Page 25 of The Celtic Resolution
“Maybe you’re right,” I say after several gulps of coffee. “I’m too tired to think.”
“Are you too tired to look at masks?” Cian waves the tablet in his hand and for a moment, my exhaustion fades.
“Nope. Gimme.” Cian and I swap coffee for tablet and I start flipping through every single picture he’s accumulated from the Gala while walking toward my bedroom.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?”
I don’t answer, too engrossed in every mask that flicks across the screen. There’s every color and design imaginable all next to the faces of the person underneath the mask but it’s not until the masks start to loop that I realize the truth.
My green-masked mystery man isn’t here.
“Is this everyone?” I snap.
“Yes.”
“Cian, are you sure?” I spin to face him while struggling to keep the irritation out of my voice. “This isn’t a half-assed job, is it? This is everyone?”
“Yes!” Cian snaps back though he lacks any heat. “What the fuck, I did what you asked. That’s everyone who attended the masquerade that night okay?”
Shit.
So the green mask was a party crasher, is that it? Not only did I fuck stranger, but I also fucked someone that wasn’t even supposed tobethere. My head spins.
“Saoirse, what is it?” Cian’s annoyance melts away to concern but as soon as he touches my arm, I pull away.
“Nothing.”
“Saoirse—”
“I’m going to bed.” The door slams in his face and I instantly regret it. He doesn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of my irritation, especially when this mess is all of my own making. Typically we tell each other everything but now I have to keep my investigation from him because of Cormac, and I can’t tell him about the baby because I haven’t even processed it properly. And now my one chance to get answers is a dead end.
Fuck my life.
Sleep comes quickly thanks to exhaustion and I spend the next few days throwing myself into tracking down the names and identities of the women we found in the house. With any luck finding out who they are will give me a lead toward whomight have taken them and why. Is it random? Targeted? Until one of them is coherent enough to talk to me, guesswork is all I have.
But I’m getting nowhere. These women might as well be ghosts and as frustration born from dead ends builds, I find myself turning to the one person who can understand.
“Saoirse!” Bruno’s warm tones buzzing down the phone instantly make me feel at ease but I’m not ready to unpack why. “And here I was thinking I’d rocked your world so much that you just couldn’t stand to talk to me again.”
“No,” I snort. “Don’t let that ego get in the way of reality.”
“Dang.” He sounds genuinely disappointed for a moment until he laughs. “What do I owe the pleasure?”
“Well, I’m going in circles here trying to track down who these poor women are and I’m hoping you’re either having better luck, or worse. Either would make me feel better.”
“I don’t know if I have better luck,” Bruno muses. “But how do you feel about shooting something?”
11
BRUNO
“When you asked me out to shoot something, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind!” Saoirse yells over the hail of bullets that thud into the wall we’re hiding behind.
“Why?” I grin at her as I reload my gun. “Aren’t you having fun?”
She rolls her eyes and leans out past the wall to take a few pot shots at the Triads who have us pinned down behind a rabidly crumbling brick wall. I invited her here because I’d tracked the ownership of the house those women were found in and after jumping through an insane number of property hoops, I got a name. Inviting Saoirse to meet him was the fair thing to do and while I’d teased about a firefight, I hadn’t expected it to turn into one as explosive as this. My car, my beautiful but rickety car, lies in flames on the other side of the parking lot after a few stray bullets landed right in the engine.
I’m going to miss her.
