Page 70 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

“You saw the news?” she asked.

Where did that come from? She cares about the news now?

“No.”

“Fighting in the Middle East.” she said. “Everyone’s acting like it’s something new.”

“It isn’t.”

She took a sip and didn’t react to the taste. “They said there will be a storm later,” she said, glancing outside.

“It already passed.”

Her eyes stayed on the sky. “Doesn’t look like it.”

I followed her gaze. Heavy clouds were still there. “The forecast can be wrong,” I said.

“Or late,” she replied.

That made me look at her properly. She didn’t look away immediately this time. She held my gaze a second too long to be casual, then she turned away. She moved to the sink and rinsed her cup.

I didn’t speak. Neither did she. It didn’t feel like avoidance, just like we were giving ourselves space. Like we were both aware that anything said too quickly would change the shape of the room.

She dried her hands slowly and walked out of the kitchen. The door clicked softly shut behind her. And I stayed where I was, looking at a kitchen that suddenly felt too quiet for how little had actually been said.

***

The next call came in before I even set the pen down, from the first person I’d called the previous night. He didn’t waste time. “Boats confirmed movement along three secondary channels,” he said.

I let him continue.

“Not standard rotation. Someone is rerouting before the usual checkpoints.”

“We cross-checked the timing against previous leaks.”

“The same windows match.” He exhaled lightly on the other end. “There’s more,” he added. “The fisherman isn’t just near the fish. He’s been inside the route structure for a while.”

That tightened something in my chest. “So it’s confirmed,” I said.

A brief silence. “Yes,” he replied. “Someone has internal visibility. Not partial or observational.”

He stopped there. He didn’t need to say anything else. I already knew what was coming. But he said it anyway.

“They have operational access.” The line stayed quiet for a moment after that.

“Source?” I asked.

“Not clean,” he said finally. “But consistent across three points of failure.”

That meant something simple. Something I didn’t say out loud yet. This wasn’t Anton working blind. It wasn’t pressure from outside the system, like I’d guessed all along.

“Confirm it again,” I said.

“You want a full sweep?”

“Yes.”

“No assumptions?”