"What are you talking about?"
"When I was first investigating your finances," I say, my voice returning to its normal, confident hum. I step closer, tapping his chest with my finger. "The ones Vance was skimming from. I didn't just audit the books, Lorcan. I built a decoy."
He goes completely still. "A decoy."
"A financial mirror," I explain. "A dummy shell. I constructed a false asset ledger, complete with mirrored routing codes, simulated offshore balances, and fake shell companies. I estimated that if Silas had a hacker on his payroll. which we knew he did, because of the phone tracking, he’d be looking for specific administrative access keys. So I gave him ones that looked identical to the Syndicate's master ledger, but were mathematically locked into a sandbox environment."
Lorcan’s grey eyes are wide now, staring at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. "A sandbox?"
"A closed loop," I say, a triumphant grin spreading across my face. "It’s basic risk management. I migrated ninety-five percent of your actual liquid holdings, the Las Vegas properties, and the offshore pools into a pristine, clean account under a new encrypted protocol. The other five percent remained active in the dummy shell to mimic liquidity and fool the automated sweeps. What Silas received, the master bypass code you executed on your phone was the dummy. The shell. The elaborate, beautiful financial fiction a twenty-three-year-old built on a borrowed tablet in a compound she was supposedly trying to escape."
The silence in the warehouse returns, but this time, it’s Lorcan who’s frozen. He looks at me, his mouth slightly open, his brain trying to process the fact that his entire empire is still sitting safely in a bank account he didn't even know existed.
"You... you kept the money?" he whispers.
"I kept the money," I say, crossing my arms over my chest. "You still have everything, Don O’Shea. You’re still the king of your little desert castle. You’re welcome, by the way."
Lorcan stares at me for a long, heavy beat. The confusion on his face slowly melts away, replaced by a dark, stunned awe that makes his chest heave. He lets out a low, rough chuckle, shaking his head.
"You devilish woman," he murmurs, his voice a low vibration.
"I told you I was your best match," I say, stepping into his space, my eyes finding his. "You deal in bullets, Lorcan. I deal in the numbers behind them. We’re an equation that balances perfectly."
"God help me," he whispers, a slow, predatory grin finally spreading across his face. "You’re right."
He grabs my waist, lifting me slightly off the concrete, and kisses me again. This time, there’s no desperation, no lingering fear of Silas, and no grief. It’s a clean, dominant claim, and for the first time since Ireland, I don't feel like a captive. I don't feel like cargo he’s trying to relocate.
I’m staying. By my own choice. By my own rules.
"Let’s go home," I murmur against his lips.
"Yeah," Lorcan says, his hand resting firm on the small of my back. "Let's go home."
Epilogue
Atara
"Dominic," I say, tapping the stylus against the glass whiteboard. "If you look closely at the fourth column, you’ll see a six percent discrepancy in the Las Vegas logistics report. I don’t care if you’re routing the cash through slot machines, dummy corporations, or a chain of artisanal dog washes. You do not leave a paper trail that looks like a toddler’s drawing."
The sub-basement war room is completely silent. Dominic, a fifty-year-old capo with a scar running from his eye to his jaw, actually shrinks back an inch in his leather chair. He looks at the digital spreadsheet like it’s a bomb.
"I... we had a system, Atara," Dominic mutters, adjusting his heavy gold watch. "We’ve used that shell company for three years."
"And for three years, you've been overpaying your state taxes by twelve grand annually because you didn't account for the regional depreciation of your transport fleet," I counter, crossing my arms. I lean back against the mahogany table, the cotton of my blue maternity dress stretching tight over my massive stomach. "It’s bad risk management, Dominic. It’s practically a charitable donation to the IRS, and I do not run a charity."
Echo lets out a quiet snort from his seat by the door, quickly covering his mouth when I cut my eyes to him. Kieran is leaning against the back wall, systematically cleaning a blade with a rag, a faint grin on his face.
"She's right, Dom," Kieran says, not looking up. "You're bad at math. We've established this."
"I am a capo, not an accountant," Dominic grumbles, crossing his arms.
"Well, currently, I am both," I say, stepping forward to transition to the next slide. "Now, if we look at the—"
I stop.
The sentence dies in my throat. A sharp, sudden, and incredibly rude squeeze right in the lower half of my abdomen makes my lungs completely freeze. My hand drops to the edge of the table,my fingers digging into the polished wood to keep my knees from buckling.
Oh. That’s... that’s not a drill.
