Page 67 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

I didn’t check the new attacks or the losses. I checked the decisions, the old ones. That was where mistakes hid. People became careless with familiar things, including me. By midnight I was making calls…to ghosts.

There were old alliances, old debts…old loyalties.

“How is fishing?” I asked.

A laugh from the other end. “Haven’t been near the water in months.”

“That’s a shame.”

“It is.”

“Are you asking about the river or the boats?”

“The boats. Always the boats.”

By two in the morning I had three separate stories, but none matched perfectly. That interested me. It was rare for truth to arrive whole. It arrived in fragments and contradictions.

I spread names across a legal pad and crossed some of them out as leads fizzled out. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. There. A shipping route.

Three opportunities. Anton had touched two and ignored one.

Why? I studied the notes again. The answer didn’t come, but the feeling did.

Somewhere inside this organization, somebody was feeding Anton information. The leak was intelligent. That made the pool smaller and far more dangerous. Somebody had made a mistake, but I simply didn’t know if I’d seen it yet.

I looked at the clock. It was almost three in the morning, and the rain had stopped. The city below had gone quiet, but I couldn’t sleep.

***

Colt came in just after sunrise. No knocking. All I could see was a file placed on the edge of my desk. Neat and aligned, the way he always did things.

“Morning update,” he said.

“Talk.”

He did. Clean summary. Operations and movements. Anton’s last strike broken down into segments, as expected. Countermeasures already initiated. Recommendations attached. Everything in order.

I turned a page slowly. “Where did this come from?”

“Field report,” Colt responded immediately.

I nodded once and kept reading. There were small inconsistencies now, things I would have ignored before. Now I looked for patterns wherever they were. I closed the file halfway through and reopened it at the beginning.

Colt waited. He always waited, patient and still.

“Walk me through the timeline again,” I said.

He adjusted slightly. “As reported, Anton’s team moved at—”

“Not that,” I cut in.

A pause. The first real one. Then Colt continued.

“The latest breach occurred at 1:40. Confirmed at 2:05. Response teams deployed—”

“Who confirmed it?”

“Local channel.”