“You are? Why the fuck didn’t you say?” Brennan grumbled, and I glowered at him.
“Because I’m in, doesn’t mean I don’t have to figure out her incoming and outgoing payments. Jesus, I know I’m smart, but I’m not a computer.” I rolled my eyes at their expectations, and while I usually lived up to them, I wasn’t AI.
Yet.
Grousing at him under my breath, I ignored the weighted stares of the five people who I cared most about in the world.
I loved Ma and Da, but these were my brothers. We’d been raised together, cured together like the finest Iberian ham—my favorite—and they were the only people I could stand for more than a few hours.
They were pains in my asses, but that worked both ways. I figured they felt the same because, in the grand scheme of things, none of us had that many friends. We all hung out together, and then did our own lone wolf shit before coming back to the clan.
Of course, that was normal considering we were at the top of the tree. It wasn’t like there were many people we could shoot the shit with when everyone in our vicinity was under us and, therefore, not to be trusted with everything we knew.
I sniffed at the thought, but my sniff turned into a curse when the antivirus program I’d created especially for Lodestar’s bullshit had an alarm pinging through the waiting room.
We were sitting in the warehouse where Declan was being treated, and I’d been working on his messed up life ever since he’d told us he had a blackmailer.
Not only did I have to find that fucker, I also had to work out if Aela O’Neill was some kind of Mafia stooge, and then I had to deal with this Lodestar bullshit.
I’d come across the hacker when she’d managed to break my code and had penetrated Eoghan’s security system on his apartment. It had caused a real shitstorm for him with his new wife, because Lodestar, being a cunt, had tripped his phone too and had sent his mistress a text.
When he and Inessa, his new wife, had walked into the apartment, the slut had been waiting, legs spread, for Eoghan to ‘service’ her. Leticia was dead now, on my orders—the slut had known what she was doing so I felt no guilt. But Lodestar?
A bona fide bitch, and while I might otherwise be impressed by her abilities, mostly she was a burr under my skin. A mosquito dancing around my ears while I tried to sleep at night.
Of course, as irritating as mosquitos were, they were also one of the top killers in the world… Lodestar was dangerous. That made her all the more fun to play with though. It would also make it even better when I squashed her with my tennis shoe.
“What the hell is that?” Eoghan hissed, rubbing his ear as my laptop carried on sounding the alarm.
Last thing I needed was Lodestar getting into my computer, so I shut shit down, defragged my system, and quickly cleared it. My program had already isolated her presence, and I knew it would be analyzing how she’d jacked into my system, but it was annoying that she kept on managing to do it.
Muttering under my breath as my computer restarted, once it was back online, I quickly logged into Aela’s bank account again.
“Okay, so Declan doesn’t have to worry about money anymore,” was how I started the analysis.
“Huh?” Brennan asked, his brow furrowed when I peeped a look at him.
“She’s richer than him,” I stated dryly.
Finn, being our money man, got to his feet and wandered over to me. When he saw all the zeros in her account, he whistled under his breath. “Jesus. Wonder if she’d let me play with it. Haven’t fucked with the stock exchange in a long while.”
“Married life is slowing you down,” Eoghan joked, but when the two of them glanced at each other, sharing wide grins, I knew they were happy about that.
And I couldn’t blame them.
I didn’t want to be tied down. If anything, that was the last thing I wanted, but when I saw Finn with his wife, Aoife, and Eoghan with Inessa? It made me think about things I really didn’t need to be thinking about.
Scratching the stubble on my chin as I scanned through her payments, through her income streams, and spotting a few red herrings, I arched a brow and declared, “I don’t think she knows she’s a patsy, but I figure she is. There are a lot of Fuoco Corp subsidiaries who’ve paid her for artwork, yet she gets a lot of commissions. It could simply be that one dick in theFamigliahappened to see a piece of hers in a friend’s house, and his wife decided she wanted an O’Neill in their home too.” I shrugged. “No way of correlating—”
“There was enough to warrant an undercover operative being dumped in their lives for years,” Brennan pointed out gruffly.
I cast him a look, and even though I was usually blind with this stuff, I wondered if the idiot knew he was halfway to sounding like he had a crush on Aela.
I was pissed that Declan had managed to have a side piece for over a year without me knowing. We were all close, close enough to share intimate details of the women we banged. I knew he and Deirdre hadn’t been as close as Ma and Da thought—they’d believed there were wedding bells on the horizon—but Declan had never told me a damn thing about Aela.
And seeing her tat? The brand? That was unusual.
Claiming wasn’t something we did at our rank.