Page 8 of Shadow Of Sin

That’s as much as I’m going to give them right now. Almost a year and a half ago, I started tracking some outside intrusions into our systems. They were small-scale, though. Nothing urgent that we needed to act on. I let my brothers know I was watching. And then they suddenly stopped. Nobody tried to breach our systems again until recently.

About three months ago, I picked up on some new activity, which I reported to my brothers. But I didn’t tell them I’ve traced this new ghost’s work back to networks that lead to the Kozlov Bratva. After we negotiated a way to keep peace between all of our families not too long ago, I don’t believe this is the work of Viktor, the pakhan. I’m pretty sure the person pulling the strings is Dmitri Kozlov, Viktor’s nephew, who’s running his own thing separate from his family. He’s got his ass in a twist because he wanted a power position, but with the way we settled things between the families, there wasn’t room.

But if I say that name in this room, Ronan will call Viktor, confront him about Dmitri, and then I lose the ghost and my only thread to understanding Dmitri’s endgame. I need to see the full picture before I blow it up.

Ronan’s face stays stoic, like always, as he processes.

“So let’s just go get them,” Gavin says, because for Gavin, most solutions involve showing up and beating the hell out of someone until the problem resolves itself.

“No,” I say.

Cillian and Gavin exchange a look and then glance at Ronan, who is glaring at me. He doesn’t like to hear the word no. Ever. So I explain before he explodes, which is not a far-off reaction.

“Grabbing a coerced freelancer gives us a scared person in a room,” I say. “Watching them gets us whoever’s behind this.”

Ronan stares at me long enough that Gavin starts spinning his pen again. Then he says, “How long do you need to find the person giving the orders?”

“A week.”

“Five days,” he says through clenched teeth.

Then he moves on to the next topic, which Lochlan speaks to. Something about security, since that’s Lochlan’s specialty. Under the table, Cillian knocks his leg against mine once. He’s been doing that since we were kids. It means nice job without having to say it. It’s a move I wouldn’t recognize from anyone else, but I’ve had years to learn Cillian’s language, and it was time well spent, in my opinion.

It’s nice that I don’t have to struggle to understand at least one person in my family.

The meeting ends pretty quickly after talk of the ghost.

I didn’t mention Eva Moreno or my suspicions about Dmitri Kozlov, even though both were gnawing at my brain the whole time. There are too many dots that still need to be connected, and my brothers don’t take time to do that. They prefer to blow up the dots first, ask questions never.

So far, I’ve collected Eva’s name, her background, her arrest record, her federal conviction, her current location, and a screenshot from a service corridor that I’ve looked at more times than I can explain away. I know she’s the ghost. I know she’s being coerced by Dmitri, and I know he’s wasting her talents with the bullshit work he’s given her.

I go home to my private office and sink into a chair I spent too much money on, turning over the details in my mind.

Eva left the gap in her security open. I’ve been thinking about that since four in the morning. I know she found my entry point because I was watching when she did. She traced my path through her system, saw exactly how I got in, and didn’t close it.

That’s not carelessness. That’s someone as good as me deciding to leave the door unlocked, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what that means.

I don’t make snap decisions. I never go into situations unprepared. I’ve had eyes on her apartment building for three days. I know her block, her walking route to Rosario’s, her brother’s restaurant, and the layout of the neighborhood. I know which entrance she uses, what time she comes and goes, and that she checks the street in both directions before she steps outside every single time. It’s the kind of habit you develop when you’ve spent time in a place where not checking could get you hurt.

I’ve spent so many hours running scenarios through my head. Every version where I hand her file to Ronan ends with her tied up in a room she can’t leave, being questioned by men who don’t understand what they’ve got. Every version where I go to her myself starts with a conversation between two people who speak the same language. The math isn’t really complicated when you think about it. The decision should be an easy one.

But I’m just not sure the math is what’s actually driving my plan to go to her, and that’s the part that irks the hell out of me. I don’t like not having an answer. And worse, I don’t like not knowing the right question.

I take a quick shower and change. I check the surveillance feeds one last time. And then I pull up the image of her from the gala that I saved over two years ago, and I stare at it the way I’ve stared at it twenty-four times since I matched it to her name.

It’s the same woman from the corridor who told me to go left at the split and walked away without looking back. The same one who also left a unique scent that I can’t forget, no matter how hard I try.

Decision made. I’m doing this.

I pick up my keys and walk out the front door.

Eva’s neighborhood is about twenty minutes from mine, and it might as well be a different planet.

I park down the block from her building at 3:20 in the morning. My car is nothing flashy, nothing that screams money or danger, so it’s easy for me to fly under the radar. I kill the engine, but I don’t move. I’ve spent weeks studying this woman through computer screens and data and case files. And months before that, her name sat in a closed file on my drive that I told myself didn’t matter. I know everything about her except what it feels like to be in the same room. And my brain doesn’t have a setting for that.

The building is a three-story walkup that’s seen better decades. There are fire escapes on the front, a bodega on the corner, and a twenty-four-hour dry cleaner next door with a flickering sign. Down the block is Rosario’s restaurant.

I watch her apartment for two hours. The blue-white glow of a computer monitor streams through a second-floor window. She’s working, the way she is almost every day at this hour.