Page 19 of Vicious Betrayal

"What happens to him?" I ask quietly. "If I do this. What happens to Cormac?"

Brennan's expression doesn't change. "That depends entirely on what he's done and what you find. If he's as deep in Murphy's operation as we believe, he'll face charges commensurate with his involvement."

"So he goes to prison instead of my family. And the people he works with."

"Possibly."

Those people have families too, I think to myself. But they're not my family. I've been selfish all my life, doing things because they make me happy and bring me pleasure regardless of the consequences, and now I think this is my punishment. I have to be selfish once again, put my family over every other family that will be hurt by these people, put myself above Cormac, for the sake of saving the people I love. Not because I want to or because it makes me happy, but because there's no other choice.

I close my eyes for a second. I can still see him, muscled and gorgeous over me, those scarred hands on my breasts, that scar on his jaw as he leaned in to kiss me. He's a formidable man, but a man's greatest weakness is a woman he wants.

I can be that. I feel sure, remembering last night, that I can. And I would want to, if it were any other circumstance.

If I could be something to him other than the person who's going to ruin his life using the one weakness he's shown—me.

"I need time to think," I say uncertainly, my voice trembling.

"You don't have time," Reyes says. "We need movement on this quickly, before he has reason to suspect anything. Every day you wait is a day closer to your father's indictment."

I look at my father one more time. He doesn't say anything—doesn't beg, doesn't order me. He just sits there looking older than I've ever seen him look, waiting to find out if his youngest daughter is about to save him or refuse to.

I think of Katya, wherever she is right now, and I wonder if she understood exactly what she was setting in motion, or if her anger made it so that she simply didn't care.

"Fine," I say, feeling like I'm swallowing down poison. "I'll do it."

Reyes doesn't smile, exactly, but something in her posture eases. "Good," she says. "We'll be in touch about how to proceed."

I sit there after they've gone, after my father's finally exhaled, and I stare at my hands in my lap. I think about Cormac's mouth against my throat and the low, rough way he said my name. I'm about to walk back into that and pretend, for as long as I can manage it, that I'm pursuing him only because I want to be.

I'm going to lie to a man who has done nothing wrong to me, and nothing that my own family hasn't done themselves.

All because it's the only way to save them, and I know it.

The agents left behind a business card and a burner phone. I sit in the chair across from my father for a long time after the door closes, listening to the sound of their car leaving the drive. Neither of us says anything. Eventually, my father stands, moves to the sideboard, pours two fingers of vodka into a glass, and sets it in front of me. He doesn't pour one for himself. He just stands there, one hand braced on the edge of the desk, and looks at the wall behind my head.

I stare at the glass, then at him. In all my life so far, my father has never offered me anything stronger to drink than wine at dinner. That glass looks like a blade, poised to come down on my throat. Evidence of just how awful things have become.

"I'm sorry," I say quietly.

He swallows hard. "Maybe you shouldn't be. After all, if you hadn't gone out last night, we might not have any way out of this."

7

OKSANA

Reyes comes back the next morning without Brennan, which I'm vaguely grateful for. She's easier to be in a room with on her own, with less of the deliberate good cop/bad cop choreography they did together yesterday. Alone, she's just a woman in her early forties with sharp eyes and a practical ponytail, sitting across from me at the dining room table. I didn't want to speak with her alone, but it's a requirement. No one else can know exactly the details of what I'm being told to do, or else the plan might be considered compromised.

She sets a folder down on the table. "The way the Gallagher-Murphy operation works now is different from how it used to," she says, opening it and spreading photographs on the table between us. "Ten years ago they were running things the way every other Irish crew in this city ran things. It was violent, rough, and involved a lot of muscle and guns. We arrested a few of their guys over the years, but none of them rolled over on anything but the murder charges we sent them to prison on. But since Declan Murphy took over, things have changed. He prefers to run things undercover, and more diplomatically. He has clubs, bars, restaurants, a property management company, real estate, strip clubs… on paper, he's a legitimate and wealthy business owner who likes to diversify." She taps one of the photographs, a glossy exterior shot of a nice bar I've seen before in Wicker Park. "On paper, every one of these businesses is profitable and clean. Audited properly, all the right permits, pays taxes on time, all the proper paperwork. No paying employees under the table, no underage girls at the strip clubs, no escorting on the side from waitresses or champagne girls."

I look at the photographs. I see the club where I met Cormac in one of them. A couple others are restaurants I've been to with my friends. "But they're not just businesses," I say quietly. I know that much just from the business my father does.

"No. Underneath, those businesses are being used to legitimize money from extortion, weapons, distribution of drugs, etcetera," Reyes says. "We know it. It's easy enough to recognize, given the history of the organization. Declan is a former gang member and motorcycle club president from New York. He and all these men didn't go legitimate overnight. He's using all of this as cover to make them look clean while they do their dirty work. We can see that, but what we can't do is prove it in a way that will hold up in court, because they're very good at this now. They've been doing it long enough to have worked out most of the obvious mistakes." She pauses, laying two more photographs on the table—headshots of Declan Murphy and Cormac side by side. "The records that would prove it are what we need. Ledgers, communications, documentation of the actual deals getting laundered through these businesses. Someone is keeping them. Operations this complex require documentation. They always do."

I look at Cormac's photograph. It's grainy, taken from a distance. He's walking out of a building I don't recognize, coat on, head slightly turned. Even in a bad photograph he looks like the kind of man you'd cross the street to avoid if you weren't on his good side.

"You want those records," I say.

"We need them. Without hard documentation, everything we have is circumstantial. Good enough for pressure, but not good enough for convictions that stick." She sits back slightly, hands folded on the table. "Declan Murphy runs the operation. He would be the obvious place to start. Access to him would mean access to everything." She says it without inflection, just stating a fact, and then stops.