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I groaned. Running a hand down my face, I stood from my chair and slowly began to clean up the mess I had made. “Fucking stuck here,” I mumbled. “No idea where my wife is. There’s a mole somewhere in our operation. Whole place reeks of piss poor beer.”
“That’s Corona you’re thinking of.” Liam’s voice drifted in behind Vas. “We serve Guinness. Big difference. Not that I expect you to understand such finer tastes when all you drink is that swill you call vodka.”
“It is not swill.”
“Tastes like water,” Liam countered. “Stale water, in fact.”
“Says the man whose beer curdles when you drink it,” I sneered. “And who always stinks like cabbage.”
“And you smell so much better?”
“Anything is better than cabbage.”
“You reek of desperation.” The leprechaun sniffed. “That’s definitely worse than cabbage.”
“That’s the pot calling the pan, don’t you think?”
“Kettle.” The Irish asshat smirked. “It’s the pot calling the kettle.”
I shot him a confused look. “What? That makes no sense. Pots and pans go together. Why a kettle?”
Liam thought about that for a moment before he shrugged. “Have no idea,” he admitted nonchalantly. “Now, if we’re done, my hacker and yours have something for us.” He looked down at the mess I’d created in his spare office. “Unless you’d like to continue with your Neanderthal temper tantrum, that is.”
I growled when he turned his back and strode from the room. “Neanderthal,” I hissed. “I’ll show you a fucking Neanderthal, you fucking leprechaun. Choke you on your goddamn Lucky Charms.”
Vas barked a laugh as we exited the room, following my wife’s father. Since the collapse of the Dashkov building, he’d graciously allowed us to take over one of the empty floors in the building above his bar. Most of my men had been assigned to the compound to continue training and preparing our people for war, but it was too far away from the city for me to set up shop at.
Kavanaugh had his own similar setup in the basement that rivaled ours back at the bunker. It was more rustic than what I was used to, but it did the job, and that was what mattered.
Mark sat at one of the operation stations next to a blond girl whose hair was tied up in space buns. She was wearing bright red flare pants and an orange tank top. Her face was covered in a layer of heavy makeup of bright rainbow colors. Bridget, I believed, was her name. She was the Kavanaugh family’s hacker, with a resume that left most speechless. Ivy league graduate. Valedictorian. Bridget Jones was a mechanical and technological prodigy, and yet she was down here in the basement of a bar, working for a crime syndicate.
“Where are we at with finding my daughter?” Liam questioned the pair as he stalked through the door. Neither hacker turned to look at him, their hands busy flying across their keyboards, eyes scanning the brightly lit monitors in front of them.
“Her tracker just became active,” Mark announced.
“Why weren’t we able to get a reading until now?” I asked. “Or at least track where she’s been?” The tracker should have had the capability to store Ava’s route inside of the mainframe, giving us her GPS footprint.
“The tracker wasn’t activated,” Bridget explained. “Your wife probably never had a chance to activate it before she was taken from the scene. She probably tried to activate it sometime later, after we had already tried, but there was something blocking it. A jammer of some sort, most likely.”
“Why can we see it now?” I wondered.
“We think that wherever she’s being held has a similar setup to the Wardstables,” Mark commented. “The jammer only workedbelowthe surface of the barn. Just in case someone came snooping around. Cops would be more suspicious if they suddenly couldn’t make a radio or cell phone call.”
“Where is she now?” Liam stepped forward, peering at the screens.
Mark pointed at a large piece of green land near a small town called Kangley. Houses out there were few and far between. “Here.”
“We believe she’s still there,” Bridget sniffed, “but her tracker cut out again about five minutes ago.
“Is that land registered to anyone?” Kavanaugh asked tersely. His eyes were narrowed at the screen, jaw tight. Did he recognize that area?
“Um…” Mark input the address into the federal database. “Yeah. It is registered to a Dearbhla O’Malley, but according to record, she died several years ago in a car crash.”
“Who inherited it?” I asked. Mark scrolled through the documents, trying to source a name.
“Seamus McDonough,” Liam hissed. “Seamus McDonough inherited that land.”
I frowned. “Ava’s grandfather?” He’d been at the gala. I remember the way Ava looked at him. Not with the newfound awe of meeting her biological grandfather, but with suspicion and fear.
