Page 59 of Unhinged Little Angel

“I know you told Enz it would take a couple of days, but I was hoping you could—”

He barks out a laugh. “Already on it. I was actually just waffling over whether the big boss man is the kind of guy who will get pissy over a one a.m. phone call.”

“Wait, you mean you already traced the bank transfers?”

Dante gestures at the phone, and I pull it away from my ear and put it on speaker while Sparrow responds.

“Yeah, it was bugging me. Who hacks an account to transfer moneyintoit? It doesn’t make any sense. So, I decided to let Xav play with Antonio alone while I worked on this.”

“And?” Dante asks, leaning forward until he’s perched on the very edge of the counter.

“Definitely didn’t add any clarity to the ‘why,’ but it’s interesting, that’s for sure,” he says.

Dante rolls his eyes, and I choke back a laugh. “Would you stop edging us and just tell us whatever you found?”

“The IP address that I traced the activity back to came from MacFord Correctional Facility.”

“Don,” Dante says without hesitation. “Get me your laptop.” He nudges me with his foot.

“Why?”

“I’ve got some hacking of my own to do.”

“Let me know what you find, I’m invested now,” Sparrow says, then hangs up without a goodbye.

DANTE

My eyes are burning and I’m vaguely aware of night turning into dawn turning into full-blown daylight in my peripheral vision. Salvatore has been snoring softly beside me for hours now, one hand hanging off the couch and loosely clutching my foot, his fingers twitching every so often while he dreams.

“I’ve got it. Sal, wake up, I think I figured it out.”

He grunts and jerks awake, blinking against the daylight. “Shit, I’m going to pay for sleeping on the couch all night.” He groans, sitting up and slowly working out the kinks in his neck.

My muscles have been burning for hours, but that’s not as important right now as what I found.

“Listen, it took me half the night, but I got into Cian’s emails. I broke the encryption and boy do I have answers.”

His eyebrows inch up, and he shakes off his grogginess.

“You did all that in…” He looks at his wrist like he’s expecting there to be a watch there.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m amazing.” I wave him off. “You’re not going to believe what I found though.”

He nods. “Lay it on me.”

“First of all, Antonio is Cian’s little pet, I can show you the messages between them. But more important than that, I have dozens of emails between Declan and Cian while Cian was locked up. They’re not stupid enough to say anything incriminating, obviously, but about eight months ago, Cian started mentioning that he had some ‘new business ideas’ for when he came home. He says he met someone with a mind for business who worked in importing for years.”

“That’s Don?”

“That’s Don. I don’t know what Don told him exactly, but clearly, he charmed the guy, convinced him he had ideas that could benefit the Fitzpatricks, probably made himself sound like some kind of fucking king pin, knowing Don. Declan’s responses are pretty dismissive though. He tells Cian the business is going well, that he just wants him to focus on more important things right now, not to worry about it, stuff like that. So, eventually, Cian dropped that tactic and started bringing up the Morettis a lot in his emails instead.”

Salvatore perks up and glowers. “What about us?”

“Nothing specific, but it feels like he’s trying to nudge his brother to start that war you said Lorenzo isn’t keen on. It almost sounds like he’s trying to make him paranoid in a lot of these emails. He tells Declan to keep a close eye on the books, that someone might be stealing, things like that.”

Salvatore drags his hand along his jaw and then the light bulb goes off in his eyes. “Those transfers into our accounts?”

I nod. “Bingo.”

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