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Ronan Murphy watchedhis brother’s face through the shadows inside the car. “Seeanything?”
Nick lowered the binoculars. “Tell you what: I’ll let you know if I see anything so you can stop asking me every ten minutes. Or better yet,” he held out the binoculars to Ronan, “you can look foryourself.”
Ronan took the binoculars, even though he’d handed them to Nick two hours earlier precisely because he’d gotten sick of peering through them and seeing nothingunusual.
They’d been casing Connor Moran’s office for almost a week. Like all of Ronan’s recent targets in his effort to find Elise Berenger, Congressman Moran had appeared on the list of the Whitmore Club’s membership, but he also occupied a place on their board. Ronan had no idea how the shadowy group called Manifest was linked to the Whitmore Club, but it undoubtedly was, and as far as Ronan was concerned a board member was more likely to beinvolved.
That’s what he’d told himself when they’d started staking out the Whitmore’s board members, anyway. So far it had amounted to almostnothing.
He’d never been as frustrated with a case as he’d been in the three months since he and Julia came home from Dubai without Julia’s sister,Elise.
He’d been sure Elise was at Gold, the club in Dubai linked to Manifest. He was still sure she’d been there, although it wasn’t something he said aloud to Julia. Everything about the place had screamed wealth and secrecy, and he’d been haunted by the well-heeled couple who’d been sitting outside the private offices on the top floor of the club, a steel briefcase on the table in front ofthem.
Had the couple been there to buy a girl? To buyElise?
Rumors were rampant online about the secret society called Manifest: that they engaged in trafficking, that they were backed by a consortium of rich, powerful men, that they influenced politics with money and blackmail and a host of other unsavorymethods.
It was something he didn’t let himself consider too often. The curtain of rage that spilled over his vision made it hard to think straight, rivaled only by the helplessness he felt when he caught Julia’s expression in an unguarded moment. It was fear and pain so raw he sometimes had to stifle a primal scream, her pain fostering his fury until his need to make Manifest pay eclipsed the reason he’d spent a lifetimecultivating.
He tried not to think about the way she’d fought as he’d carried her out of Gold, gunfire erupting around them as she yelled for Elise and called Ronan names. He’d hated it, but every instinct in his body had told him his only job was to get Julia out of therealive.
The owners of Gold had proven difficult to crack, even for the world-class hackers kept on retainer by Murphy Intelligence and Security. Whoever Gold’s owners were, they were tied to Manifest, hidden behind a network of shell companies and fake identities that MIS was still trying tounravel.
They’d diversified their strategy six weeks earlier by refocusing on the members of the Whitmore Club. They proved easier to target — technically the place was an aboveboard private club for Boston’s wealthy movers and shakers — but the ease of getting the information was offset by the sheer number of leads it opened up. Every member had multiple businesses and places of residences, associations that fanned out into overlapping patterns that took up a whole wall in the MIS conferenceroom.
Their hackers were still working the Dubai angle, but in the meantime, Ronan had been doing recon on every long-standing member of the Whitmore Club, staking out their houses and places of businesses, running background on every knownassociate.
He tried to ignore the feeling that he was spinning his wheels, that the activity was doing little more than keeping him moving, allowing him to convince Julia they were making progress when any fool could see they were at astandstill.
And Julia Berenger was nofool.
“We can’t do thisforever.”
Ronan turned toward his brother’s voice. Nick was staring out the windshield, his eyes focused on the brick facade of the Congressman’s downtownoffice.
“We fucking can and will,” Ronansaid.
Nick looked at Ronan, his green eyes flashing in the dim light of the street lamps around the car. “No, we can’t. The Berenger job never fell within our core service offerings, and we’ve been at it for more than three months. We have other clientswaiting.”
“Core service offerings? You sound like such anasshole.”
Nick shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it. It used to beyou.”
Ronan heard the meaning flowing under Nick’s words like a current: that Ronan had gotten soft, that he wasn’t being professional, that his feelings for Julia were clouding his judgement. “Careful,Nick.”
He hoped Nick heard the warning in his words, hoped it was a warning Nick heeded. It had been a long time since they’d fought it out, but Ronan wasn’t too old to kick Nick’sass.
Nick moved his shoulders like he was loosening the kinks. “I’m not saying anything you don’t know — and for the record, I’m not saying anything Dec doesn’t agreewith.”
Ronan’s laugh was short. “Criticism from Declan doesn’t exactly hit me where ithurts.”
Knowing each other too well was just one of many perils of working with one’s siblings. As a former cop with Boston PD — following in their father’s footsteps — Nick was perfectly capable of stepping in when things got hot in the field, but Ronan did most of the dirty work, along with the high-level strategizing, both areas of expertise a product of his time as a NavySEAL.
Nick had seemed to surprise even himself when he’d realized he was good at managing the business side of things. He had a knack for dealing with the financials, crossing every T and dotting every I with the IRS while stashing money in lucrative investments and offshore accounts that had made them all millionaires many timesover.
Sometimes Ronan thought it was a shame. Nick had been a great beat cop and an even better detective, thriving on the excitement and danger of criminal work in a city as complex as Boston. More than once Ronan had wondered if it was because of Erin, their sister who’d overdosed when he and Nick had been in their early twenties. Maybe seeing all that crime up close and personal had been too much. Ronan wouldn’t know: as brothers went, he and Nick were close, but none of the Murphy brothers were eager to pick the scab off the wound of their dead sister, and that included Declan, an aimless douchebag either by birth or through the circumstances of their mother’s death from cancer followed by Erin’soverdose.
