Shit’s starting to hit the fan, and it’s making Kane anxious and snappy, and Alice isn’t having any of it, so she’s snarking back as good as she’s getting. Someone’s going to blow, and I know that if Kane would get his head out of his ass for five minutes and just fuck her, it would solve a lot of problems.
But he won’t.
I create a little makeshift study with some of the equipment I was able to bring with me, and everyone knows to leave me the fuck alone until I have something. I’ve been able to route our signal to a thousand different places, so by the time anyone can follow the lead back to where we are, it’ll have looped and looped into infinity.
It means I can log in to my network and begin the search. It’s easier this way, feeling my way through the darkness of cyberspace. Everyone does this mostly blind—usually with code on a computer screen that they’ve had to translate in their brains, much like the braille under my fingers. It becomes as easy as breathing eventually, and it’s the best way to keep my heart from trying to crack through my ribs.
Especially when I find a thread and start pulling.
It’s no surprise that after three hours of working and ignoring the shouting matches coming from the living room, I find the first leak at Kane’s office. It’s a computer terminal in the IT department, and it hasn’t been logged into for about twoweeks. But that leads me to another thread, which I unravel to a dingy apartment on the east side of the city.
That line shuts down immediately—the computer wiped in seconds—but not before I’m able to save the location.
I don’t know this man. I know his employee code. He was hired over a year ago and signed off on by Kane, but I don’t know if Kane ever met him, though Aldis had to have sat down with him once. But his background is scrubbed. Someone who doesn’t possess my training might have been fooled, but it’s obvious he’s a plant.
I move into the kitchen with a piece of paper and no idea how sloppy the writing is on it, but I know the boys will be able to read it.
“The first name,” I say and slap it on the counter.
I hear something clatter to the counter, then footsteps, which tell me the only one in the kitchen right now is Ari. He kisses me as his fingers paint words on my skin. ‘Beautiful fucking genius.’
I laugh, pulling away from him, shaking my head. “I just needed time and a place to get this done without one of those fuckers tailing me.”
‘How many more?’
“I don’t know,” I confess. I lift his hand and kiss it. “Take that to Kane, please. Tell him he needs to send someone after this guy and quick. He knows someone’s onto him, so he’s going to run.”
Kane has a laundry list of freelancers who can move quickly and are loyal to cash, not people. If Rhys and Leoarebehind this, the most they’ll be able to do is start shutting things down before we get there.
Ari kisses me a second time before I get back to work, and I lose myself once more in the rhythm of it all until I’ve pulled at every single thread I can find. My head is aching, and my fingersare numb and no longer processing the bumps beneath them, but I think I have them all. I know who’s sitting pretty in the Walsh empire while also betraying us.
I know who’s under Romano’s thumb.
I know who’s working for cash and a few working for the government.
It’s nothing I haven’t already suspected, but it means there’s every chance we can pick up Leo and bring him in to hold him until we’re certain what his real plans are for Alice and the Romanos. If he’s telling the truth, if he’s really after a way to take Guido down, I know Kane will accept his offer to work together.
And if not, well…
Alice will have one more sibling to mourn, and I don’t know that she’ll cry very hard for him at all.
I’m tempted to put together an AI that I can work with inside this house, but I decide it’s not worth it. If I’m ever going to function with my boys and with Alice outside of the home—and fuck, that’s all I’ve wanted for twenty years—I know I need to learn to do it this way.
I feel my way out of the room and down the hall. I count the doors until the one Kane had claimed for his own, and then I step inside.
For a single beat of a heart, I wonder if the lights are on. I can smell his cigar smoke and hear the quiet puffing. I can feel the breeze from an open window, and I know he’s probably standing at it, watching whatever he can see beyond the glass.
Though he’s probably looking at me now.
“I want to suck your soul out through your dick,” he growls. “That work today was beautiful.”
“It was exactly what I’m good for,” I tell him, not in the mood to take praise. “The only reason I failed at home was that they were in our system.”
“Do you know which one of them managed to hack it?” he asks. His bare feet tap on the wooden floor as he approaches.
I shake my head. “I think that’s for Ari to find out, isn’t it?”
He huffs a soft laugh as one arm curls around my waist. He’s not holding his cigar anymore, but the smell of the smoke clings to him. He leans in, nuzzling my neck, and I can feel the tension in his body.