Page 48 of Still Burning

“You can’t do that,” she snapped.

“Like hell I can’t.”

“You’d be shot and killed the moment you were spotted. And if dead, you wouldn’t ever see Salem again.”

I paused and looked up at her. “Then what the fuck do you want me to do? Stay here and wait some more? I can’t wait.I need her!”

She sighed. “Plan properly. Showing up in Birr? Hell, I doubt you’d get farther than the airport parking lot. They have people everywhere. It would get you killed.”

“Thank you,” Liam said. “If that is all, we can take it fromhere.”

She looked back at Liam. “Don’t do anything stupid. There is a chance it isn’t Salem.”

Liam nodded his head once. “We won’t.”

I could tell she wanted to ask what it was Blaise had been here to tell us, but she didn’t.

“That’s likely the best information I will get. It was a miracle that I got that,” she told us.

“We appreciate it,” Liam told her.

With a swift nod, she gave us a concerned frown, then turned and headed for the door. Neither of us spoke until she was gone.

“You’re not going to fucking Ireland. She’s right. You’d have a bullet between your eyes within moments of your arrival,” Liam said.

Gripping my phone tightly in my hand, I glared down at it. “I can’t just sit here and wait. I don’t know why they have her. If they’re mistreating her. And I need to tell her that no other woman is having my baby and they never will.”

“I know. And we will use that information, but I believe what we learned from Blaise was more helpful. We just need a plan to track down the fucking chameleon. What Blaise didn’t get to tell you before Marlana arrived was that Wilder is working through his system, using the one alter ego name that he has and attempting to link it to the others he has used. Once he finds a pattern, he can then use it to lead us to the source.”

“But if she’s in Birr, then how the fuck do we go get her, even if we track him down?”

Liam smirked. “We find out what port he is using to smuggle drugs into the States and take something of value from him. That will draw him out. Then we offer an exchange.”

“You are saying we take his fucking drugs and offer to return them for Salem?” I asked, not sure that sounded like a winning idea.

“No. We take his vessel and everyone on it.”

“How the fuck are we gonna do that?”

“That’s where Blaise’s men come in,” Liam replied. “Now, aren’t you glad my daughter married into the Mafia and we all became friends?”

18

Salem

Squinting against the sun, I looked from Brady driving the car to the window to see where we were now.

Last night, we’d flown back to America, but I had no idea where we were landing because Brady had said we’d discuss things today. Then we got off the plane, and a Jeep Wagoneer was waiting on us. Emmett hadn’t joined us in the car, but he was here too. I’d seen him get into another vehicle behind ours.

The exhaustion from not sleeping for weeks and the slight relief to be back on American soil, even if it wasn’t in Miami, hit me, and I closed my eyes and fell asleep almost immediately.

Morning had come while I was sleeping, it seemed. I adjusted the back of my seat to sit up straight. From the looks of it, I assumed we were in Georgia or somewhere in the southeast. But where exactly, I wasn’t sure.

“Heavy sleeper you are,” Brady said beside me in his Southern accent.

I frowned at him. That was so beyond weird.

“Are you going to tell me where we are, or do I have to look at the signs and guess?” My voice was raspy from sleep when I spoke, and I cleared my throat, then looked around for the bottle of water I’d brought with me from the plane.

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