Page 77 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

For me, everything was different. I stopped at the central desk and checked the latest entries. The results matched the previous tests perfectly.

The same source. The same reaction. The same timing.

There was no point searching for alternative explanations anymore. I’d spent days doing exactly that. Every test had pointed in the same direction, and this one removed the last doubt. I turned and headed back toward my office.

Halfway down the corridor, I stopped. The answer had been sitting in front of me for hours. The system had been spelling it out piece by piece, and I finally accepted what it was telling me.

“Declan.”

I said the name quietly. Hearing it out loud felt strange.Damn.A part of me had already known, hadn’t it?

I’d thought it could have been Colt or Dilligan, but it turned out the snake had a bigger head. The test hadn’t revealed anything new. It had simply confirmed what the evidence had been saying from the beginning. I stood there for a few seconds before continuing down the hall.

Declan.The name changed the shape of the investigation. The leak was no longer a theory hidden somewhere inside reports and access logs. It belonged to a person I knew.

A person Itrusted.

Back in my office, I locked the door and pulled up every log I could find. Months of records filled the screen, and I read through them one by one.

This time I wasn’t trying to identify the leak. That part was over. I was searching for the point where Declan had crossed the line. The moment he’d stopped protecting the people around him and started feeding information somewhere else.

Because that was the question that mattered now. I knew who he was. What I needed to know was how long he’d been betraying me.

***

The rain hit the glass in steady bursts. I stood in the kitchen for a while without moving, the refrigerator open behind me, cold air drifting into the room. I didn’t close it. Didn’t really think about it. My attention had already drifted somewhere else.

Declan.The name no longer felt like a discovery. It felt like something that had always been there, buried under everything else, and I was only now seeing it clearly. I walked back into the living room slowly.

Years of work, trust, and structure collapsed into something that felt obvious in hindsight but was still hard to accept in the moment.

Declan had been inside every layer of the system. Not on the edges of it, but built into it. Trusted access wasn’t easily gotten in my world. It was given once and held unless something went wrong.

My jaw tightened as I moved back to the desk and pulled up the log feed again. The same entries were still there. The same sequence. The same timing pattern I’d seen too many times for it to feel accidental.

But I wasn’t looking at patterns anymore. I was looking at position. At access. At how close someone had to be to the core of the system to move through it without resistance.

Declan had that reach. He always had.

I leaned back in the chair and let the realization settle. It didn’t hit like shock. It came in slowly, with weight, like something locking into place that couldn’t be undone.

Every test I’d run started to re-frame itself. It wasn’t random interference or outside pressure reacting to opportunity. It was internal movement, controlled and consistent, shaped by someone who understood the system too well to ever look like an outsider.

I stood and walked to the window. Outside, the rain blurred the city into broken lights and shifting shadows.

Declan had been present through everything that mattered. Every decision, every correction, every escalation that had built this system into what it was. He’d always been close enough to see everything. Always trusted enough that no one thought to question him.

That realization sat heavy. This wasn’t a simple breach or a mistake. It had been deliberate, shaped over time, and built into the system in a way that stayed hidden until it didn’t. And ifDeclan had been moving information out, he hadn’t been doing it alone.

I opened the laptop slowly. The sound was quiet, but it landed like something final. The rain kept falling outside. My eyes went back to the log feed again.

Samuel Anton’s name wasn’t on it. Not directly, but it didn’t need to be. Because whoever had been shaping the flow inside my system had been doing it in a way that benefited someone outside it, and that someone was definitely Anton.

For the first time since this began, I wasn’t looking for patterns anymore. I was looking at consequences.

I didn’t move for a long time after that. I stood in the center of the room while the rain kept hitting the window. It felt distant, like it belonged to another version of the world, even though it was happening right outside this room.

The pattern in the logs wasn’t new. It was old. Older than Maeve’s anger, older than my suspicion, older than the system I’d been trying to understand.