took Brennan’s body, chopped it up, and buried the pieces farther north of Beacon in several open fields and lakes. His parents are dead, and it turns out his father probably murdered his mother. Wesley was an only child and the end of a line of serial abusers.
Good riddance.
The police department will look for him since he’s an active member of service. He’ll just end up being one of the millions who are never found.
He’s dead, and I have the love of my life at my side, pregnant with my babies.
Today, we’re collecting the rest of Ella’s things from the apartment and will meet with a realtor about selling it.
It’s mortgaged to the hilt and was about to be sold at auction in a foreclosure. But Eoghan stopped it and paid back the bank so we could sell it free and clear. Hopefully at a profit, money that will go to Ella to spend as she chooses.
Ella chokes up at hearing all these messy financial details when Jillian brings us the paperwork.
I press my lips against Ella’s forehead. “I settled whatever your father owed. It’s a clean slate.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers.
“Nothing to be sorry for. None of this is your fault. All I want is for you to be free of this.”
Nodding, she walks around, touching items here and there. “I don’t even know what to keep. My mother’s gone. Now he’s gone, Balor.”
Elegant souvenirs from around the world decorate the living room. Leather-bound books sit unread on the shelves in lower bookcases that stretch from one wall around the fireplace. I peeked at Snow’s closet; his suits were both tailor-made and designer brands.
He could have sold off all this to pay his gambling debts. Instead, he chose to terrorize the world. And left his daughter in ruin.
“Hmmm,” Jillian says, looking at her phone and reading a text. “Oh boy, your brother is going to lose his shit.”
I glance at her. “Why? Did you like a post from a guy?”
“Please don’t get me started on that.” She shakes her head. “His credit card got denied again. I had to give him mine. You can guess which embarrassment he hates more.”
“Something tells me Eoghan would happily change his name to Diamond for you.”
“Only because it’s my dad’s name and he didn’t have a son.” She smiles. “There’s plenty of O’Rourkes and—” Her phone rings, and with an eye roll, she answers it. “Hi. Slow down. What’s going on?”
I stand, worry crawling all over me. Instinctively, I finger my phone, but get nothing other than a blank screen. Quickly, I power off and then power on. But nothing.
It’s fully charged, but the phone is dead.
Jillian has stopped talking and is tapping her screen, troubled.
“What happened?” I step closer. “Is your phone working?”
“Yes, but my call with Eoghan just dropped.” Jillian shows me her cell screen. “I’m trying to call him back but it’s going directly to voicemail. ”
My face drains of all its blood.
“Guys, what’s wrong?” Ella moves beside me. “You’re scaring me. You’re both white as sheets.”
Any other time I would blame my cheap Irish skin, but Jillian’s ma is from Ireland, too.
“Jillian are you on our data plan yet?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“Ella, butterfly, is your phone working?”
She slips it from her purse. “Yeah?”
Jillian’s phone rings again.
“Eoghan, I’m here. What’s going on? Uh-huh. What phone is this, babe? Your burner?”
The burner phones work. Because they run on the federally protected spectrum that uses military satellites.
Mine is at my house.
“Can I talk to Eoghan, Jillian?”
“Yeah, oh Balor. It’s bad.”
My throat tight, I say, “Alo?”
“All our phones are dead, except the burners,” Eoghan speaks calmly. “Even Darragh’s and he’s fucking livid because he’s a doctor. What’s going on?”
I glance around, the worst pit in my stomach making me sick. “Check the bank accounts.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Which one?”
“All of them. Mine. Yours. You manage them, Eoghan.”
“Aw, Christ.” Eoghan jostles the phone after tapping. “What the fuck?”
“What it is?”
“This can’t be happening.”
“Balor, what’s going on?” Ella slips an arm around my waist.
I close my eyes and hug her close to me .
I’m fucking blind without a laptop. “Ella, love, where are your father’s computers?”
She stumbles back. “No, it can’t be him. He’s...”
“It’s okay, baby. It might not be,” I say, though my gut strongly doubts it. “I just need to check.”
Nodding, she says, “He works in his office. I’ll get the key.”
I watch her dash away. Mine.
“Tell me what you see, Eoghan,” I say into the phone.
“I’m getting all these notifications on my phone, Balor,” Jillian screeches. “All our checks and wire transfers are reversing as insufficient.”
“Tell me what you see,” I repeat to Eoghan, my voice even.
“One-thousand-dollar withdrawals. Over and over.”
“Interesting...”
“There are hundreds of them,” Eoghan says. “Our banks are processing these withdrawals, draining our accounts. Whoops, Lachlan’s account is empty. Better fix this or he’ll go to the bank and shoot someone.”
“Nah, he’ll slit their throats. More fun and easier to get away with.”
All while a cyber code is circling the globe looking to hurt my family.
Hurt. My. Family.
My family is losing millions by the minute and that bastard Snow is dead. He won’t know how happy we are. Unless he made it to the pearly gates and is watching me fuck her every night.
But he’ll see how dirty his daughter is for me for all of eternity. That could be his hell.
“Balor, what is this?” Jillian looks shaken. “There aren’t any fraud alerts.”
No fraud alerts. Either what we’re looking at isn’t real, or Snow disabled the alerts because that would have given me time to stop the withdrawals.
Or slow them down.
“I have the key.” Ella returns, waving a silver key.
It hits me. Snow is the tripwire . His death unleashed this destructive virus that is bankrupting my family.
I follow Ella down a hallway to an office. She unlocks it and lets me inside. It smells of cigar smoke. A Mac-Air laptop sits closed on his desk. Could the code be on that laptop? Or some other device buried ten feet deep in another state? Or sitting on the bottom of the ocean?
No, that’s not possible. This is an active link on a loop to keep making these withdrawals. It needs a live Wi-Fi signal for the commands.
It has to be on this laptop in front of me.
“Jillian,” I call out from the office. “Ask Eoghan for a link to one of the accounts that’s being drained. And give the link to Ella. I cup her cheek. “It’s going to be okay. All of this can be reversed.”
I put a safety net around the URLs for each of our accounts. Added a layer beyond the banks’ shitty firewalls.
Someone broke through our walls.
My walls...
Snow.
Iceman.
I approach the Mac-Air slowly like I would a bomb.
Just opening it, I lose my breath.
There’s no passcode. Just a photo of him and Ella as wallpaper. I ignore that, for now. She’ll need my support to deal with this death, and with the loss of him in her life. The life he chose to show her and not who he really was.
My fingers go to work, and I hold my breath looking for this laptop’s IP address. But without the data we collected on Snow, I don’t know if this is the vault without tearing it apart .
Digging through folders, my heart stops at one with my name on it.
O’Rourke Ruin.
I click it and find a link to a bank account. It takes seconds for me to break into it, and I choke seeing the account growing before my eyes.
$1,000.00
$1,000.00
$1,000.00
$1,000.00
On and on.
He expected me to find this sooner. Or didn’t expect the code to spread...
The bomb replicated itself over and over, reaching fifteen megatons. It couldn’t stop. Like a virus.
Possibly his coding lost control of this one, just like the one he’d launched at Christmas.
Clicking on the profile my fingers freeze over the keyboard.
Estella Reyes
An account he opened for her. She doesn’t use Estella.
“Here, I have one of the bank accounts.” Ella comes around and gasps seeing her name and a swelling balance.
I pull her onto my lap to keep me calm. “Stay with me. Help me.”
“I don’t know what that is.” She takes a deep breath. “That’s not me.”
Days ago, Eoghan said he found an account for her. But we never imagined it would be the scene of the crime of the century.
If Wesley knew about this money, he never would let her keep it.
“It’s okay, baby.” I believe she had no idea.
She’s twisted into the fabric of my soul. Every fiber rings true and pure. Plus, for me, it’s child’s play to figure out how and when this account was opened.
Baby. Child. I cup her stomach.
“Even if I weren’t in love with you and having your babies, I’d strongly advise my father not to attempt to ruin the mafia!”
“I worried Wesley had a tripwire that upon his death, evidence would go to the FBI or something,” I say. “But he wasn’t that smart. Or tech savvy.”
“But my father was. What does this thing want? How do we stop all those withdrawals?” Ella whacks the screen. “Balor, this is your family fortune.”
“I know, baby.” I press my face into the back of her shoulder, then dig further into this laptop, reverse searching by date. Looking for files updated around the time of Christmas.
Shockingly, there’s a folder with one file dated three days before Christmas.
I smash ENTER and a dialogue box flies open.
PASSCODE: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
“I don’t suppose you can hack that?” Ella asks, her voice shaking.
“I’m not sure.”
“It’s like he wanted you to try to stop it.”
“And possibly fail. There’s jamming the knife into your gut, and then there’s the twisting that hurts worst.”
“Entering useless numbers—”
“Or letters, or characters.”
“Oh my God, how many possibilities does that make it?”
“21 spaces to fill?” I start to type in every failsafe code I know for that total of characters.
It’s not a random number. It’s a passcode program used often, but Snow would never code it with known passcode breakers .
“Balor, Kieran is calling you,” Jillian says from the office entryway.
“Tell him I’ll call him back.”
“Your brother, the king,” Ella whispers.
I scoff. “He’ll never hurt me and even if this can’t be fixed and we end up broke, or worse owing millions in transaction fees, he won’t have any power to hurt me.”
“Balor, I’m so sorry.” Ella holds back tears.
“No need, baby. We’ll figure this out.” I give her a little squeeze, but she flinches. The many wounds on her body are still inflamed.
Each night, I gently massage every spot with ointment to help her heal. My kisses and soft-spoken words telling her how much I love her are meant to mend her heart and soul. I’m the only man in her life now.
She shifts in her seat and tugs at the bralette she’s wearing because the tattoo under her ribcage...
I freeze as my mind buzzes and lands on the answer.
“Ella, you said your father suggested that tattoo under your ribcage.”
She stiffens. “Not the location, but the saying.”
The Russian alphabet always freaked me out. I’d spent time in Moscow and had figured out some of the letters in order to use their keyboards. I didn’t love her father’s poison etched into Ella’s skin, but it’s her heritage.
“The tattoo meant so much to him and for some reason that butcher with the laser carved that one off me first.”
I stand up so fast, that I nearly launch her across the room. “What?”
My eyes devour her body. Those letters that represented some random saying, she didn’t even understand, had been removed from her body first.
Fuck, that can’t be a coincidence.
“Ella, my love. Can you remember exactly what that saying said? ”
“No. It’s some Russian proverb. Dad always said it in his native tongue.”
“Do you remember it?”
“I don’t know.” Her pained face kills me.
I gently kiss her swollen cheek. “Breathe, baby. And think. It’s in your head. Push it forward.”
She struggles, mangling the rough language.
“You’re doing great, butterfly. Keep going.” I watch more money pour into her account.
Several words smoothly come off her lips, and my cock hardens at how the language sounds in her voice. It’s so fucking ironic. The Russians were our biggest enemy for years. I’m the third O’Rourke to fall head over fucking heels for one.
Even if my Ella is undeniably American, her roots are Russian.
“Say that into your phone, baby.” I activate the voice tool and hold it up to her.
She repeats the saying, clearer now. Snow must have said it to her over and over. It was in her brain. She just needed to find it.
Using my chi training, I’m forcing myself to be calm with every fiber of my being. With every trained muscle to function at its highest level for complete and utter smoothness in my actions.
Otherwise, I will fucking detonate.
Ding.
I blink at her translated words:
fortune favours the brave
Slowly, I count the characters. 22 without spaces.
The code wants 21.
That stops my heart.
Fuck!
Looking closer, I see the translator spelled favours in British English .
“I think we’ve got it, butterfly.” Slowly, I type the proverb, using the American English. Something perhaps to throw us off.
A screeching buzzer whines at a decibel that rattles my fucking eardrums.
Then the screen goes completely black.