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8
Declan glancedat the iPad balanced in the console of the Rover, his eyes on the image of the road displayedthere.
“It’s too soon,” Nick said from the passenger seat. “They just got to themarket.”
“I know.” The fact that Nick was right didn’t make him any lessannoying.
Ronan had texted them when Jóhanna Leifsson had pulled away from the curb in Reykjavík. He’d tailed her all the way to Hólmavík, texting an update an hour into the drive when she’d stopped for gas and a bathroombreak.
Last they’d heard, she’d arrived at the market in Hólmavík. It was too small to provide cover, and Ronan had stayed outside in the car, waiting while she did the weekly shopping for whoever was inside the house half a mile from where Declan and Nick were parked on a side road lined with trees off the main road leading to thehouse.
They’d been planting cameras along the road for the past three days, hiding them in the trees so they would be able to see Leifsson’s approach when she made her weekly trip to thehouse.
So far no one had left the house via the road, and no one had arrived that way either. Whoever was holed up in the house was locked downtight.
A new text pinged Nick’s phone and he looked down at his screen. “She’s leaving. Ronan’s on her tail, but he’s going to drop it when she turns onto theroad.”
“Good.” The road leading to the house was too small, too deserted, to allow Ronan to tail Leifsson without being seen. They would have to use the cameras from here on out, the cameras and the listening device Ronan had planted in Leifsson’s bag during a planned run-in on the street in Reykjavík that had caused the woman’s bag to spill onto thepavement.
“Think Beth’s in there?” Nickasked.
“It stands to reason,” Declan said. “Where else has she been all thesemonths?”
He thought of Kate, of the way her eyes darkened when someone mentioned Beth, the tension that still hung over every interaction between Kate and her mom because of Annie Walsh’s affair with Neil Curran all those yearsago.
“Gonna be tricky if she is,” Nicksaid.
“That’s the understatement of theyear.”
Kate had been worried sick about the prospect, trying to give Declan the room he needed to get Neil while also begging him to be careful ofBeth.
It wasn’t the way MIS usually worked. Their raids weren’t designed to minimize collateral damage — they were designed to take out the target at a time when no one else was around to bear witness toit.
MIS wasn’t in the business of hurting innocent people. The justice was exacted under cover of night, with no witnesses, at a time when the people who had motive were setting up airtightalibis.
But his job wasn’t like the others, and it wasn’t just a job. Neil had to pay for what he’d done to Mac Walsh, to Kate and Griffin by taking Mac away from them, but they needed details on what Neil had planned, and they had to protect Beth even if she was part ofit.
Kate didn’t fool him. Whatever she said, she was anything but sure about their relationship. She loved him. He knew that much was true. But the newly revealed lies in her parents’ marriage had created doubt in her mind, making her wonder if she could really trust Declan, if she could really trustanything.
He worried that she would use any excuse to put distance between them, and no excuse would be more powerful than something happening to Beth at the hands ofMIS.
OfDeclan.
They didn’t know for sure that Beth was inside with Neil, but if she was, they would have to create an airtight plan for getting her out alive, and for keeping Neil alive long enough to get the information they needed out ofhim.
“We can’t guarantee her survival,” Nick said, still talking about Beth. “You knowthat.”
Declan looked at him. “We have to. And Neil’s too, at least in the shortterm.”
Nick shook his head and swore. “That isn’t our business,Dec.”
“It is now. Besides, that’s not what you were saying when we were sniffing around Alexa’s accident, and it’s not what Ronan was saying when we agreed to search forElise.”
His brothers had only found the women they loved because MIS had broken the rules, taken cases that stood in opposition to their mission statement of providing the ultimate justice only after all the facts were in — criminals who went free on technicalities, whose cases were thrown out of court because some beat cop didn’t deliver Miranda, who’d managed to escape arrest time and time again when the evidence made it clear they were guilty of hurtinginnocents.
What MIS wasn’t was an investigative firm, and they definitely weren’t in the business of searching for kidnap victims likeElise.
But they’d done it. They’d broken the rules to save Elise from Manifest. They’d broken the rules to deliver justice for Alexa by discovering the identity of the powerful man who’d killed her best friend and almost killed Alexa in a hit-and-run accident a decadeearlier.
