"The poisoning?" He shuddered. "Yeah. He’d probably get me to taste everything first."
"Nah, more like Declan," I joked. "You’re the money man, I’m the heir, Bren’s the Fixer, and Kid’s way too useful behind a computer."
"And anyone can shoot a gun?" Finn retorted, laughing as we discounted Eoghan’s talents with a sniper rifle.
Grinning, I nodded. "Well, this task in particular was to find that journalist who’d been digging around into the circumstances of Uncle Paddy’s death."
Finn frowned. "Thought that was an easy one? Just get one of the runners on it?"
I grimaced at what hewasn’tsaying. "It should have been that easy." The cops would just think it was a mugging gone wrong... we’d done it way more times than was smart, but why fix what wasn’t broken?
"Why wasn’t it?"
"I did a background check on her." Not altogether unusual, but I’d pulled one of the Firm’s contacts inside the NYPD to get a complete run down on her and had discovered who her father was.
While Conor’s appreciation for her father’s shitty music had been a compelling argument over why I shouldn’t automatically have her killed because she was pissing Da off, mostly, it was the fact that Dagger Daniels was notoriously protective of his family.
Everyone remembered what had happened to one of his youngest. He’d gone apeshit when she’d been kidnapped. His private security had found her first, the cops lagging way behind as per goddamn usual, and as miracles would have it, not a single kidnapper had survived the encounter…
Right.
Like miracles were ever that kind.
While I wasn’t afraid of a rockstar, I was concerned about the publicity. We had a rep in Manhattan, but Daniels’ was worldwide. The last thing I wanted was Acuig shares taking a nosedive because ofnoxxiousfans deciding to fuck with the stock market to get back at us.
Because I knew Finn would tell me that nobody would connect the dots between the Five Points and Acuig Corp, I didn’t bother telling him any of that. Instead, I just said, "She’s hot."
Finn shook his head. "You always think with your dick, man."
"Like you fucking don’t," I groused. "I looked into her—"
"I bet you goddamn did."
"You make that sound like I was jacking off outside her bedroom window," I grumbled. "I just looked into who and what she is."
With a mocking glint to his smirk, he murmured, "And who and what is she?"
I rubbed my chin. "Smart."
"So?"
"I read a lot of her articles—"
"Jesus, how fucking banging is she?"
I glowered at him. "I read." Sort of.
"You read reports," he corrected. "I don’t think I’ve ever seen you pick up a newspaper. Or a book." He frowned, like he was deep in thought. He wasn’t doing it to be irritating either, just genuinely trying to think back to a time when he’d seen me with a book. Which was probably school.
"This was research."
"Research," he repeated with a nod. "Okay. So, what did you uncover?"
"Da’s not happy with her because she’s asking about Paddy."
"You told me that already."
"She’s not the kind of person who’d waste her time on a story that wasn’t there."