Page 109 of Inflict

Connor shook his head. “Not at all the same, but keep going.”

“She came from a whore, one he’d killed. Her name isn’t Evelyn, it’s Katie. Her face was all over the feckin’ place for a good year after he stole her from her crib. She was high profile because her mother was one of his victims, and he’d never done that before. Took something—a baby, I mean.”

“Killian?” Connor asked.

A throat cleared behind him. “Yeah, mate?”

“Go grab the information in the truck. The newspapers, mostly. Bring them in to me.”

“All right.”

The door clicked shut behind him.

Connor was alone with Lachlan, at least for a short while. “Why didn’t he keep her, then? Let her be raised by one of his girls, like I was for all those years.”

“He already had you in the feckin’ house,” Lachlan mumbled, his head bobbing down as he tried to look at his bleeding injury. “Your mother didn’t last the first six months after she birthed you—lucky you even came into the world, lad, she never even looked pregnant until the last couple months. He thought you might be like him, and he was right.”

“To an extent. You’re off topic.” Connor tapped the edge of his knife under Lachlan’s jaw, creating a two-inch slice as he withdrew the blade. Hot blood slid down the edge, and over his fingers, but he had the man’s attention again. “Her—tell me about her. I don’t give a feck about me.”

He was here.

He was alive.

Evelyn was another story.

“He already had you,” Lachlan repeated, “and it was enough, so he passed her on to Declan the night he took her. He knew the man’s wife wouldn’t say no—she was feckin’ dying, couldn’t have her own kids, and it would make her happy. Declan wasn’t stupid, he’d been watching the news enough to know where the wee lass came from, but what was he going to do? He just wanted Sean to feck off somewhere and stay there.”

“Where would he go?” Connor asked. “Sean, I mean. Where would he take her, now? Somewhere in the states? Back to Ireland maybe?”

Lachlan let out a shaky breath. “I don’t know. You’re not going to like that answer, but it’s the truth. I just don’t know. They ran his father and brother out of Ireland decades ago, when he killed the daughter of a farmer over there—his father didn’t last a year in the states before his heart gave out. Declan was always trying to keep Sean under wraps, control him as much as he could. He doesn’t have somewhere to go, lad. Not any place he plans to stay for any period of time, anyway.”

The door opened behind Connor, and he turned to find Killian had come back in with a stack of clippings in his hand.

“There’s info here on the baby named Katie,” Killian said, never looking up from his papers. “It’s what he says, mate.”

Connor turned back on Lachlan. “If it was the end for him, and he knew it, where would Sean go?”

Lachlan shrugged. “Lad, you’re more like him than me. Your eyes are just as dead as his—you’re just as feckin’ cold in your heart, you’ve got no soul. Where would you go?” Then, he added quieter, “Sean had a lawyer, and he’d been running to him a lot these last three weeks. He might know something.”

“A name?”

Lachlan rattled it off.

Connor felt like it was time to end the conversation with that.

“Killian?”

“Yeah, Connor?”

“Leave if you need to, but you’re not to interrupt me for the next hour.”

“Pardon?” Killian asked.

“I said what I said.”

Connor took his time, and he didn’t make it easy on Lachlan. The man was already a loose end that needed to be whacked, so it didn’t matter, when it came right down to it all. He didn’t have more information for Connor to pull from him, or he’d have already rolled over like the pig he was while he squealed it all out.

So, yeah, he took his time.