“I sent the woman to deal with your obsession years ago…”
I relay what I read to Matthias.
“I’ll have Mark track Elias’s movements on the days leading up to the event,” he assures me. “I wonder if he followed her, waited for her to leave, and then stepped in. That would also explain why it took anyone so long to find you.”
I furrow my brow. “What do you mean?”
“From your own memories, it sounds like everything was practically cleaned up by the time that officer found you in your hiding spot,” Matthias points out. I don’t see how that matters, and I tell him so. “You said the officer told you the phrase your mother taught you to listen to. Correct?”
I nod.A chroi.Heart. It had been our codeword for as long as I can recall.
“I think the officer knew where you were all along.” The car pulls into my father’s parking garage. “He had to wait until anyone who wasn’t on Sully’s father’s payroll had left to keep you secure. He would have known about the cleanup.”
I shake my head. “But Elias still found me.”
“The social worker was most likely a plant,” Matthias offers. “He went to do the right thing but got stabbed in the back for it. Otherwise, you might have grown up with him and his wife. He had filed a petition for custody, stating familial ties. It probably tipped off whoever worked for Elias.”
“Fuck.” I could have grown up in Portland with a loving family instead of in the hellhole Elias created for me every day. Love and comfort. Sighing, I set those thoughts aside. What-ifs will get me nowhere, and thinking about what could have been will only lead me down a road I don’t want to go.
This is where I am today, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. My path led me to Matthias and Vas.
To my father and my siblings.
It led me back to my mother.
These are things I never would have had if it wasn’t for Elias.
I can’t be bitter about the past when it has brought me to this point, and I can only hope that the future keeps getting better.
forty-three
Ava has been restless all night. Barely sleeping, even in the secure warmth of my embrace. We are all exhausted in the morning. Vas, Liam, Ava. Even the twins wear haggard expressions when they sit down at the dining room table that morning.
My little wife is quietly thinking to herself, her cup of coffee held tightly to her chest. I have come to realize that it is a form of security for her when she is out of sorts or contemplating something. She drags the warmth of the cup into her and concentrates on the peace it brings her in that moment.
It centers her.
Her leg bounces anxiously beneath the table, and she bites her lip. I can’t help but smile at how she is chomping at the bit to see her mother again. Radick has informed us, however, that we should wait until the afternoon to visit so her mother can have enough rest.
Liam has his chin in his hand, elbow braced on the table, eyes cast down in thought. I can only imagine what he is goingthrough, finding out that the woman meant to be his wife is alive and that it is his current wife who tried to murder her. It has been unanimously decided that we will wait until it is time for Katherine’s discharge to include Liam in everything. Unless she asks for him, but I have a feeling that she won’t.
“Any news on Christian?” Ava asks me once I kiss her good morning. I nod.
“Mark has been monitoring internet chatter with Bridget,” I say. “But your brothers have been coming up with a plan to draw him out.”
Ava raises her brows in surprise and glances over at the twins. “Ooh,” she grins excitedly. “Do tell.”
“You’re gonna be bait.” Seamus grins at her. I growl quietly next to my wife with my arms crossed against my chest, glaring at the smug bastard.
This is the part of the plan I don’t like. There is no mistaking that Ava has become well trained while we have been separated, but she is nowhere near mastery level. She is small and slight, which gives her an advantage, but if her opponent gets her in a compromised position, she could have a hard time getting out of it. Especially if it is a man twice her size.
“I do make good bait,” she teases, her eyes twinkling mischievously when they flicker my way before she glances back to her brother.
“He’s been following you,” Kiernan sneers. “The fucking cockroach has had you under surveillance this entire time, and we barely caught on to it.”
“How?” she wonders. How indeed.
“We thought the hack into the Dashkov building was planting the virus that triggered the explosion,” I tell her. And we were fucking wrong about that. “It wasn’t,” I continue. “The hack spread a virus through our entire system that was searching for one thing only. You.”