Page 55 of The Celtic Resolution
“I’m going to fix this.”
“I don’t need you to fix it, I just need you to listen to me.”
“Fine, what’sournext step. I’m going to help you so what’s the next step?”
“I can’t ask you to do that. Cormac needs you in his corner.”
“I’m in his corner, and so are you. And when we fix this, he will see that and whoever has caused this will face the wrath of the Irish. Besides, have you got any idea what Ma will do when she finds out you’ve been running around pregnant? So tell me, Saoirse. What’s next?”
My vision finally clears enough for me to look Cian in the eye while trying to organize my thoughts. “Well… I guess we need to find out the truth about Domenico. Is he the leader of some dark underworld human trafficking ring or not?”
“Right.” Cian slaps one hand lightly down on his thigh. “Domenico it is. That fucker better be really fucking guilty, or really fucking gracious if we’re wrong.”
Fuck. If we’re wrong, I’m going to owe him one hell of an apology.
I should have askedfor Cian’s help sooner. Within a day of me sobbing my heart out on his shoulder, he’s wiped out three Triad dens in our territory and sent all leaders off for questioning. The last one he invites me to with a very stern warning to stay back.
“You wanna tell me how you even found these places?” Standing at the trunk of his car, I quickly check the condition of my gun.
“What can I say, I’m motivated,” Cian smirks. “No, honestly I just followed the money. One thing I noticed after you explained everything to me is that we were missing guns and drugs but not money. I know Rocky might have been kind enough to keep paying for what wasn’t being delivered but if you didn’t have the manifests and the shipment numbers, looking at our finances wouldn’t tellanythingthat something was missing.”
I pause my work while trying to wrap my head around it. “Huh?”
“Basically, whoever has been stealing the drugs and weapons while trying to make it look like they just got lost or whatever, has been doing it in a way that doesn’t disrupt our finances. So on the surface we’ve lost nothing and neither have the Italians. It would take someone pretty high up in either organization to make sure income isn’t affected by missing product so either they’re footing the bill themselves—which makes no sense because at that point, just buy more—or they’re fudging things to make it look like everything that is missing is actually delivered. So there’s no missing product to trace.”
“But I have the shipment numbers, and the serial numbers of the missing weapons. I know they’re missing.”
“Of course you do.” Cian hands me another clip and closes the trunk. “Because you were looking closely enough to see the discrepancies. Think of it like this. You have ice cream on the receipt, the store has CCTV of you buying it and the box is in the freezer so to everyone else, it looks like the ice cream is there. But you looked in the box and saw the ice cream was already missing before it got to the freezer. Most would assume it was eatenafterit got to the freezer.”
“So someone with enough power to fudge numbers and shipment information means…?”
“It means you might be right about Domenico and I think the Triad are the ones eating the ice cream. So I called in a favor from a friend and started looking into the accounts the Italians use to pay us, and a few of them were making ‘untraceable’ payments to several accounts which just so happen to be Triad.”
“If it’s Domenico, is he really dumb enough to pay the Triad from the same account he pays us?”
“If he wants to keep the money flow hidden, sure. Each payment was disguised as something related to our account so again, at a glance, it would look like he was paying us reparations for the missing drugs.”
“Cian, if we’re right about this then you know what that means, right?”
“Yup.” Cian sighs deeply and pulls his phone out his pocket. “Cormac is going to be pissed. Oh, one more thing.” He hands the device to me. “You remember the tracks you put in those drug shipments to try and find out where they were vanishing to?”
I nod while staring down at his phone. “Hold on, all those crates came through here?”
“Yup. Something tells me they found your trackers and made surethosecontinued onto their destination.”
“Motherfuckers!”
“Exactly. So, you ready to get some answers?”
I pass the phone back to him. “Oh, you have no idea.”
With Cian leading, we burst into the apartment building with several armed men from Cian’s squad. They immediately take the upper floors and within seconds, the building is flooded with explosive gunfire, screams of injured men, and the curses of angry Triads. Getting someone to interrogate becomes much more difficult when every person we come across is determined to either kill us or take their own lives but we manage to corner two Triad. Just as we do, Cian tackles one last man at the bottom of the stairs and is about to knock him out when I catch a glimpse of his face.
“Cian, wait!” My cry comes just in time and Cian swerves his powerful punch into the man’s chest, winding him.
“What?”
“I know that guy. Stephen, what the fuck are you doing here?”
