Page 98 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Maeve

I noticed the change as soon as I walked into the room. Sean was already up. He wasn’t pacing like before, and the room didn’t carry that heavy silence anymore. Everything about him was locked into focus, like he’d been working through the same problem for hours without stopping.

The table was covered with papers. A laptop sat open in the middle. Files were spread out in a way that looked organized, but only just, like they’d been placed quickly and kept under control by effort rather than calm. He looked up when I entered.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat. My eyes moved to the table. “You didn’t sleep.”

He didn’t answer that. Instead, he pushed a file toward me. “I started with your father’s records.”

I opened it. The pages were full of dates, reports, and notes that didn’t fit together cleanly. Sean pointed to a section.

“Look at this,” he said. “Two timelines. One shows your father already removed. The other shows him still active at the same time.”

I read it again. My brows drew together. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“It doesn’t,” he agreed. He turned the page. “Here as well. Public records say one thing. Internal records say something different.”

I leaned in closer. My fingers pressed into the edge of the file. “You think someone changed it,” I said.

“I know someone did,” he said. “The question is who knew about it.”

I went quiet for a moment. “I see.” My voice came out lower. “This isn’t random,” I added.

“No,” Sean said. “It’s controlled.”

I looked up at him. “What about Declan?”

He pushed another file toward me. “He’s connected to all of it.”

I opened it. The pattern didn’t appear all at once. It formed piece by piece, linking together in a way that felt too precise to be coincidence.

My expression changed before I could stop it. “So he wasn’t just involved,” I said. “He was there from the beginning.”

“Yes,” Sean said.

We stayed quiet for a moment. I looked at everything on the table again.

“All of this is connected,” I said.

“I’ve been going through it all night,” he said.

I held his gaze for a second. Then I asked the only question that mattered.

“Where do we start?”

Sean met my eyes. “We start where the story stops making sense,” he said. I nodded.

I sat back down at the table and kept my eyes on the files. Sean slid another one toward me.

“This one is newer,” he said.

I opened Father Michael’s file.

At first it looked like normal numbers, dates, accounts, and transfers. Nothing made sense on its own, but it was all part of Father Michael’s financial activity. Then I started seeing a pattern in his bank statements.