Page 72 of His Kidnapped Irish Mafia Virgin

“They’re trapped. They just don’t know it yet,” Sean added.

The fighting spread through the warehouse as room after room was cleared. Some of the syndicate members threw down their weapons the moment they realized there was nowhere left to run, but others refused to stop fighting.

Those men fought until the last bullet, forcing our teams into brutal, close-quarters firefights that left the concrete floors stained with blood and scattered shell casings.

“Clear!” Diggs kicked open another reinforced door while two men covered the entrance.

Inside were rows of filing cabinets, computers, stacks of cash, and shelves filled with ledgers. We discovered locked rooms fitted with heavy steel doors and chains bolted into concrete walls. Passports, forged identification documents, shipping manifests, account books, and photographs of victims were packed into files. Crates packed with weapons lined one section of the warehouse, while another held bundles of cash wrapped in plastic.

Every room revealed another piece of the same horrifying business. This was trafficking on a scale larger than any of us had imagined. Sean looked around the room before speaking into his radio.

“Secure every document. Every computer comes with us. I want this place stripped down to the last hard drive.”

Our men acknowledged the order immediately. None of it held my attention for more than a second. The money meant nothing, the weapons meant nothing, and the evidence could wait.

I moved past every discovery without slowing because every room that failed to contain Victor Hale tightened the anger already burning inside me. He was still somewhere in this building, and I intended to find him before the night was over.

The drainage tunnel was exactly where Ronan said it would be.

Cold water rushed through the narrow channel, carrying mud and broken branches toward the river beyond the docks. Rusted pipes lined the walls, and the stale air smelled of damp concrete and oil. It was the perfect escape route for a man who believed everyone would be looking somewhere else.

He was wrong.

I lowered my hand, signaling the men behind me to spread out.

Diggs moved to the left without a sound. Michael circled back toward the tunnel entrance. There would be no way through us. A pair of hurried footsteps echoed from deeper inside the tunnel. A figure stumbled into view, breathing hard, his clothes streaked with dirt and blood. Victor Hale froze the moment he saw us.

He looked nothing like his picture. The smugness and confidence he had in those pictures were nowhere to be found.

His gaze darted from me to Diggs, then to Michael, searching for a gap that didn’t exist. Victor swallowed.

“You’ve got nowhere to go,” I said.

He let out a slow breath and raised his empty hands slightly. “You don’t understand. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Those people...they gave me no choice.”

The words echoed through the tunnel, and I stared at him without moving.

“They would’ve killed me,” he said. “Do you hear me? They would’ve killed me if I didn’t give them something.”

My grip tightened around my weapon. Victor took another cautious step back, until his shoulders struck the damp concrete wall behind him.

“I was just surviving,” he said desperately. “Everything I did was about survival.”

I laughed once, without humor. “You call selling your stepdaughter survival?”

“You don’t know what it was like,” he said, looking only at me now. “You think this world gives people choices? It doesn’t. It never has.” His breathing grew heavier. “I fed her, I raised her, I kept a roof over her head. She was mine. She always belonged to me!”

The words settled over the tunnel like poison. I felt something inside me grow impossibly still. I remembered Nora waking in terror from nightmares she could never fully explain. I remembered the fear in her eyes the first time she spoke Victor’s name.

I remembered finding her locked inside that room, injured, bleeding, and still trying to convince herself she just had to survive one more day.

I remembered her shaking as she told me what he planned to do with her. Victor kept talking, but I barely heard him anymore.

“She owed me! None of this would’ve happened if she’d just listened.”

His voice became nothing more than distant noise. All I could see was Nora. He looked at me, waiting for an answer.

“You’ve said enough.”