Page 7 of Shattered Empire (Shattered World)

The man with the silver cane.

My grandfather. Seamus McDonough, the man my brother was named after. Libby had written about him in her diary.The silver cross cane. My mother had been a spitting image of him. I was reticent to approach my biological father about my grandfather. So buried in my grief, I never bothered to crack open the book that would soon decipher Libby’s rashly written code in the back of her journal.

It meant going back to the penthouse, and I hadn’t been ready. I was too cowardly to face the space we once shared. The memories it invoked.

Now, I was more than prepared to face what lay ahead.

“So,” Tomas broke the silence. He leaned forward, elbows braced on the table, a small smile tugging at his lips. “What is your plan?”

“Kill them all.”

CHAPTER THREE

The funeral had wrecked me, but my conversation with Tomas had done far worse damage over the past week. Everyone was looking to me for answers. Answers I didn’t have. There was so much to do on a daily basis that I barely had time to think about plotting revenge. Right now, I was just trying to keep the snakes at bay.

Pakhan.

I was the motherfuckingPakhanof one of the most powerfulBratvasin the United States, but it all felt too fantastical. Too fake. As if it would come crashing down at any moment. The bastard never told me he had made me his heir.

Fucker probably thought he’d live forever.

News flash, he didn’t.

Now I was expected to seek revenge on his behalf. Not that I had an aversion to seeking justice for his death. I’d planned on it long before the nuclear bomb dropped on my head. Exhaling harshly, I quietly stalked down the lower passages that snaked below McDonough’s, toward where Seamus had set up an operational center for finding Bailey.

“The old witch herself,” my father muttered darkly as I walked into the room. He was staring at a picture of an older woman talking with Kiernan. Immediately, I recognized her as one of the women who worked for Elias. “Quite the social climber, that one. What did she say to you when you were talking?”

“She knew who I was,” my brother Kiernan divulged. “She was asking about Bailey’s sale price. I thought she worked for Lina.”

“She does.” I spoke up from behind them. The three men turned around, surprised to see me standing in the doorway, peering over their shoulders. Being invisible had given me some pretty neat ninja skills over the years. “So does Bailey’s ex-fiancé, Drew.”

“And you know this because…” Kiernan let the question hang in the air. I smiled at him, the gesture not quite reaching my eyes. “Well, we know Drew works for Christian. His logo is on the side of the containers he was using to ship his cargo.”

“All right, that was a gimme,” Seamus laughed, lightening the mood. I chuckled, but after the day I’d had, it came out sounding more wounded than I would have liked. Jesus, they had been working down here for the last two weeks trying to find her, and where was I? Trying to control an empire I had no business leading.

I ran my gaze over the board. Shit, maybe they would have found her sooner if I’d been here helping.

“That woman.” I pointed at the picture of a woman I recognized. “And that one.” I pointed back to the tall woman my father had called an old witch. “Are the ones Elias placed in charge of strip clubs and brothels.”

“How progressive of him,” Kiernan drawled.

I chuckled darkly. “Elias believed that he’d have less trouble with a woman in charge than a man,” I elaborated. “Said that men think with their dicks, but a woman thinks with her bank account.”

My father laughed. “I’m putting that on a T-shirt,” he snorted, and I couldn’t help the laugh that followed. We spent another hour going back and forth on why Lina would take Bailey in the first place. Kiernan and Seamus believed that Bailey had been set up long before she’d caught them in the alley.

Elias had a history with the two women that went back further than any of us had anticipated, and I dreaded the moment my brothers had to tell Bailey the truth about her mother. In a way, it would have been a relief for her, but there was a darkness to that truth that would taint her forever.

It didn’t matter. We were her family now, and that was all that mattered.

Once we all decided on a course of action, we planned into the wee hours of the morning. Sometime in the middle of the night, I brought in Vas and Maxim to assist in our coordinated attack. My men and I would hit Drew at Bailey’s old penthouse while the twins and my father took out the brothel where we’d learned Bailey was being kept.

Lina was smarter than her coconspirator. Sarah Eriksen was as dumb as a box of rocks. She’d led us straight to Bailey with her car GPS system backlog. My father told me he took those out of every vehicle he and his men used. They were easy to hack and easy to subpoena in a court of law.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured to my brothers as we left the confines of the room to head upstairs for a few hours of sleep before the raid.

“For what?” Kiernan asked, perplexed.

“I should have been here with you sooner,” I admitted sadly. “Bailey is important to you, and maybe, if I had helped sooner, she would be back here already.”

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