Page 34 of Shattered Empire (Shattered World)

Liam smirked. “McDonough pulled out of Portland within a few months of putting a huge chunk of money into a ground transportation company. He said it was because there wasn’t any money to be made there and moved the transport company back into Washington.”

“But you think it was because of all the shipments my father and his men lifted.”

Liam grinned. “Katherine was smart. A genius. And she could hold a grudge like no other. She would have found a way to screw him over.”

Realization hit. She hadn’t been trying to screw Elias—she had gone after her own father.

“She knew,” I murmured brokenly. “He’s the one who sold her.”

CHAPTER NINE

It was all coming together. The morbid pieces of my mother’s death slipped into place section by section. Piece by piece. There were so many years of my life I had let slip by, never wondering about her death or the mysterious appearance of my “father.” I questioned none of it as a child, and even as I grew, I simply accepted the life fate handed me.

Until Matthias pulled the wool back from my eyes.

Well, Mark did, but I would never have had the opportunity if Matthias hadn’t bought me.

Semantics.

My teeth dug into my lower lip hard enough to bleed as the scene came together. The pictures strewn cohesively on the floor made up my mother’s dead body as it had been found the day of her murder. Crouching down, I inspected every inch of every photo until I found what I was looking for. A bruise, just barely visible on her cheek due to the poor lighting of the photo.

A bruise in the shape of a cross.

Libby had written that the silver cross man had sent a woman after Elias’sobsessionyears ago and then ranted about how he came back with herspawn.

He was talking about my mother and me.

So the man we hadn’t identified yet didn’t know at the time my mother was murdered that she had a child. How did Elias find out? And who was the woman he sent to kill her? The presence of the bruise shaped like a cross told me that it was someone in the upper echelon of whatever secret society Madam Therese and the McDonough doppelgänger were a part of.

Another player we needed to identify.

“This,” I pointed out the weird bruise to Aine. “I didn’t see this documented on the autopsy report.”

Aine shook her head. “No,” she confirmed. “There were several anomalies with not only the autopsy but also the crime scene itself.”

Liam frowned. “What do you mean anomalies?”

“Well,” Aine started. “Besides the cross-shaped bruise, both the detective on the case and the coroner left out that it was a woman who committed these crimes. Not a man.”

“A woman did all that?” Vas waved a hand at the photos of my mother. Aine nodded.

“Whatever she was hit with was long and cylindrical,” she informed us. “Something covered in a black lacquered paint and metal.”

“Like a cane.” She didn’t need to confirm what I already knew.

“Like a cane,” Aine confirmed. “Then, there was this.” The Irish woman pulled out her cell phone and pressed play. The footage was old and grainy, but there was no mistaking the size and height of the figure getting out of the car and walking up to our door. “This is an Irish neighborhood, and there are cameras everywhere. The police got this off the house across the street, but it never saw the light of day. It wasn’t even documented as being in evidence.”

“Why does she look so familiar?” I wondered. The black and white footage made it difficult to determine hair color or car color, and the distance and angle of the camera didn’t help in identifying any traits that might stand out.

“There’s a license plate, but we haven’t been able to link it back to anything yet.” Sully sighed. “Your hacker might have better luck.”

I nodded, but my mind was completely on the woman in the video. There was a tugging at the back of my mind that spoke to familiarization. Like I had somehow met her but had never seen her. A face in a crowd of hundreds you think you see again a few days later. Déjà vu was another word for it.

“Was Jonny Morelli the only officer on this case?” I turned to Aine. “You said he was dead.”

“Yeah, fucker committed suicide a few years ago,” she said. “IA found him working for some Italian Mafia type here in the city. Caruso.”

Vas snarled. “Fucking Cosa Nostra,” he spat. “Leon’s been working on getting info from the Seattle Don, but it’s been slow going, even for him.”

---