Page 76 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

I exhaled slowly, because the worst part wasn’t the conclusion forming. It was the fact that it fit like it had been waiting for me to notice it all along.Holy crap.

I didn’t notice how long I’d been standing by the window until my legs started to ache. The room behind me still looked the same—bed unmade, papers spread, evidence scattered.

But I wasn’t looking at any of that anymore. I was thinking about Sean. The version of him who’d existed before I ever walked into his world.

Because the more I understood about the structure underneath everything, the less Sean looked like he was at the center of everything that had happened to me.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sean

I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. There was no reason to. If I explained it, I would contaminate it.

So I kept it quiet. The first move happened at eight in the morning. I sat at my desk with the door locked and pushed a transfer through an offshore route that hadn’t been active in years.

It needed no approvals and assistants. It didn’t move in the usual chain. It was just me and a system I knew well enough to bend without breaking it. The money left my control and disappeared into a holding structure that shouldn’t raise any dust.

Then I waited for the reaction. It came slower than I’d expected—four hours. They were either being cautious or didn’t expect me to use the channel I did.

A quiet hit on one of the external monitoring feeds. It wasn’t an alert tied to my systems. Someone had searched the receiving institution.

I paused with my pen halfway across the page. That detail mattered more than the timing. No one inside my organization should have had any reason to look there unless they already knew what to look for.

The first test was over. By late morning, I was in the operations floor briefing. I waited until the conversation drifted into logistics, and then I said it without breaking rhythm.

“We’re expecting a shipment next week.”

That was all. No context or details. I didn’t mention a direction. I just let the sentence drop into the middle of everything else.

I kept my posture relaxed and didn’t look for reactions immediately. That was the mistake people made when theywanted confirmation too badly. The room carried on, a few heads nodding. One of the logistics leads made a note without looking up.

Colt and Dilligan exchanged a glance that lasted half a second too long. Declan didn’t react at all. I let the conversation continue without adding anything else. By the time the meeting ended, I’d gotten what I needed from it.

People left quickly after that. Phones came out before they reached the hallway, already processing what they thought they’d heard. I stayed behind long enough for the room to empty. The second test didn’t take long. By midafternoon, one of the outer monitoring channels flagged movement near a route that didn’t officially exist in any active schedule.

Someone had positioned themselves early—too early for coincidence and too precise for guesswork. I logged it without comment. That evening, I passed through the operations floor again.

Same environment and same rhythm. I didn’t stop walking when I dropped another test. “We’re moving some spare cash next week. Nothing major.”

No one paused or turned to look at me. I kept walking; didn’t look back or check faces. I didn’t need to.

By the time night came, the system had already started answering me—quiet movement, attention where there shouldn’t have been any, in the same direction, every time. Three tests should have been enough.

I already had a strong idea of what was happening, but assumptions were dangerous when too much depended on them. If I was going to accuse someone, I needed to be certain. So I ran one final test.

This time I kept it simple. Instead of spreading information through different channels, I made a small change to a single movement file. Access to the file was tightlycontrolled, and nobody would see the adjustment unless they were already watching it. I changed the schedule by six minutes.

Then I uploaded the revision and left it alone. There was nothing else to do except wait. Less than an hour later, somebody opened the file.

I watched the activity log without touching a thing. The access came from the same point that had appeared during the earlier tests. A few minutes later, another action followed. Then another.

Each response matched the change I’d made.

Whoever was watching wasn’t reacting to events after they happened. They were reacting to the information itself. The moment the schedule changed, they changed with it. I sat back in my chair and watched the log update again.

The pattern held. By then, I knew what I was looking at. I left my office and walked toward the operations room.

The building carried on as usual. Phones rang behind glass walls. Analysts stared at monitors. Conversations drifted through open doors. Nobody seemed aware that anything had changed.